FEAST AND FAMINE

I wrote about Rolling Stone and Jessica Valenti’s article in the Guardian tonight but I ended up deleting all six paragraphs.  It wasn’t thoughtful writing.  I’m just too disheartened by the whole thing.  I’ll come back to it later once I can THINK about it.

In the meantime I have been reflecting on Jonathan Franzen’s essay in the New Yorker.  He asks:  “Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation?”  Very, very interesting, and I thank him for the question and his thoughts on it.  Also for the book recommendation.  I have been thinking along similar lines, specifically… what is the difference between “prediction” and “provision”?  My thoughts on it are still muddled so that will have to be a blob post for another time.

For now I’ll just ramble about something related that popped into my mind when I saw the crazy beautiful moon tonight.  I like the Equinoxes, Solstices and Cross Quarter Days because they keep me rooted in the cycles of the earth.  Between astrology and earth based celebrations I have learned an awful lot about how our planet moves through the sky, how it tilts and twirls and what effect that has on people.  As recently as a hundred years ago my grandparents were more subject to harvest bounty and midwinter frugality than I am today.  If I have an appetite I can walk into a grocery store and for a pittance pick up a rotisserie chicken and eat myself sick no matter what time of day or what day of the year.

But my ancestors?  They weren’t afforded such luxuries.  Oh some of them may have been adept at acquiring fortunes and maybe they were sitting pretty throughout the year, but not all of them.  There had to be a few who survived more on cunning and wit and still others who survived on wisdom and hard work.  They may well have suffered some feast and famine episodes.  In fact I know they did.  I’ve heard the stories.

We don’t have markers for feast and famine in our lives anymore so we don’t have the psychological tools to deal with it.  Our forebears experienced a lot of it on very basic levels so when other types of feast and famine occurred in their lives they knew not to run off half cocked with victory or to succumb to doom and gloom when times were spare.

Today we experience feast and famine in areas like relationships.  We can go months, even years without a meaningful significant other and be whiney babies throughout the whole ordeal (ahem) or be good stoics, cherish the friends and family we do have, cross our fingers and hope for the best.

Sometimes we have a job we don’t like but it’s not prudent to quit at the moment, again, stoicism might be a handy characteristic to have.  We might not have the car we want, or a car at all and find riding the bus to be a bit humiliating.  Maybe there are no fun events to go to or there’s nothing on television we want to watch.  These things sound silly but I really have seen people who slat around for want of something to do, some easy form of entertainment.  Hell, I’ve probably done it myself.

These days I find myself wanting to feast, to mark the waning of winter and the return of the sun but also wanting to initiate a period of abstinence afterward.  I want to celebrate what I do have and then pick something in which I over indulge and just tone it down until Beltane.  I will be suggesting this to my friends and family too.  If you eat too much, drink too much, smoke too much, spend too much time on the computer or in front of the tube, if you find yourself being a glutton for sex or shopping or even sleeping, well cut it out!  Be spare.  Be an ascetic.  Put yourself into hard times for a month.  Train yourself to keep your spirits up, to creatively problem solve to get your needs met without that activity or substance.  Look at it as preparation for sacrifice to a greater good.

One day you might have to.  It would be good if you knew how to do it with some grace.

Today though… feasting.

For breakfast… a cheese omelette with onions and tomatoes.

For lunch… spinach soup with bacon, and an apple with old cheddar.

For dinner… fish provençal.  Probably my favorite way to eat white fish.

And for dessert… tarte au citron!

This is a great dessert if you love tart flavors, as I do.  Raspberries AND lemon… yum.

FORLORN

I came this close to shutting down my twitter account tonight.  I disappeared from facebook a while ago.  I even wanted to close up shop here on my blob.  I’ve done it before.  I get in these moods sometimes, these extreme moods of wanting to just dissociate.  From everything.  I wander around online and I don’t see much of anything that I respect, or really even understand.  In a lot of ways I’m a miserable person.  I’m not really “fun” to be around except to a certain kind of weirdo.  I protect this weirdo from ennui and the illusion that he’ll never get caught and he protects me from total despair and misanthropy.  So maybe that’s it.  Maybe I am just lonely.

I didn’t shut anything down because if history is any indication this feeling will pass.  I’m not even sure why I am writing this down.  Sometimes it helps, I suppose.  Not tonight though.

DSM 5

Ok, last one for today, promise.

I was raised in a very small, rural community by loving parents.  I basically had one of those idyllic childhoods that are portrayed as fiction these days.  I went to school and received good grades, even scholarships.  I studied English and Art for a few semesters in University before dropping out.  I’d say I read about three books a month.  I write every day and pursue other creative projects rather sporadically.  I peruse the news.  I read a lot of blogs.  I take walks in winter and putter in my garden in summer.  I cook a lot.  I work out every day.  I’m 5’7″ and last time I checked I weighed 135 lbs.  I eat all my fruits and vegetables.  I have five good friends, some that I’ve had for over twenty years, some that I haven’t seen in quite a while and who I miss.  I’ve had intensely passionate, loving relationships with three men.  I’ve never had “casual sex”.  I’ve never “dumped” anybody nor has anyone ever “dumped” me, romantically or friendship-wise.  I’ve never been married, though I respect marriage and I hope for it.  I don’t have any children, though I hope for them also.  I am successfully self-employed.  I own my home.  I have absolutely no debt.  Zero.  AND, I have been exploring and integrating a masochist sexuality for over twenty years now.

Question:

Am I healthy?

I am reading a thread on the “mental illness” of transgenderism and I am pretty sure these people would consider sadomasochism a mental illness also.  I have to double check on this but I am pretty sure we are still in the DSM 5.

That’s a sincere question, by the way.  Masochism could very well be an illness of some kind and I am coping with it rather well.  *shrug*

SOFT DREAD

Speaking of differences… I want to write this down before I lose it.  Pardon me if it’s not well thought out, this is a first draft even in my own mind.  I have heard a lot about the necessity of inspiring “soft dread” in women.  Well, I can get behind that… though probably not in the way they mean.  For one thing, I was involved with sadists.  I never knew when the next insult, taunt, mockery, barb, put down, head slap, arm punch, hair pull, nipple tweak or leg trip was going to come my way.  When they moved toward me quickly, I flinched.  There were also occasions where they caused me terrible, terrible emotional pain.  I feared revisiting that pain.  So yes, “soft dread” was a part of my relationships.

I get the feeling sometimes though that some men WANT their woman to be possessive of them, jealous, afraid.  Perhaps this is an easy way to control them?  I don’t know.  In my relationships it was just a major pain in the ass.

Did I fear abandonment?  Was I insecure?  Of course.  That was certainly part of the “terrible emotional pain” but what is very interesting to me is that my experiences with sadomasochism have rendered me able to deal with such feelings and if not always digest them erotically then at least control them, endure them with some dignity and poise, even vanquish them.

I remember being jealous.  Scary jealous.  Scared even myself.

There came a time in my first relationship with a man when he informed me of his desire to be with other women.  Oh my God, the pain.  Because I am hyper verbal and narrate my hysterical fits I was able to actually find the words to elucidate how I felt and why.  I loved him so much and needed him so much that I wouldn’t be able to live without him.  I would die from the pain if he left.  Sleeping with other women put me at risk of him finding my better, my replacement and abandoning me.  I was the most easily threatened, maniacally jealous, possessive controlling witch in the world when it came to his sexuality.  I’d found a damn gold mine and it was MINE!  I remember actually having a total freak out over a visit to a strip bar, for Christ sake.

His response was basically, “If you don’t stop being so jealous, if you don’t stop cornering me and threatening me and if you don’t give me the freedom to do whatever I want with my own body then you will have to die from that pain because I WILL leave.”

Well, that put a whole new spin on the deal huh?  One was sure abandonment, the other only a risk.  I took the risk.  So I struggled through it, sorted it out and it went away.  I can honestly say that after having gone through that process, I was free to actually love him, the real him, not the man I needed him to be, not my life preserver, not some form of narcissistic supply.  Him.

What I felt before that was not love as I define it today.

I was infatuated.  I was dependent.  I was hot for him.  I needed him.

When I panicked over the strip bar incident my friend neo counseled me blue in the face over it and I honestly felt at that time that her position of “Jesus, just let the poor guy go” meant that she didn’t know what it meant to really love someone, to really want someone, to really just have to have someone so passionately that she’d die without him.  The truth is that it was me who didn’t know those things.

What I have found is that I move into possessive love when I can’t stand the vertigo of recognizing the reality that I have no idea what the next moment has in store for me.  If, however, I recognize that I am sharing his life with him right now I can milk that experience for all its glory and love and pleasure.  If I focus on a future in which I might not have him around I miss this moment in which I do.

The mission is for me to teach my differentiated self to cope with the humility that I cannot control him and he could deny me his presence at any given moment.  This helps me be grateful to and respectful of the opportunities I have right now to enjoy him.  If the day comes when someone or somewhere else is a better choice then at least I have been present for as many moments as possible when he was choosing me.

Protectiveness is the same sentiment.  I want to protect him from harm so I can have him instead of recognizing that harm is very much a part of life, his, mine, yours… and he is free to invite as much or as little harm onto himself as he needs in order to have a rich and textured life.  When I live in each moment with him without designs for controlling him so my own life rolls on pain free, I find that I can actually deal with the pain that comes along much more easily and I can even be present for his.

What’s kind of interesting about this process is that it has fostered very “secure” relationships.  It’s like that Zen koan about looking for the door.  When I stop looking for it, it appears.  I wanted him to be with me forever so I didn’t have to experience loss.  I wanted him to never experience set back or pain so I didn’t have to suffer with him.  That was me looking for the door.  When I looked instead at the moment and at him, instead of my own fear of the future, an amazing thing happened.  He felt comfortable and unconstrained by me and chose me over and over.  And I think he might have done that because I didn’t rule him with my fear of pain, in fact my method proved to him that I was willing to risk terrible pain in order TO love him.  For some, that’s hard to turn down.

DISTINCTION

I just came across this quote on twitter:

If a girl doesn’t learn to cook, that means she doesn’t believe she has to use more than her vagina to please men.

I have written about “the desire to please” probably to nauseating extremes at this point so I’ll spare you another dissertation.  It’s kind of funny to me however that I have worked so hard to “unlearn” certain behaviors only to see them being praised by so many men online.  The guys I have been with?  They did not want to be pleased.  They wanted to be free.  Big, big difference.

CREATION

I have been stewing mightily over a certain concept but I still don’t have the right words.  It’s this idea of the God awakening the Goddess so she can give birth to the God.  It’s in much of our mythology as a species and I wonder if it isn’t somehow true, even for us moderns in all our cockamamie type relationships.

This idea began gelling the day I read a thread asking if true love was all that was needed to make a relationship work.  Everyone said no, that you need trust too.  Well, I put down the gun and walked away.  Then I read a rather nasty tidbit in another thread about women seeing men as projects and it seemed that every one said no, so once again, I put down the gun and walked away.

Creation myths are about which came first the chicken or the egg, and if read carefully every Creation myth I am acquainted with says, “both”.  Who created God?  The Goddess gave birth to him.  Well, who created her?  He did.

I think it is possible to “make each other perfect for each other” by projecting onto each other what “God” and “Goddess” are.  And then out of true love, you know that thing that people have so little respect for?  You become that for each other.

In fact, I know this is possible.  I’ve done it, and I’ve had men do it for me.

LAZY DAY

Crazy beautiful day today, though still cold.  Did not accomplish much.  Read six chapters of my book.  Took a long walk.  Did some yoga and spent about an hour stretching my back, hips and legs which felt freaking FANTASTIC.  Work is really doing a number on my posture.  I’m going to have to watch myself so I don’t become one of those stooped old ladies.

Had fun playing in the kitchen.

Breakfast:  roasted tomatoes and asparagus with an egg…

 

Lunch:  cream of tomato soup with veggies and guacamole…

 

Dinner:  lemon chicken…

 

And for dessert:  frozen berries with white hot chocolate sauce…

 

I am no photographer but I get why this is fun now.  Yes, I have turned into one of THOSE people.