The Italians – my slab fabricators – hired the Albanians – my slab installers – to put in the counter tops – they look great! BUT, the holes for the faucets are all off to the left by one inch – whoa – what goes on? So they are going to try to fix it and I sure hope they can otherwise they are going to have to cut these slabs again.
I’ve learned that even gadabouts need time off – so this weekend I got some much needed rest and mental downtime – check, done, now, back to being a gadabout – BECAUSE Mardi Gras is here for godsakes! Not to mention, La Vita is opening for friends this week for dress rehearsals. And whirling dervishes are coming too – or so Moosey said.
So this is what Mardi Gras looks like thus far:
Saturday – Krewe du Vieux
San Francisco for a week (G coincidentally in NY)
Valentine’s Day – Muses
Friday 2/16 – Hermes
Saturday 2/17 – Iris, Tucks and Endymion (uptown – big sigh)
Sunday 2/18 Thoth at Ernie’s and then Bacchus (my fav of the big ones)
Mardi Gras – St Ann into the Quarter
Got a crisis SOS call from Javier that Pieri was there putting in the slabs and there was a problem with getting the sinks going in. I explained what we had decided that they would put the sinks in themselves because the clips didn’t work with the size of the slab and cabinets. What goes on that my carpenter is hysterical and I’m talking him off the ledge?
Just went over a list with G about a multitude of issues because I don’t know when this all started but it seems like everything and everyone I am dealing with these days is a cliché – including moi – why is that?
I called L late this evening just telling him about how disengaged I have felt from anything and anyone in the last couple of days – and he was a good listener and mentor – he said you are outside of your usual social amp and sometimes the disengagement and the detachment helps you get passed things you might not be dealing with during the swirl.
We talked about the uncertainty of the times we live in and he told me a parable involving himself and P whereby they were deconstructing another younger friend M, who has not been able to pull the trigger with R – as they pondered why, P said, well when we were his age we weren’t pulling the trigger either, but then we woke up and were 50. Frightening, no?
But isn’t that life? L wondered aloud whether he might not live out his years without finding that other and I said well, I’m not looking for the other, but I am a romantic and am inclined to believe that love will come and I believe it will be the best love of the ones that have come before. He, Gomez, said he too believed the same, that he is hopeful he will find that in his life.
He said he was in the process of teaching Emma, Jane Austen’s masterpiece, and he read from the novel the passage when Mr. Knightly finally declares himself to Emma – it is when he finds Emma faultless despite all her faults. And isn’t that love? we both declared.
And then he read from a text about Jane Austen from a writer who said her characters have a moral obligation to live outside themselves and that the best minds are constantly striving for self awareness even while never fully achieving it. Ah, feet of clay. We try so hard to understand ourselves and yet, we are shocked to find ourselves at every turn.
And so I gave him my own parable – where when my girlfriend whispered to me the other night, “I’m acting out” and acknowledging it can’t stop her from doing what she has done a hundred times before even if she doesn’t like that part of herself.
And I too, tell him I’d like to be somebody else sometimes – a woman who isn’t so goddamn earnest about my feelings and seeking to take care of the feelings of others – I’d like to be careless and irresponsible with a man and his heart – but at the end of the day, I’m the woman who can’t be frivolous in sex, love and relationships – and so I am what I am – as tedious as that might be.
And suddenly it explains a lot about me though – I understand now why I have been married my entire adult life.
Today has been a continuation of yesterday’s centering – I pretty much isolated myself into my world and yet took SOSs as they came – a friend’s father has colon cancer, my mother had a distressing call from my sister, my friend called that her paramour has, well how shall I say, stepped out of bounds yet again, and then there was a rat a tat tat of emails about a work situation that has snowballed into something bigger than itself – missives of this nature were rampant while I was cocooning.
Which is why I was maybe hesitant to go out to dinner when someone asked me and maybe he’s right – I’m moody – who knew? – but I felt guarded from taking the last 36 hours down and really allowing myself to feel some feelings that I have kept in abeyance – sadness, guilt, fear, anxiety – I followed my instincts though and went out to dinner knowing I would have to remove the veil at some point. And you know what, that was the right thing to do, sometimes it is good to interact and learn about someone else and see things, even yourself, through someone else’s eyes – even if he said I’m moody – well maybe it takes the son of a preacher man to show me a side of myself I didn’t know I had.
I was speaking to a friend of mine the other day about how natural lying comes to children and how as parents you have to brainwash children into not lying.
So if lying is such a natural human response why does it feel so unnatural – does brainwashing really work that well?
The reason I want to know is that I have few regrets in my life but I’d have to say lying to Steve is right up there as having left a black mark on my soul. Mostly because for 16 years he was wont to say to anyone who cared to listen that “Rachel cannot tell a lie” and he believed that, and I believed that, even while I was telling the biggest lie of my life.
The truth about lying is that it adds a complication to life that is unnecessary and self-defeating. I kind of believe in karma, that all lies come out in the end, and look much worse in the light of day than they did in the dark of night when they were being told. Being direct and forthright doesn’t necessarily always make you well liked by others, but it sure makes it easier to like yourself at the end of the day.
It’s around your mid-thirties that you start looking at where you are and saying huh? Which is why you will notice that your forties are when most people start thinking about making money in earnest because they realize they are going to need it or they get married and get busy having that child so they can have the family they wanted.
Mid-thirties to mid-forties is when a lot of people take stock of the whole picture – have I had that child I wanted? am I really happy with this person? what do I want to really do with my life? – so it seems there is a lot of industry around this age group – people getting busy getting what they think they want.
The truth is that the *Come to Jesus* moment happens somewhere in this range too – for me it was around 45 – I realized that some people are blessed with their dreams come true (QED, my husband) and some people are blessed with the courage to realize theirs haven’t come true and the strength to free themselves from the tyranny of the dream (uh, that would be me).
There is no sense in feeling pointless because life hasn’t turned out the way you wanted it to – because there are other dreams to be had. So when I felt at 44, reclining on my leather couch in Marin County, staring out at the hill directly in front of my house, that I was entering the denouement of my life, I was blessed by a radical transformation – a different dream, a hurricane, and a complete deconstruction of my life as I knew it that has allowed me to rise like a phoenix from my own ashes.
My dream of the future is still undefined – I prefer this to the claustrophobic certainty of where I was headed before – I don’t want a plain vanilla life – I want to be open to all possibilities and to surround myself with traveling companions who are also open to all possibilities. As the director of my own narrative, I might not be ready for the denouement for a very long time – it might be that everything doesn’t get wrapped up in a tidy script till hours before the ending.
Not everyone in this world gets to fully enjoy self-actualization – so finding it is a blessing. My new dreams suit who I truly am and I’m thankful that the world was large enough to let me go there.
Here I was taking a mental health day and so I started surfing the television late last night after reading most of the day and lo and behold but who do I see but Terry B on an informercial for a church! Good grief. Years and years ago when I worked for my brother, Terry was his in house attorney and he and I would get each other’s coffee every morning – it’s possible that Terry was one of my first work husbands. He’d stop by my desk in the mornings and ask with that cute smile of his, “fancy or plain?” and I’d always take it fancy (two teaspoons of sugar with cream).
Terry and his wife fostered a child and then proceeded to go through hell as the court tried to reunite the child with its biological mother. What an ordeal they went through to be loving parents to this child.
The things you see on late night television.
It’s grey and raining outside and even cold – kind of like winter – something us here in the deep Gulf South don’t like to entertain. I woke up thankful I had switched to soda water at Chickie Wah Wah – it made Pilates that much easier. After Pilates, I went and smudged the LaLa and ran some Lowe’s errands for locks and shoe molding. Then I came back to the Can where I have been doing the slow hello between Rusty and Arlene – Arlene is all for making friends, Rusty isn’t so sure.
It’s a day for hot cocoa, movies, and reading and a lot of lounging for the Lord. Mom called and asked me what I was doing and I said searching for inner peace – she said rots of ruck.