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A realization came to me in the groggy moments of waking, I am exactly where I need to be.

August 24, 2011

1. Taurus (4/20-5/20)

   Even though your time is completely your own right now, there is no time to waste. Just because you don’t feel pressure from outside forces does not mean that the speed at which you travel effects only you. Other folks are depending on you to put your best foot forward and fight for your perspective. They want you to value how you feel about yourself, if for no other reason than it makes you happier — and more pleasant to be with. You are supported.

My aunt told me she is happy my uncle has retired because he is around more. I told her she is the only woman who would say such a thing. Then she gave me an example of the other day when she was in the utility room and saw the complete outline of a snake from where one had just shed its skin. She called him, he was there.

I was speaking to a very close person to me and I said I feel as if I am shedding my skin right now and the transaction has me at polar extremes – very sad and very joyful. And that I keep vacillating between the two with such rapidity that it is mind blowing. My own acid without the acid trip complete with hallucinations.

This morning, I took the dogs on a good long walk – I needed one and they did too. The guy working on my house had just cornered me to tell me the patch we are trying to effect on the dry rotted wood from the addition, which gets no shelter from the storm, and because it is wood that is low-grade cypress, from up north no less, and wasn’t back primed, needs to be replaced, not patched. Of course it does, I said to him, my eyes glistening.

We (the dogs and I) walked through the park listening to Be Love Now, an audio book by Ram Dass but narrated by an actor – sort of perplexing in and of itself. The message, it is the opening of your heart that will bring you to the next step, because once you open it, you will accept love. Dass also speaks about gurus, whether you can find them or whether you will ever even know them and I thought about that while I walked. I’ve always believed my heart to be open, but it’s not.

My mother poured unconditional love into me my entire life and I rejected her at many passes around the sun. My partner pours unconditional love into me and I sometimes receive her in anger for the gall of her to love a wretch like me. I’m grown very adept at rejecting love and so I tried to think of what Ram Dass was telling me his guru had told him, reject evil you see, hear or touch. I thought about rewriting some of the last scripts of people who loved me – how they walked with me, alongside me on my journey, and how each of them was crucial to my getting to the next step because each loved me. The nerve of them.

Love comes to me in waves, I feel profound love and then I feel isolated on an island of indifference at times. To stay in a constant state of receptivity is challenging, but not impossible. But this morning as I walked and rewrote the script of all the people who are on my shit list, I began to see them anew, enlarged, but instead of this having a calming effect, it made me breath heavier, and walk more deliberately, and I thought my head would explode.

Neurosis runs deep in the Jew’s blood. Enlightenment, in the words of Van Morrison, “don’t know what it is.”

I’ve just listened to All Around the Mulberry Bush about 85 times. And I didn’t crack. Which tells me that I can handle whatever is going to come my way.

The guy who has been working on my house had a 200 lb slab of wood fall on him and now he is out of commission. As he sat at the dining room table petting Loca – I told him about Loca’s backstory. How she came to me when Arlene was very old and she loved Arlene but she thought one day Arlene would die and she would be top dog. That was how she imagined her future.

Only before Arlene died, we got Wolfie and Bam Bam. And right after Arlene died, we got Heidi and Blekica. So now Loca appears needy because the moment she had been waiting for never materialized and now it is too late.

Similarly, Rudy thought he was going to spend all of August fishing, but now he’s convalescing.

I was at the grocery store and when I came out the guy pushing his cart to his vehicle in front of me stopped in front of a brand spanking new robin’s egg blue truck. He started unloading. I stopped and started unloading. Then he went around to get in his truck but the cart careened and went down the hill and hit his brand new truck and caused a big dent. I had tried to stop the cart but had not gotten there in time. He looked at me when he got out of the car and said, “It’s my fault.” And I said, “Whatyagonnado?”

I wanted to tell him that Cheb i Sabbah has stomach cancer, Stage IV and that my friend’s friend who has two young children has Stage III or IV brain cancer – that a dent to his new car is nothing. I got in my truck and thought about this all the way home – how really none of it matters, that we are what we are and what will be will be.

I watched Loca begging for attention from Rudy and thought, things just don’t happen the way we plan. So why plan? Why bother. Life is going to hand you challenges equally with joy – you just have to be still and it will be.

What would you do if you were me and you were on a mission to change the parts of you that are learned behavior and learn the parts of you that are fundamental to who you are, to who our species is, to who you should be. This morning walking through City Park, a thousand thoughts vied for attention in my mind that ran the gamut:

Ugly and rebellious, wtf?
Need to figure out a plan for Tin’s school.
Where did I put that book on Spain I bought years ago.
Doesn’t have time to talk, hmm.
Why do I feel so sluggish.
If I lose weight, then ….
Is Loca ever going to be normal?
When I’m in San Francisco, I will …

All of these thoughts vied to conquer my joie de vivre of just experiencing the park again as I have not been able to go on one single walk since Tatjana left on Thursday last week. I tried to shove the thoughts out by repeating Ram Ram Ram (Ram means God. Ram is derived from the sanskrit word Ramaneeyam – meaning Beautiful).

I got to my desk after a flurry of activity in the house with Tin, Tatjana, and dogs and cats and before my day started I learned Cheb i Sabbah had Stage IV cancer, my friend in New York is doing okay (he finally responded), the DVD the nun asked me to copy would take more time than I had thought, a friend and neighbor is suffering with arthritis and on meds to control her pain, and I thought to myself, girl, you have it good, so relax into yourself. Anyone else who could figure this out faster or better than me, may take a walk in my shoes, but I’d have to say probably preferable if you stand over there and just watch.

My horoscope today:

August 22, 2011

1. Taurus (4/20-5/20)

   If you’re accused of acting out of character today, don’t sweat it. Right now, you’re spiritually searching, whether you realize it or not. And although you might not be behaving in a consistent manner, you’re still adhering to the personal philosophies you’ve been developing over the years. Do not let other people make you second-guess your reactions right now. You’re doing what you think is right, and that is all that matters.

I was looking up Cheb i Sabbah since I’m going to be in San Francisco and he is an Algerian DJ who spins records in the Mission District. We saw him a few years ago, and had an awesome time at Bollyhood, the club he had become a regular at on Thursday nights. I first learned of him when Tatjana brought me a CD back from Istanbul. Sadly, in searching for him, I came across this website which is a campaign to raise money for him – he has Stage IV stomach cancer.

The bright spot is that the web was used to raise money for this global music celebrity and money was raised beyond the goal to help send him to a clinic in Germany. Perhaps all health care should move to the web, since the U.S. seems incapable of finding the compassion to offer health care uniformly to every one.

For now, I’m sending my thoughts to Cheb i Sabbah and hoping he overcomes his prognosis.

I don’t understand boarding school because I believe it’s our duty and joy to have our kids at home. But the last napless days when I knew that Tin was so dog tired that he had better sleep, I have to say I have resorted to the military tactics that are probably used in boarding school. Mainly, I knock hard on the wall between our bathroom and his room three times as I watch him dancing in the window instead of lying down and say very sternly, “Glavne Binga” – which is Croatian for put your head down on Bingo, his pillow. If I say this in English, it doesn’t have the same effect. He always lays his head back down but then starts crying.

I thought to myself after round three of this that maybe there was another way to handle getting him to sleep as we don’t believe in parental involvement, we believe that he should be able to go to sleep by himself and soothe himself.

So today, when a friend sent me this link, I read with interest the soothing and comforting way this nanny put her ward to sleep. But it involves parental intervention. If a child becomes accustomed to a parent patting them or rocking them to fall asleep, then if they wake on their own, they have not learned how to soothe and put themselves to sleep.

The days I tried not to resort to the Croatian military tactics were the days that Tin didn’t sleep, and then didn’t sleep well in the evening, and then didn’t behave well in the waking hours. He needs his sleep. So it’s home boarding school tactics I fell back on.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

I am back to hot flashes, back to feeling like I am Orca the land whale, and back to feeling as if the days of feeling spry are so far in the past they might as well be in another universe.

It’s good to know that menopause just doesn’t go away. After ten years of peri-menopause and finally menopause now post-menopause seems to be the same roller coaster ride of aliens having abducted the sexy kitten I was and replaced me with a scraggly, raggedy, bitchy, mama cat.

God help anyone in my vicinity.

Two years old – Tender or Terrible?

Fifty two years old – Tender or Terrible?

During tod-zilla’s nap (yes he finally took one) a thunderstorm erupted and when the kettle drum of thunder rolled over the house, I heard him say over the video, “Mommy” in that little voice of his. He didn’t wake up. Then he said, “Mommy” with the next roll of thunder. But he still didn’t wake up. When he did finally get up from his nap, he said, “Mommy I want you to hold me.”

And then we proceeded to have a nice and tender evening.

Shades of evil twin Skippy (read: tod-zilla) erased.

I was reading through Facebook and came across an entry from a friend who was taking her daughter along with six other girls out for the day. After struggling through four days of Tin’s defiant mood and my single-parentdom, I wanted desperately to hit the DISLIKE button but there wasn’t one.

When I’m glazing over the FB entries and trying to reconcile how I have no time for much in my life anymore, I wonder what I am doing there. What do I see that makes me go there? It’s almost like ice cream. I love ice cream, but I go sometimes years before I eat ice cream. Put it in my face and I will scarf it down as if I am a seasoned ice cream eating professional, the truth being something else. The other night I was at my neighbor’s house and other neighbors were there and were waxing rapturously about a new Kleinpeter Creme ice cream she had seen on a billboard. “We’re big ice cream eaters,” she said to me, and described all the places they went looking for this ice cream – Dorignac’s, Martin’s, Rouse’s, Whole Food. It meant nothing to me, but if they had put that Kleinpeter Creme whatever ice cream in front of me instead, I would have eaten it as if it were laced with nicotine.

I loved Linked In, I like that it is job site where I can update my resume and make contact with the people I do business with, unfortunately I can update my resume but I can’t really make contact with my colleagues because my sources in industry are anonymous. And recently, after joining some groups on Linked In, I got irritated by some banal questions that were being circulated around groups, such as this one in my New Orleans network, “What’s your favorite dive?” Isn’t that Yelp’s department? Or this one by an advertising group I belong to, “Do you believe that integrity and morals are dead?” Isn’t that a question to ponder with your inner voice?

Where are all the psychopaths that leave comments on nola.com or Youtube? I mean the kind where you are watching a yogi meditating or something and there is a comment like this one, “What is up with the nose hair?” Or the really hateful, angry messages that are readily found on nola.com, the online version of the Times Picayune, our daily here in New Orleans. How come we don’t see any of those on Facebook? Or now Linked In? Is someone censoring the real pathological depressed and rage-aholics on social media?

Sampling from nola.com:

Ovaltine Jenkins August 21, 2011 at 9:35AM

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@laprincessesusan – You are either lying or you are far more stupid than your posting style suggests if you seriously couldn’t find a decent nonprofit debt counseling service.

laprincessesusan August 21, 2011 at 11:04AM

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Sweetie, you don’t know me so to publicly tag me as either a liar or stupid seems to be a tad arrogant.

[How could he have missed her name is Ovaltine?]

There was a point when Tatjana’s mother was visiting us from Croatia, where I wanted to start a company to be the opposite of Yogi tea that has those zen like sayings on their tea bags, I wanted the Eastern European socialist tea bag with messages like, “We all die alone.” What if I started the Curmudgeon AntiSocial Network where we could enjoy entries that might run the gamut of:

“I woke up this morning and remembered I work with a bunch of morons so I called in sick.”

“Have you ever notice all those people who post the most on Facebook don’t really have a life.”

“If someone asked me if I think integrity and morals are dead, I’d say dead, they’d have had to be alive first.”

“I have no precious photo to show you of my kid today because he spit yogurt on my beautiful blouse.”

I want an emoticon that has a thumbs down, a Psycho-esque outline of someone lifting a butcher knife, a woman hot flashing, and so on.

I could also post some famous lines on the CAN (the acronym for the Curmudgeon AntiSocial Network):

There is no such thing as inner peace.  There is only nervousness and death.  ~Fran Lebowitz