Oh Man Like/Dislike Mind-F*** Continues

So to keep thinking about all this personality and like/dislike stuff – I’m trying to find the inner part of what disliking someone means to me. As Ferd noted in my comments (loving it!), repulsing people is pretty effective in a wheat/chaff sense, and you can end up repulsing the exact people you'd like to repulse, so, you know, win-win. Win-win since one of the major things about this is that in a basic way it’s pleasant to be with people you enjoy, of course. Connecting and laughing and joking and discussing things with people who resonate with you is pretty exciting. And there’s such a wide range of kinds of relationships that are interesting to have with people – for example, in some friendships I bet you like someone because they really bring out the sense of fun in you, and in other friendships you are the fun one. But in all the forms of friendship to have, the most fun to have with people is when there is some sense of life moving forward just in the being together. It’s sort of like exciting conversations, in which your ideas just feed off each other’s and by the end of the conversations you and your friend have figured out just so darn much about life and the nature of reality and perception etc.

And then, on the other hand, there’s those attempts at connectedness that just fall completely flat, where you or the other person just can’t pick up the other end of the interaction; either the idea doesn’t click with you, or they say it in a way that doesn’t seem to permit further interesting discussion, or just completely misses the point of what you were trying to say. It’s deflating energetically. But anyway spending time with someone who you dislike sort of takes the air out of the tires of life. Imagine spending the rest of time with someone you don’t like, bleh. I suppose you’d find common ground eventually, but it’s much nicer when you ring with someone.

So what makes one “ring” with someone? Right now I’m thinking about this in terms of my own disapproval. Not liking someone, for me, feels a lot about shaking my head or clucking about “the way someone is.” Some of these are personality/value judgments, like “she’s a know-it-all,” or “he’s a bigot,” or “she’s a complainer,” or “he’s full of sh*t all the time,” or “she’s too needy and reaches further in than I think this relationship should go.” Others of these are behavioral judgments, like “she chimes in with inappropriate nonsense just to be part of the conversation,” or “he jumps right in with advice even though I’m not done explaining this thing and if he’d let me finish he’d see this isn’t an advice request,” or “she drinks too much,” or “he pursues nothing beyond video games and it’s just sad.” All of these things come from my ideas about what kind of person it is okay to be. It’s not okay to ignore the conversation topic. It’s not okay to speak with total confidence about topics you’ve seen one documentary about. It’s not okay to complain all the time or make yourself out to be something you’re not. It’s not okay to play a lot of video games or drink too much. I mean, clearly I have a lot of rules in my head about what to do and how to act, and it is a person’s failure to conform to my normative imaginings that makes me dislike them. When I meet someone else who seems to have come to the same kind of behavioral/personality conclusions that I have come to, then this confirms something about my view of the world (Hey look, we both live on the same planet at the same point in history and both understand a lot of things in the same way! I must be on to something! This “rings.”). Disapproving of people also reaffirms my view of the world to me, of course.

So if I think of my disapproval in terms of looking for ways to confirm or reaffirm my view of the world, I am using my perceptions of other people as a way to stay as closed-minded as possible. If you already fit a certain mold, you’re part of the evidence of me being right about the world – and if you defy my model of existence, as luck would have it, you’re also part of the evidence of me being right about the world. Feels pretty convenient.

So then, this week's Boatmeal Challenge Continued? Why, critically consider my human-personality worldview, of course, in the hope that by loosening my concepts of what is acceptable in a person I can be a little less affected by feelings of dislike.

Personality Problems

So one of my personality problems (flaws) is that I talk a little loud and bulldozer-ish and kind of know-it-all-ish in a class clown kind of way that is hilarious to me but not always hilarious to the listener. I like to start sentences with the phrase “here’s what you should do” and follow it up with something preposterous. I also like to roll my eyes about things and identify the problems in arguments or points of view. Nobody likes this. I also enjoy cutting off your sentences to say something funny to me. Nobody likes this either. But anyway.

I noticed a couple of incidents at my job this week that reminded me of how annoying I can be to people and it got me thinking about what aspects of myself I should want to change, and what aspects I should accept as being part of “myself.” Sometimes I don’t care if people don’t think I’m funny, in what my dear pal calls the “joke ‘em if they can’t take a f***” approach to things. Under this perspective, I am in charge of my half of the interaction, which is My Personal Intention, and everybody else can worry about themselves and it’s not my problem. MPI is not (usually) to be hurtful or mean or dismissive, but rather, to be funny and interested and interesting and bat around ideas and critiques of things for fun and banter (and to get laughs, which is a vanity/insecurity thing). The listener’s experience my boisterousness might be different from MPI, of course. The listener could be offended or feel misunderstood or get the impression that I think s/he is foolish or whatever, so it’s not always effective.

The examples at work were as follows: two gals in the workplace were discussing Eat, Pray, Love, and one had seen the movie but not read the book, and the other had the book and brought it in to share. I saw the book on the table and immediately launched into some version of “oh lordy who’s reading THIS,” fully believing that I was effectively opening up the channels of communication for fun discussion of the book and its problematic and successful qualities. This belief of mine that saying how much I hate stuff is actually a great ice breaker is funny in itself, and of course, "channel-opening" is not what happened. Instead I prompted the gal who brought it in to say “yeah I guess only people with terrible taste, like me, like this book.” It took me a minute to catch on that this was the hurt-feelings kind of sarcasm and not funny self-deprecating humor, so I said “yeah only dumb-dumbs like this crap.” And then I realized that I had provoked hurt feelings, and I had to let the crankiness settle for a minute and then explain that I didn’t want to be mean or superior about it, I was trying to be funny and that I was sorry.

So that’s one incident. Another one was a different set of gals chit chatting about stuff, and one of them starts saying how she got an iris reading the other day – yes, someone looks into your eyeball and tells you all about yourself. I guess the premise is that there is information in the iris of the eye that says stuff about you and your choices and your life – and the first two things that the iris reader told this gal were that her deodorant was clogging her breast tissue lymph drainage and that she eats too much dairy. Yawn! These are totally generic and I said so, again, thinking that I am funny. Instead the gal’s face fell a bit and I have probably effectively inhibited her from ever wanting to share anything about her life with me ever again for the rest of time. Here’s how that conversation could have gone in my ideal world with a friend who “gets” me:

“Hey Marth I got my iris read last week, and it was so rad! This chick looked into my eyes and told me my lymph stuff wasn’t draining because of my deodorant and that I eat too much dairy!”

“Dude, she also tell you that you had a hard time high school, and detect stress and confusion in your life? That stuff is way generic!”

“Ha ha whatever lame-o, no way, you had to be there, it was different than that – it was really right on, for reals!”

“Whoa, that’s nutty! Are you going to go back? Tell me what else she said!”

See, was that so hard? Fun! Shows my attention and critical thinking and delight in life, no? I mean, I recognize how snarky and combative and potentially offensive it is, so yeah, maybe not.

So now here’s the real problem: I don’t want to alienate people, but I also want to be myself. I don’t want to maintain relationships with people who willfully misunderstand me or who are too sensitive or serious about themselves, but I want to be relate to lots of different kind of people in my life and not use my personality as some kind of filter or friend deterrent. I want to do my half of whatever it is that happens between people to make sure everyone knows that everyone is cool with everyone else being exactly how they are. And I want to be around people who can do their half of not taking things the wrong way, or being too attached to their decisions or preferences or anything else such that disagreement on books or iris readings is really offensive to them.

But I also don’t want to become so settled in my personality or defensive about my characteristics such that I deny the possibility or necessity of improving myself when it comes to my personality problems. I mean, it’s maddening to be around people who are really protective of their bad personality traits (lots of old people do this, and I think it can be pretty lazy sometimes). But how do I know which things to work on changing and which things are okay to keep? My friend suggested that I can get comfortable with this idea by thinking about being myself, but just adjusting my behaviors to what is "appropriate" for the situation. This is a nicer way of thinking about it than just saying I need to change myself or censor my nature. Even if it’s just semantic that’s fine with me, I can work with it. So that’s what I’ll be trying to think about for a while.

So What Was Law School About?

I was recently talking with a pal, well, a few pals really, about what law school was all about for me. A few things to get out of the way here - I definitely went to law school because by age 27 I felt that still having no idea what the hell to do with myself was a big problem that needed some kind of answer. It's funny to think about in retrospect because right around the same time I was thinking about doing yoga teacher training, but it ended in the fall and law school would start in the fall and it wasn't going to work out in time to do both. Hm. Second, I hated the bureaucracy of the world and felt pretty powerless and broke a lot of the time, and was tired of that; getting one blood test and a prescription for antibiotics from the hospital cost more than my rent and caused a serious panic about How Am I Going to Live at one point. Um, I also got a preposterous scholarship and my vanity was so ridiculously flattered that I was definitely going to get this bargain education even if I didn't really know what the hell I was doing it for. And of course, being a lawyer is sooooo versatile, yes? You do aaaaaanything with a law degree, right? Ha ha, that's funny. Anyway, being a lawyer certainly sounds like something indisputably worthwhile, skill-set wise. "Marketable" is the term we hear tossed around.

Okay so there's that. What did law school do for me? The way I found myself putting it over the phone to one friend is that, well, "I basically have the exact same life I had before I became a lawyer, except now, I really like my life." This sort of sounds like some version of "I punched myself in the face for while, and once I stopped, it was awesome." It's a little different than that, more like, I was filled with doubt about my choices, and having challenged them to the extreme with this five-year adventure, I can feel more confident about my choices. One thing I got out of law school is that I love to learn. I love it. Even though I'm not going to be a lawyer, getting my J.D. was super fun for me. I would go back to school for any number of things if money were no object. Philosophy, Spanish, Botany, Music, you name it, I would love to learn about it. I truly treasure my law school education for the new way of viewing the world that it provided me - I had no idea how the FCC is allowed to exist, I had never considered my "rights" under the Constitution, I had never had to bend my mind around the kind of reasoning that the law uses. It was pretty neat for all those reasons. Another thing I got out of it was finally getting over my own insecurities about my intelligence. Being smart is VERY highly prized by my family and I was always worried about being only sort of smart and how that doomed me to a meaningless life. Grandpa went to Yale, Uncle got a free ride to college because he's so super smart, cousins have perfect SAT scores . . . but I was always hovering well under the exceptional threshold as it's measured by the world - wasn't going to get into a great school, etc. At last, at last, I do not give a crap about that. Education pedigree is a shameful and exclusive and hierarchical measure of human worth that no one should subscribe to. I went to a low/medium crappy college, and I would have had a way better time at a state school meeting actually interesting and diverse students. But anyway. As for my own level of intelligence, I am totally fine with not being a genius. I did great in law school (yes it was not a well regarded school but whatever I'll take it), and I certainly keep that in my pocket as evidence that I am reasonably smart, but it's not just that - it's more like I have enough education and enough of a sprinkle of wisdom now to feel like I can trust my own analysis and intuition, and enough skepticism to be ready to change my mind when something better, clearer, or more persuasive comes along, and I know I will keep trying to learn new things. That's plenty, and I feel great about that.

And here's one more important thing about law school that really broadened my perspective, and it's pretty basic, so if this kind of thing has been obvious to you since birth then pardon this silly revelation. So, a lady adult in my life has been repeating the following anecdote for years to me: this lady adult goes to a job interview, and the interviewer immediately notes her haircut, and says something to the effect of, "I really appreciate a simple, no fuss haircut on a woman, it shows that your sense of practicality is sound." This haircut apparently was highly influential in getting a job. I walked around for a long time with this, and many other similar ideas, in my head - certain decisions we make have very clear messages to people, and one of those is that having a practical haircut means you are practical person. I think I still judge people with elaborate hairdos as having suspicious priorities. So anyway, I think it took me until I was in law school to understand that sets of facts are susceptible to multiple conclusions. This is basically the premise of arguing the law - with any given set of facts, which conclusion is best for you, and can you persuade someone of it? With respect to the haircut thing - why didn't the interviewer conclude that the haircut meant this lady had no concern for attention to detail? Or placed no value on self-care and beautifying herself and was therefore indifferent to pleasing others in a workplace setting? Or gets up really late and is super disorganized and can't handle anything beyond a wash and go haircut? (Most of all, why didn't this lady adult conclude, in spite of the observation coming in the form of a compliment, that the interviewer was inappropriate and superficial?! Seriously, the haircut?!) Feeling liberated from narrow conclusions was huge for me. I didn't know how to see beyond a certain way of thinking until I was forced to squeeze my brain out a lot. Now I feel like I can see unlimited kinds of conclusions in all things, every day, and it makes life so much more interesting, and much less severe, if you see what I mean.

And of course, participating in the corporate world was fascinating, and I could finally decide, based on my own experience, not just my own leftist prejudices, that it wasn't the right place for me. And that does go a long way in terms of my own contentment. So, onward and upward, further in and further up.

More Fevered Musings

Still sick. Sick blogging might be my equivalent of drunk dialing right now. Not advisable but here we go!!

So I'm supposed to assist a class for my final obligation before certification this weekend, and I get to give a little talk to open up the class, and here are my sentimental and feverish thoughts about it right now:

A yoga teacher this week said, "every stage of a pose is a pose." I loved this. Sometimes we feel like we aren't doing it quite right, and forget to feel the immediacy and beauty of our present version of ourselves. Bent knees in downdog? That's a downdog. Knees down in plank? That's a plank. Wherever you are, you're doing it.

This reminded me of waitressing, which I did for a long time. If I count the summer country club lunch counter and catering in high school, I did it for about 12 years. And then about six years total of full time, adult waitressing. Fun money as a teenager, rent money in college, and life money after college and before law school.

I really liked doing it once I got the hang of it. Clearly I liked it or I would have quit, just like I've quit a million other jobs that weren't right for me. Waitressing always stuck. Because I like it. Also it's the best money for the time. But here's the thing - I never really let myself like it. It was always part of the mythology of my temporary self; it was something I was doing on the way to doing something else, or just to make money while I supported my "real" life. I had some nasty upper middle bourgeois ideology crap in my head that made me think what I was doing could never be treated as adequate for me. I didn't really let myself like it until someone else pointed out to me that I could, legitimately, really like it. A woman came into the restaurant one night, right at year 6 of adult waitressing, and told me how much she liked waitressing when she was younger. She had done it pretty seriously - an American woman server in fancy restaurants in Paris in the 1960s-70s - she was no joke (she was no joke about anything, though - she was also an accomplished mime and attorney at the Department of Justice). Anyway, it really hit home, the fact that she, this super sharp and credible person, said that she liked waitressing - and not in that stupid nostalgic way that forgetful and oblivious people think college and childhood were great, but with a real sense of ownership, she proclaimed unambiguously her love of waitressing. This prompted a pretty astounding revelation for me. Her confidence was all the credibility her life needed. Suddenly I knew that I could give myself permission to love my life just the way it was. I wasn't really ready to actually do it, I mean, I still went to law school and everything, but that's another story. But it was there, this idea that I could own my life joyfully, even though it didn't look like it was supposed to look.

So then, flash forward 5+ years. Every stage of a pose is a pose. There is no need to postpone your life, or think of your real Self as something that will come together "later." Every expectation and feeling of inadequacy and insecurity, once shed, can reveal to you a pose, or life, that you already love, and can relish, and feel the immediacy and import of if you let yourself do it - even if it doesn't look like it's "supposed" to look. Love, love, love, love, love your life, especially when it doesn't look like it's "supposed" to look. It might be that all you have to do is give yourself permission.

A little simplistic, I know, but it's the fever talking. Love!!!

Know it All

Went to yoga this morning in Brooklyn with a teacher I liked a lot when I was living closer by. She talked about some inner-self stuff today, like letting go of the desire to control our lives or wish they could be different and just be open to how things really are and trust that when we are open and alert we will identify things we are truly drawn to. Something like that, I'm paraphrasing.

And she also gave us a little advice in the form of recommending that we try not to give people advice all the time; or maybe more like tell people how they should think and feel and act or even think to ourselves how we think they should be thinking and feeling and acting. I thought this was pretty good advice - I loooove to give my friends advice and I should probably just listen and sympathize more, so I decided to give it a try today. This has already not worked out. In fact, it took me about 5 minutes to go off track, and when I saw my friend this morning after yoga class, and we were chatting about how's-it-going, I proceeded to tell her what she should have said to her mom on the phone an hour ago, how should view her relationship with her boss, and what kind of business to open and in what location. Boy oh boy I sure do know a lot of things about a lot of things.

I guess I'm just noticing this tendency. Yoga teacher lady this morning said something like well What If we all directed our advice-giving energy back at ourselves and our own stuff instead of displacing or distracting ourselves by focusing on other people's lives and problems, wouldn't that be nice/change the world? Probably. I always slippery-slope these kinds of observations though - sure we should think about our own stuff and not tell other people what to do, but we also shouldn't just be self-absorbed and let people who need perspective or help or, yes, advice, just sort of flounder around. Is the difference just waiting to be asked? Nah, that's not it exactly. Anyway every piece of wisdom is flawed if I slippery-slope it to death - like the "control" thing the yoga teacher said this morning. Sure I could stop trying to wrestle my life into the shape I want it to be and let it all unfold organically, but that sounds like a great way to stay unemployed and unfocused, too.

It's all a balancing act blah blah blah.

A Few Additional Observations

There is a chick in the coffee shop where I am right now crying on the phone, and I'm pretending not to notice, which basically means I am not looking directly at her. What is this about? Take this little bit of public theater someplace else, lady. Is that horrible? Probably. I'm probably cursing myself with a future public-drama moment that I find embarrassing and impossible to move to another location at that moment. I guess sh*t happens and sometimes you cry on the phone in a coffee shop and that's kind of how life is. I am trying to feel a little compassion here, but it's really hard.

In other news, I was thinking about the thing I said a few posts ago about how I sometimes don't like telling people that I am a lawyer, because it complicates their impression of me and I think adds a little - okay wait a minute the crying lady just hung up in anger and said she is going to the hospital. My compassion is expanding because of the potentially tragic element in this scenario. She is calling a cab. I don't know what to feel about this. Emergencies and crises are intimate - my instinct here is toward providing her with a little pretend privacy in the form of not looking at her. Okay she's in the bathroom now. Sheesh.

Well here's what I was going to say about lawyering: I am aware that it sounds impressive to people to have worked as a lawyer in Manhattan for a few years. People do not realize that this is NOT that impressive, and it's hard to convince them that it is not really such a big deal, but sometimes people look at me like I pooped at Yale and didn't even think twice about it. This is definitely not the case. But the impact of this past lawyer life to the outsider is to provide extra credibility to my current choices, which, objectively speaking, are pretty lame. I live in a tiny apartment with cruddy carpeting in a tiny little "city", I have zero job/career ideas, make no money, and I'm taking a yoga teacher training class. But since I already had, and then rejected, what some people see as a professionally glamorous career path, my current state of existence isn't just the desperate searching of someone with nothing else going for her, but the calculated and mindful undertaking of someone who Sees Life As It Is. And nothing could be further from the truth - I have no idea what I'm doing, I am desperately searching for something, I am very conscious that spiritual inquiry and never-ending-learning are ways to merely expand my distraction enough to fill the time available while I excuse myself from meeting the challenges of actual life, because that is at least a little better than just pacing and pacing and pacing until the end of time like some 1950's housewife. Yes I am still reading The Feminine Mystique and yes it is basically killing me softly with its song.

So what I'm getting at is that telling people I was a Manhattan lawyer is yet another exercise in vanity.

Also coffee shop crisis lady has regained her grip on existence and seems to be wrapping it up hysteria-wise. That's good, I was a little worried.

Keeping Stuff Around

I have a book somewhere around here someplace that I am keeping for no reason. I keep a lot of books around for no reason, if I think about it even a little bit. But this particular book is a copy of Pride and Prejudice. It’s a paperback copy of the book that I bought in England in 1996 as part of a class I was taking on Austen’s P&P and Mansfield Park. It has a price tag sticker on the cover for 5 British pounds. I studied both books for basically a whole school year, so the book is well finger-trod – the pages are pretty soft, and it wasn’t the world’s best paperback copy to begin with, so it might even be shedding pages away from the binding by now. It has oodles of pseudo-intellectual markings in it from a whole year of churning over it page by page as a teenager. It’s safe to say I will not read this particular copy of P&P again, since the loosening of the binding would make the book sort of inconvenient to enjoy, and the note-taking of that teenager would distract me and probably embarrass me in front of myself a little.

Why do I have this book? Am I acting in some kind of self-archivist role here by holding on to this thing, as though future generations of Martha studiers will draw conclusions from the book about the pivotal, most substantive moments of my life in an attempt to recreate my life path? What I mean to say is that nothing like this will ever happen, ever. If that book makes it with me to my death, it will be put in a box and sent to the Salvation Army, or probably thrown away, since it’s not really useful for anyone anymore. Or at most, some guilty next-generation relative will take it home and keep it in a box or on a shelf where it will continue to inform and delight no one.

Why oh why do I have this book? And I’m definitely not going to throw it away, let me be clear about that. I suppose it is a remembrance? Is it then just like a snap shot of something that I use to remember that certain events in my life actually happened? Is it a little memory jogger that helps to place me in space-time within the linear narrative of my life story? I suppose I am an archivist of myself, aren’t I? But to what end? Something about that book makes me feel interesting to myself. I did something a long time ago and it’s fun to remember it sometimes. This seems like kind of a lame, self-indulgent reason to keep crap around (vanity!). I mean, I’m not going to forget that once upon a time I went to England and read a book. And if I do forget, what of it? So do I keep is as proof? As evidence of my own interesting-ness to myself? To others?

I have sooooo many books hanging around in various parents’ garages and spare rooms. Tons and tons of comic books, too. The comics books are a special case, though. These are not library-card items. The fantasy attached to the comic books is that since they are clearly awesome, someday my offspring will be old enough to read them and they will have the same happy experience of the comics’ awesomeness, and I will be really happy that we both will have enjoyed them, and won’t that be awesome. This is my literal hope for those comic books. Also that I like to read and re-read them. I’ve probably read most of them at least 4 times each, and there is really a huge number of them. Yep, I keep them so that 15 to 20 years from now I might get someone who doesn’t, and may never exist, to read them too.

In my future there is a big accumulation of crap belonging to previous generations. None of it is organized. None of it does anything for me except in a strange, far-off, anecdotal sense that requires an older person from my life to contextualize. I would like to lengthen my memory of my own family, I think that’s important. I asked various branches of the family for family trees a long time ago but they have not been forthcoming. I’m sort of annoyed about that, actually. Where’s my freakin’ family tree? You people have all this crap and numerous stemware and china sets (complete service for 24, sweetheart! Oh but don’t use it it’s too valuable, fragile, and sentimental) and rusty 1800’s ice skates that I’m supposed to treasure and I have no context for them. Get it together, people. I’m planning the yard sale right now.

Seriously what am I going to do with all the faux-historical stuff that I’m going to end up with someday? I ‘m just going to throw it away, donate it, or give it to the local historical society and then replace it with my own bizarre stuff. That’s what’s going to happen. Man, I’m not even interested in the effort required to evaluate and sell potentially valuable items. I can even get myself pre-worried about the future about this issue. What do you think, Buddha, is this worrying a waste of time? Yes. Yes it is.

But back to the important question: what is this compulsion to self-archive? Some stuff I love. I love photos of my parents when they were young. I love photos of them with us as babies and toddlers. I can’t think of anything else that I’m pumped about ephemera-wise. Old clothes? Nah. Nobody in my life has vintage Valentino my size and there will never be anywhere to wear something like that, Lord knows. I’d probably just rather sell it, anyway. Thoreau calls stuff an animal trap – we drag it around, clamped down on our tails – animals will chew off their own legs to be free . . . . well anyway stuff suxx and it’s awesome, I’m highly conflicted about it.

Went to Buddha Class, Can’t Wait to Make New Friends!

Two nights ago was Buddha class in a deli in New Paltz. It was really nice. A bunch of people came, like about ten or so, and the guy was really nice and gave a good talk about meditation and how it is really useful. Speaking of which, I am probably going to Buddha sleepover camp a few hours away from here next week for two nights, or one night and two days. I’m a little nervous about it, in sort of silly ways like will there be tea? How much bathroom privacy will I get? These things impact my desire to leave the house quite a bit.

I hung around a little to talk to the Buddha guy about Buddha stuff, and it was nice to get some stuff off my chest – what’s the difference between suppressing thoughts and “choosing” whether to think about them? What about the buying groceries thing, isn’t that impossible if you don’t see anything as good or bad anymore? I don’t get the whole “emptiness” thing yet, what’s the deal? Anyway he was really friendly and said he’s looking forward to talking about Buddha stuff more in the coming weeks, and boy oh boy will I be there in the front row with my hand raised. He did call me “cerebral” which I took in a flattering way, which is vanity, and totally not okay with Buddha, but oh well. One thing at a time.

And I’m working on my class write-up for the class I need to teach for my certification, and it’s pretty engaging, but also sort of difficult. I think I’m making the class too hard, putting too much stuff in it. I’ll try it out a few different ways and see how it goes.

I Never Do My Hip (the body part) Exercises

So my low back pain is the result of two main, big things in my life.

One: doing yoga with my ego instead of my bodily intelligence. I just want to do some of that stuff so bad even though it kind of hurts!! Or what I’ll do it convince myself that my discomfort is a “roll with it and you’ll make it better” kind of discomfort instead of a “back the hell off or you’ll make it worse” kind of discomfort. In this way I treat yoga as my personal forum for vanity and denial. Nice! Totally working on that, though. I went to yoga today and tried to back way off of the stuff that makes my back cranky but I didn’t hold back enough, and my back hurts now. Key-riced-all-my-tea.

Two: my low back pain is pretty much caused by my hip problems. I have a hip thing, and it’s been there for a while, and basically I ignore it until I can’t, and then I get some attention or make some life changes, and hopefully I get a little relief, and then I go back to ignoring it. Every time I talk to anyone about my hips – generally either the orthopedist, the physical therapist, or the chiropractor, I get the same exact advice in the form of exercises to do. These exercises are basically Pilates – lots of abdominal work and leg lifts. I have heard this exact advice probably seven times from seven professionals in the last ten years; I have even literally been told to “do Pilates.” These exercises are good for my hip because stuff is both too loose and too tight up in there and strengthening it is good for the rotation of my pelvic bowl which then helps align my sacrum blah blah blah blah blah blah. For some reason which is not clear to me, I basically never ever do these exercises. I figure that between lots of walking and lots of yoga I am in pretty good shape and these dinky lame-o exercises aren’t doing anything extra for me, and besides, those doctors just regurgitate whatever they had to memorize for a test once and they don’t know ME, they don’t understand MY experience (so why do I go? I foolishly want to hear something totally miraculous someday, that’s why). But at long last, I think I am finally capable of saying that I am wrong about this. Hopefully this means I will do the freakin’ exercises. (If you are a friend of mine who has heard me say that I should really do my hip exercises, I want you to know that I think I might mean it now, and I won’t say it again, because I’m pretty sure it’s utterly exasperating to hear me complain about it. Sorry about that.)

This forces me to confront something that I do not like to acknowledge: yoga is not my ally in all things. That’s what the latest professional told me recently, that certain parts of yoga are not necessarily my ally in my hip/back issues. I hate this information. I want so badly for yoga to be a complete system that I just need to stick to, with enough variety in my poses to hit all major parts of the body, and I’ll be perfectly comfortable and have zero pain. I feel like I could just figure out the right prescription of yoga poses and I’d be fine! Yoga yoga yoga! With that other stuff, it’s like there’s something that just feels so freakin’ pedestrian about doing my hip exercises, not holistic or magical at all. And it feels like I’m not doing “real” yoga when I just throw the hip exercises into my routine. Isn’t that ridiculous? How do I feel about Yogilates (I think this is a real thing with a trademark and everything)? I used to think it is the corruption and dilution of yoga, all this combining and brand-naming and multidisciplinary made-up nonsense. But I am also probably wrong about this too (all knowledge is broadening, not narrowing, I recall me saying that sometime - also I was recently publicly wondering about how strictly one needs to adhere to a discipline to consider oneself a follower, and deciding that I can take whatever I want from anything - why do I view yoga asana differently - mystery! at least I haven't claimed to be a really consistent person). It’s just that there’s already so much to know about yoga all by itself. But I have to do something else, too? Feels unfair.

Here’s some more embarrassing information. I did some hip exercises last night and they were hard. Clearly whatever I’m doing in yoga isn’t making me so rock solidly strong that I am too diesel for these hip exercises. And here’s something else: I like Pilates. I actually have a DVD that I don’t really look at, but anyway I took Pilates a couple days a week for about a year (this was a few years ago) and I really got a lot out of it physical-comfort-wise. Ugh, so, I know what to do for my hip and back, I know I can even enjoy it, and I know it actually does help me. So what’s my problem? I don’t know. I just feel like I have enough to think about without the stupid hip pain making my back hurt. I asked the chiropractor about going to get acupuncture, to see what she thought about it, and she said sure why not – but then she said that she’d also like to see me being a little more active in caring for my hips. So embarassing that I want a quick fix for a problem I’ve had for over ten years, I mean how stupid am I!? So it’s tough nuts time for me, time to do a little Pilates for my hip every day, bleh.

Ego's Incessant Corruption

In my Buddha book and at Buddha class there is a meditation approach to cultivating love for the whole world and developing a real bodhicitta (wish to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all living beings), wherein you think to yourself how much you want to remove the full range of suffering of everyone you love, and then eventually extend this wish to the whole world. Once this is sincere and you really get it then you are starting to get somewhere.

This is a helpful way of viewing the world for me sometimes. Like if there's a pushy person at the bank or something who might make me roll my eyes and think what a jerk they are - instead, I can think to myself that I wish for their suffering to end, for their feeling of impatience, their feeling that they have to be aggressive on their own behalf, for any feeling making their trip to the bank so negative to go away so they could be happier. I think it's a fair assumption that a host of unpleasant mental functions are contributing to people's behavior, since this is my personal experience too. I can cultivate a little compassion for people by referencing my own craziness, like when I want the line to move faster and someone decides to write a check, I might feel impatience swell up in me (not that much though because I am an exact-change-counter-outer in lines which takes a bit long sometimes so I am happy to hang for check-writers). For some people that impatience just rolls right out of their mouths or makes them push and shove or whatever. I can genuinely wish for their suffering to end the same way I wish all my trips into the world could be free from suffering.

Okay so there's the good side of this way of thinking. But there's a dark side. I am really challenged by my feelings of dislike for someone that I have to maintain a pleasant relationship with, and calling upon my "may your suffering end" technique has taken a dark turn. It feels like pity in my mind. I'd like my thought to be something like "I see a grain of my own suffering in your experience, and through us the suffering of the world, and I wish for your and the world's suffering to end, forever, amen." What it comes out as is more like "I wish for your suffering to end, because you are so freakin' insufferable and so unlikable that I feel bad for you, and I also feel kind of bad for me that I have to be around you, and if your suffering ends then maybe it would be less painful for me to be around you, amen." So that's the bad side of this way of thinking.

I'm just noticing how my own ego can corrupt a gesture of love and compassion into a way to feel superior to people - especially people I don't like, because believing they are lesser than I am by pitying them makes their unlikeability more palatable, and less threatening, or whatever. It's pretty impressive actually, the ego's cleverness. I don't even know if I'm using "ego" in the correct "Ego" way but I think that's what I'm driving at, etc. Anyway I'll have to spend a little mental energy on purifying this technique again for myself and not conflating it with pity and dislike and superiority.

School School School

Man I love learning stuff. I love waiting for the click in my brain when I'm reading something I don't quite get. When you push a little bit and then figure something out you get to have that little burst popcorn kernel all to yourself forever, a little flower of comprehension to snuggle up to. Mmm mmm love it.

I frequently put down my learning, however, after the initial bloom of comprehension. Sort of goes along with my being pretty-good-at-a-whole-bunch-of-stuff-but-not-meaningfully-proficient-at-anything-at-all.

Why is this? I mean I do believe that depth actually is breadth and through the former you can achieve the latter, and following the thread of god through any discipline or body of knowledge takes you through the source of all. Iyengar says this about love - that dedicating our love to someone is our entry to universal, divine, unlimited love. Yep yep yep sure totally on board.

Ah but putting this into practice means choosing something to follow all the way down its rabbit hole, and I don't feel I've done a ton of that in this lifetime. I think I tend to figure out the baseline rules or concepts so that I know just enough of what is happening to see where something is going, and then I sort of get off the bus. So now I'm 32 and I have a bunch of things that I can do pretty okay and enjoy pretty okay but nothing that I feel I've followed so far afield that it's brought me back home. I'd like to buckle down a little but it's hard to choose what (to my three readers: I've written about this before so if there is a repetitive blogging apology to be made consider it made).

There is toughing it out involved. When the learning curve is super high in the early stages of learning about something, it's pretty thrilling to start to see the pieces put themselves together into the whole. But then there's the plateau. Sigh, the inevitable plateau when you know what's going on but don't know what to do next to make it feel like you're still on the ride. After that the feeling of progress is infinitesimal and at the same time the jump to the next plateau is further away. This is the point in learning that I usually move on.

Well no more! Kind of. We'll see. I think I have three things about myself that I really feel like I want to follow all the way down - under "meaningful work" in my criteria for happiness. My music-playing, yoga stuff, and a bit of philosophy reading that I want to know more about. Feels manageable. Whoops I'm totally forgetting my other little projects like brushing up on my Latin and working on my collages. But this is the problem - the desire to do so many things (breadth) just makes doing anything (depth) impossible. This is the problem with constantly trying on new selves. It never goes anywhere anyway, you are always just you afterward.

And the vanity issue is troubling, too. Experts are so intimidating and special and magical. It would be neat to be seen as an expert on anything. And my own sense of pride and credibility and self-worth is tied into how hard I work on any one thing (which is usually not that hard). So I'm looking for that feeling as well. Not too bodhichitta of me. Mergh, bleh.

Teachers are Good: Is Spirituality a Substitute for Actual Personality Traits?

I'm thinking about two of my happiness criteria: Meaningful Work and Spirituality. There is some overlap there. I tend to think of meaningful work as a spiritual pursuit - this is all about the discipline = freedom thing (by focusing and working hard we liberate ourselves to a higher place etc). I always thought the most meaningful way to do this was to find your "calling" and then work like the dickens at it, and that my own focus/drive/regimen would lead me where I need to go to find my true self through whatever vehicle I had chosen. For a long time I thought that vehicle was music. So I would sit with myself and play the guitar without guidance and sort of just figured that I would take myself where I needed to go - you know, the teacher within and all that. But I think I need teachers. I haven't had a guitar teacher in about 17 years. That seems remarkably stupid to me all of a sudden. Why? Why create a version of integrity for myself that refuses guidance? It feels so misguided now. I would love a music teacher. I don't know what the hell books to get or exercises to do to bring myself to a new stage in my relationship with music. I don't know anything! And the most fun I have had with music lately has been learning all those AC/DC songs and learning a bunch of pop country music hits off of youtube. I like the channeling of myself into other things. I find it rewarding - I can't just be alone with a pursuit, it's stifling to be without guidance when you hit a wall. I think I have been hitting the same wall for 10 years. I'd like a teacher.

Maybe I'm thinking about this because I get a lot out of my yoga teachers. I do yoga by myself these days when I can't make it to a class, but really it's all about being with teachers and learning from others. I can't imagine trying to yoga it up totally all alone. It's nice to let myself off the hook for self-sufficiency. I can look outside myself for direction and inspiration, and I should.

But back to the overlap of Meaningful Work and Spirituality - sometimes I feel a little dismissive of people who are all about a spiritual thing, because it seems like that's their whole bag. Nothing they do isn't about Jesus, or Buddha, or Yoga, or whatever. Sometimes it seems like a good way to spend a lot of time getting nothing done except talking about the inner self and its control, destiny, design, or sense of peace. Boring! Can anyone be a serious spiritual practitioner AND do something else meaningful? I am starting to see how following a spiritual path can turn into an all-encompassing diversion away from other purposeful activities. I feel pretty susceptible to this, too, being sucked all the way into yoga such that I can only think in terms of yoga - and I feel susceptible because really I don't have any direction in life. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing, and following the Divine down some road would be a really nice thing to do. And maybe this is fine. Or maybe it's another way to keep myself from my personal process of becoming who I am - following a prescribed path instead of my own. Is this vanity - the belief that the only legitimate expression of self has to be of my own invention, without following anyone else? Wouldn't this mean I don't want a guitar teacher? Or is it just short-sighted, and I can follow a prescribed path and still be who I am - that every path belongs to the individual just because it is the individual's path?

I worry that being all about yoga would absorb my personality I guess, because I'm digging it so much right now that I can see how being all yoga-spirity could take over my head. Just as I once worried that learning too much of others' music would diminish the strength and vision of my own inner musical gestures. But this hasn't been the case - learning AC/DC has been a really exciting broadening experience, not a narrowing one. ALL learning functions as a broadening, not a narrowing. Being alone with my pursuits hasn't created a clarity or singularity of purpose at all; it's looking outside myself that has provided the most invigorating and inspiring fodder for my inner self. Really the risk isn't that I will become a super-yogi type of person, because I'm so super resistant to submitting to that kind of mentality. But I think with this kind of resistance that I am confusing integrity with isolationism. Anyway I want to be able to submit to the yoga learning without losing myself, but I hope that I don't protect my sense of self so fiercely that I don't get to really experience whatever it is I'm trying to get out of this.

Revisit: Christian Radio

This is a revised and updated version of a post I made and then deleted.

Sometimes I listen to the Xtian radio stations, and not in a totally ironic way. There is a combined sociological, historical, and educational aspect that I sort of enjoy. Not just the Bible stories and stuff, which is neat to learn about, but also culturally, to know the substance of what so many people are apparently almost wholly influenced and guided by these days. The music blows, like fer shur, but the conversation pieces are sort of interesting. And I like batting around this stuff a lot - I love advice columns. Carolyn Hax and Dan Savage are my favorite since they are really entertaining and well-reasoned. But I also like Dr. Laura and Dave Ramsey. I like the full circumference of points of view; there is something to be gained from all of them. The benefit can be in either in challenging your biases, or finding commonality where you thought there might be none, or reaffirming your own positions in your mind in spite of contrary points of view.

Okay so that faux-intellectual meta-analysis of pop culture talking heads was a disclaimer made entirely for the benefit of my vanity because I know it's totally square to listen to Christian radio, but I do it anyway, so there's that.

Anyway last week I was listening to some Xtian radio in the car, and the pastor (minister? reverend? chaplain?) guy was describing some confessions of sins of teen lust, and how they go something like this: "I dunno pastor, we were down a dark and private lane at 2 in the morning and gosh, it just . . . it just happened." And of course the point of this is that the lapse into sinful behavior took place waaaaaaay before it supposedly "just happened," and, really, lots and lots of decision lead up to a person's giving into temptation.

So the pastor recommended giving your weaknesses wide berth. Avoid situations that give rise to opportunities to make bad choices. At first I thought this was a little silly - it's a bad idea to hide from temptation as your means of dealing with life. Um, hello, virtue untested isn't virtue at all, it's like a totally famous quote. But the observation he made that really appealed to me was this question: why do we rub up so close against our weaknesses and then ask ourselves to resist? Why do we walk the edge, thinking we can have just one bite of a sundae, or one sip of wine, or anything else like that? It's a lie of our own desires. We want to do the thing we are trying not to do. According to the pastor the feeling of want is the devil trying to get us to cave in, and that's where I fall off the train, but I'm still on board with the idea that the state of mind that makes bad decisions unfolds long before the undesired behavior takes place. You know in your heart, way ahead of time, even though you may say the opposite to yourself, that you are going to create permission for yourself to do something you claim not to want to do. Anyway I like this because when I am thinking about my own bad habits, I like the idea that I can exercise my resistance or disciplined state of mind long before the moment of temptation. I can give my weaknesses wide berth in my mind, and without having to literally stay home to avoid temptation, I can stay "home" in my head. And even when temptation is right in front of you, turning away and waiting for ten minutes, or distracting yourself from it can be effective for letting a wave of weakness pass over you. Like deciding not to have candy - if you just keep walking, ten minutes later the impulse is usually gone.

Ah, all this is just to say that yoga was so awesome this morning. I went to class taught by one of the teacher trainers and it was so great. The whole time I just kept thinking to myself, "yes, this is how I feel best, and most myself, I want this feeling, I want to hold this state in my heart all day, every day." And I can have this state of being all I want - but I have to work at it, keeping all my triggers for weakness at a distance, fomenting the state of being I really want to be anchored to. I imagine that in this positive state of self, former temptations will lose their luster anyway, and I will have to deal less with waiting out waves of weakness.

Too Vain for Meditation Books

Holy moley so I've started to read a Buddhist meditation book since, you know, knowing something about what you interested in is usually a good idea. I have minor beef with the title, though, which is "Transform Your Life." Too corny! Too self-help! I want a book titled "Serious Ideas for Truly Credible Thinkers." That's something I could take on the subway, or run into an old friend while carrying. (Even though, yes, I am reading it to help myself. Still, come on.)

But on to the real fun. In keeping with the Buddhism = life sucks model, the first hundred pages of this book are a non-stop description of the sadness in the world. The most upsetting so far is the discussion of old people and their physical deterioration and mental isolation, dying alone and wishing for company that never comes. Yeesh.

But the best so far is the story of human biological creation and how much we suffer just being conceived and carried around! Enjoy:

"Our home for nine months is this small, tightly compressed space full of unclean substances. It is like being squashed inside a small water tank full of filthy liquid with the lid tightly shut so that no air or light can come through. [para] While we are in our mother's womb . . . [w]e are extremely sensitive to everything our mother does. When she walks quickly, it feels as if we are falling from a high mountain and we are terrified. If she has sexual intercourse, it feels as if we are being crushed and suffocated between two huge weights and we panic. . . . [para] When we are emerging from our mother's womb, it feels as if we are being forced through a narrow crevice between two hard rocks, and when we are newly born our body is so delicate that any kind of contact is painful."

Okay, so there are a few things about this that bother me. I mean, babies definitely have anguish and stuff, no doubt - but I am convinced, first of all, that the womb is probably great. I think it must be a warm, suspended, peaceful, magical place that we are all really sad to have left. Everyone curls up fetal sometimes because it's the most comforting thing to do with ourselves, and that's what we like. Second, I am not sure anyone, even a Buddhist master, can remember this experience, and I would like to decline the invitation to put such a horrible spin on something I have no memory of. Wow, that's going to be one of my new General Policies. Note to self: no making up upsetting memories.

I get that the whole set up here in this book, that life is miserable, is meant to emphasize that meditation/nirvana is the only way to eliminate our suffering, but this seems a little much. We'll see what happens in the rest of the book.