This...

This is one of the reasons I have stuck with Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson, which can be a bit draggy (emotionally and plot-wise) and disjointed (purposely so and to great effect) at some points, but is ultimately one of the best things (and also one of the few books to have held my interest in a while) I have read recently. The writing is always good, even if it takes a good thirty or so pages before it gets going in a way that makes you want to keep reading...

Some mornings are harder than others...and some mornings you will look for peace or something to hold on to in the weirdest of places. I have not had much patience, time or even interest to read the Sunday papers lately, but I was straightening my unread ones from yesterday so that maybe I can read them when I get home from work tonight and the New York Times Style Magazine, sometimes just called T, fell out and onto the floor and when I picked it up it had opened to this page. Both the image and the words really jumped out at me:

 

I had never heard of Candy Darling before, but found more about her here:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candy_Darling

 

So I found myself talking to a cat earlier tonight...as if he might actually answer me. I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. A good thing because this cat has such soulful eyes and he actually seemed to be listening for once (I've seen him around several times outside where I work) and there is something about attentive eyes (whether they are human or animal) that can make a person pour her heart out. The bad thing, obviously, is my half expecting the cat to answer.

I talk to God out loud, too, but only when I am by myself and at home, but neither the cat nor God (no disrespect to God, I mean that, sincerely) can answer me directly. In the cat's eyes, though, I swear I see something deeper than just a creature who wants his dinner and in God's silence (I am not sure how He would feel about me even if He did talk out loud) I still try and find hope.

I lost my faith for a long time when I was really hating myself for being gay. I mistook really rabid Conservative Christians for all Christians and somehow I took my silent anger out on God. I don't know (really, how can I ever know for sure?) how God feels about gays and lesbians, especially how He feels about us as individuals, as actual people who feel and live and love just like anyone else does.

All I know for sure is that I only started feeling a little less angry, a little less hurt and in pain when I realized I cannot go through life without feeling there is more to this world than the hate and today's crass pop culture and people who look right past you if you aren't pretty enough or "cool" or whatever enough. I find my peace in a hungry cat's eyes and in the hope that there is a God who won't hate me or send me to Hell because of who I happen to love.

I have to believe in something higher, something better, because there are so many times I just don't believe in me.

Just a mishmash of things related to why books are sometimes better for the soul than other people are...I like the below link except for #12 which I think completely misses the point of Beauty and The Beast (unless they are joking):

 http://thoughtcatalog.com/nico-lang/2013/10/31-signs-you-like-books-more-than-you-like-people/

There are times when I really do think it is better to just stick with books and care about people from afar, where you cannot possibly bother them and your heart is safer. I love people, I really do, but as soon as I actually interact with them, especially ones I really like, I seem to mess things up.

Insomnia continues to be a constant companion and yet it leaves me unable to really do anything completely worthwhile. You can only reorganize your pantry so many times and you cannot vacuum or move furniture around in the middle of the night. I am too exhausted to really read anything with good focus or to watch tv or movies that are "new"to me...so I go with reruns and dvds I have seen a million times before. Right now my best friends are "Fringe," "Frasier" and "Golden Girls."

Last night I watched a "Frasier" I must have seen dozens of times before, but this time I took it to heart more than I remember having done in the past. The episode (titled: "The Show Where Lilith Comes Back") is from the first season and though Lilith tells Frasier she wants to get back together (that doesn't exactly go according to plan and mayhem soon ensues) at the heart of this episode is how she is so lonely, which she tells Frasier in one of her character's most vulnerable scenes ever. She is so non-Lilith (in other words, not wearing her usual tough and icy exterior), the moment is very touching and Frasier (non-pompous and genuinely consoling) reassures her that even if she never meets anyone, she will handle whatever comes her way because of who and how she is.

I felt like that moment leaped off the screen and into the part of me that needed to hear something like that. And I wish people said things like that in real life. It is not cold at all, but a refreshing truth and far, far better than some well-meaning person (who really has no way of seeing the future) telling you your day will come and that 'right person' is right around that corner you will turn someday.

Maybe that day won't come and maybe I won't meet someone and life might not be the way I wanted it to be, but it will be okay. Though Lilith is often the butt of Martin, Daphne and Nile's jokes (or fear), I really think she is seen in a positive light most of the time: a tough and strong woman who does sometimes show her fragile side and lives to tell about it.

I made a decision the other day that isn't life-altering, but yet, somehow, really is (for me) in a way. I made it in a moment of strong emotion and careful decision, and even now I am not regretting it. It will remove me somewhat from a situation I have been slipping in over and over, a situation both hopeless and heartbreaking. And I will be sad for a while at missing what I will be missing, but I also am glad that I am capable of doing what needs to be done when I feel I cannot trust how I react sometimes.

I found some articles on making decisions (some of which cover logically versus emotionally):

http://changingminds.org/explanations/emotions/emotion_decision.htm

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/one-among-many/201006/reason-and-emotion-note-plato-darwin-and-damasio

http://blog.iqmatrix.com/effective-decisions

I can never get back the respect of the person whose opinion has changed of me and that makes me, incredibly sad...especially when I think of the first day we met and how she couldn't possibly have known yet what an idiot I was going to turn out to be. But it is only what I deserve, especially considering everything that has happened.

Meanwhile, I am doing my very best to keep my feelings and thoughts to myself and hoping that even though I cannot change what has happened, even if this person never wants anything ever to do with me again, I will do my very best from now on to separate my heart from my mouth.

The Unlikely Hero Of Room 13 B is just so amazing! I haven't finished it yet, but I feel very confident it will remain amazing! :)

KIRKUS REVIEW

What would it feel like to wake up normal? It’s a question most people would never have cause to ask—and the one 14-year-old Adam Spencer Ross longs to have answered.

Life is already complicated enough for Adam, but when Robyn Plummer joins the Young Adult OCD Support Group in room 13B, Adam falls fast and hard. Having long assumed the role of protector to those he loves, Adam immediately knows that he must do everything he can to save her. The trouble is, Robyn isn’t the one who needs saving. Adam’s desperate need to protect everyone he loves—his broken mother, a younger half brother with OCD tendencies, and the entire motley crew of Room 13B—nearly costs him everything. Adam’s first-person account of his struggle to cope with the debilitating symptoms of OCD while navigating the complexities of everyday teen life is achingly authentic. Much like Adam, readers will have to remind themselves to breathe as he performs his ever worsening OCD rituals. Yet Toten does a masterful job bringing Adam to life without ever allowing him to become a one-dimensional poster boy for a teen suffering from mental illness.


Readers be warned: Like Augustus Waters before him, Adam Spencer Ross will renew your faith in real-life superheroes and shatter your heart in equal measure. (Fiction. 12 & up)

Sometimes, the more I look at a word the more it changes. Or the more it can lose its power. In this case...it's both. I am just barely old enough to have heard, as a little girl,people still use the word "spinster." It was mostly uttered by those from my grandmother's generation and I don't even remember if I knew what it meant at the time. The tone, alone, though, perfectly conveyed that it was not something a woman should aspire to be in life.

Old maid never sounded that bad to me because I always thought of the card game instead..even if "old maid" was used in the same tone, with the same slightly snide implication that ending up one was a fate worse than death...and a cross between something pitiable and something hideous. 

My copy of the newly published and widely reviewed Spinster came in today and I'm looking forward to reading it, even if the front cover seems just a tad too trendy. I prefer the title page because it shouts out less (to me) that it's okay to be a spinster as long as you definitely do not look like one.

This quote from Pure Wow kind of says what I'm thinking:


Some readers may roll their eyes as Bolick recounts yet another dude who was dying to marry her (we get it: indifference is irresistible). But overall her writing is impeccable and her message fresh.

So, in my insomniac state that keeps me from focusing enough to read a book, but not from focusing enough to think and think about one little word, I am staring at the word "spinster" and the more I look at the word itself (not the picture of the girl on the front who probably never has had trouble getting asked out on a date) the more it looks kind of cute and harmless and totally non-bothersome.

Because, really, if people (including one's own parents) have trouble with someone not being married (and this "someone" is usually a woman and, by the way, how come men get cool words like "bachelor"?) that's their problem, not the problem of the person not married.

Sometimes I worry that my Saturday nights as an adult (staying home with books and music and tea) are pretty much the same as they were in middle school and high school.

And, then, that makes me worry that I'm the same girl I was then...which would be horrible, because not changing at all in almost thirty years would show a complete lack of personal growth on my part.

These are two articles I found on personality changes, one of which is more broad in scope:

 http://nymag.com/news/features/high-school-2013-1/


and the other directly aimed at high school and whether we really do change from who we were as teens. This one really interests me because it addresses why our musical tastes are often strongest when it comes to what we listened to in our youth:

"Our self-image from those years, in other words, is especially adhesive. So, too, are our preferences. “There’s no reason why, at the age of 60, I should still be listening to the Allman Brothers,” Steinberg says. “Yet no matter how old you are, the music you listen to for the rest of your life is probably what you listened to when you were an adolescent.” Only extremely recent advances in neuroscience have begun to help explain why."

 http://nymag.com/news/features/high-school-2013-1/

I'm sipping wine (a really good one that I'm sipping for taste and not relief) and wondering how on earth I managed to write over 600 pages double-spaced of fiction about nothing I have ever experienced in real life. I don't know if it's any good or not (it's good in spots, I kind of think, but the wine is really relaxing me so I may not be able to judge well) but I hate to throw it away because I've been writing it for three years now and the actual story itself means a lot to me.

I based some of it on truth (one of the characters is based a bit on someone I knew years ago and who meant the world to me before an irreparable rift changed things forever) but most of it is just things I imagined in my heart and mind. It's about getting past heart break and figuring how to tell the difference between what is real or what is not. 

It's also about how much crap we're willing to put up with from someone we deeply love and would even die for, someone who originally was 'runner up' to the love of the central character's life, but eventually becomes much more...the main love interest is someone I totally made up in my head, though when I reread it I kind of worry I somehow wove Blanche Dubois into her character... obviously, not as well as Tennessee Williams, and definitely not intentionally. But I do remember I was really in a Vivien Leigh phase and watching every production of A Streetcar Named Desire a lot when I first started writing.

Besides worrying about the actual writing I also wonder if you really can write about what you don't know, about things you've never done or experienced. I found some interesting articles online that offer some good advice and thoughts...

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/08/dont-write-what-you-know/308576/

http://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/why-you-should-write-about-what-you-dont-know

I even found (amidst a lot of rather, shall we say, coarse advice) some words on whether you can write love scenes without experience:

...To which I reply: If a writer had to experience something in order to write it, we wouldn’t have science fiction, fantasy, or most romantic comedies. Or most romances in general, really.

I wish I could make the past few years disappear and start fresh...but since I can't I continue to read Saint Augustine's Confessions and think of what Mother Teresa would do.

“Humility is the mother of all virtues1; purity, charity and obedience. It is in being humble that our love becomes real, devoted and ardent. If you are humble nothing will touch you, neither praise nor disgrace, because you know what you are. If you are blamed you will not be discouraged. If they call you a saint you will not put yourself on a pedestal.”

Blessed Teresa of Calcutta

~Mother Teresa~

For more read here:

https://www.catholiccompany.com/blog/mother-teresas-humility-list

Sometimes it feels like your heart weighs a thousand pounds...whether you're extremely anxious or sad or trying to get past a broken relationship or one-sided love. Even though this article is from more than six years ago, I think it still has a lot to say about the broken heart. It gets it better than anything else I've read:


Heartbreak is more than just an emotional defeat; to some the pain is very real. At one point or another, everyone must experience this mind numbing feeling (unless you confine yourself to a house and never interact with even a pet) but that's not the norm and you're probably not reading this article if you've had that kind of sheltered life.

Heartbreak can be caused by many different circumstances and that's what makes this emotion easily recognized by nearly every person on the planet. It can result from the loss of a loved one, a partner, a friend and even a close pet. Or it can be caused from disappointment, betrayal or a change from known surroundings. It might not even be a loss at all but a sense of loss, or the realization that the love of the person you care most for is drifting far from where it had always been.

Love, in the same perspective as heartbreak, neither has a corrective definition nor specific amplitude implied by the physical word itself. There's a never-ending limit to the definition of love because there are so many things we love and in many different ways. There's friendship love, love for animals and possessions, love for music or hey, even food. Then there's that kind of  love that is so overwhelming perfect, passionate and meaningful, a love that you have never before been able to achieve. This is the love we're going to be talking about throughout this article, but before we can continue on, we must first understand why we as humans are constantly searching to fulfill this emotion.

A part of the desire comes from what we find most joyful in life. If you search for this answer, and look upon previous actions objectively, it's simple to say that we are satisfied by making others happy. We receive complete satisfaction from doing things for others, and this feeling increases with the intensity of love we feel towards that specific person or thing.  When you lose someone you love, you have lost the sense of purpose acquired by the relationship between them and yourself. You lose the purpose you felt when doing simple things to make them smile, and making yourself joyful in return. The cycle should continue endlessly, but as we know that could only occur in a perfect world, which this is not. Heartbreak happens, and it changes who we are for the better (in most cases) and so will it be for the rest of our lives and next.

"We of course equate the pain of loss to the intensity of the love, but that is not what is behind the pain. The more you love and feel loved, the greater the increase of your sense of purpose because when you do something for just anyone and they do not appreciate it; your sense of purpose is not completely satisfied. It requires seeing who you are helping, and their appreciation to make it complete." says personal developer, David Samuel.

Read more: http://www.science20.com/variety_tap/science_behind_heartbreak-33900#ixzz3Yv4dOrxJ




http://www.science20.com/variety_tap/science_behind_heartbreak-33900

I am fighting another night of no sleep and feeling a bit tossed and thinking about how happy I was in college...how magical it was, almost...and then I go on Facebook (something I don't do much of anymore) and I see an update from someone I adored way back then. She was probably the first person I ever really saw as a role model who wasn't a teacher or favorite author.

We met one day in the cafeteria. She was so fascinating...her hair all adorably messy, her eyes bright and wide, her hands carrying a fully loaded tray with a tattered copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude tucked under one arm. She had this energy that drew me to her right away. And she was a junior while I was a freshman so there was also that aspect of "looking up to" to as well.

We would end sharing several classes together the two years we overlapped and I loved her take on all the different stories and novels we read in our Irish fiction course. Often, we would traipse to the dining hall together discussing something we had just read. Her mind was wonderfully wild and it turned out she could sing and dance (really, really well) and was theatrically bound.

Before I met her I had never heard of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. She spoke of him in way that made it impossible not to read him. Though her dreams were for Broadway (and she certainly could have made it there) she ended up becoming a well-respected writer, which only seems fitting, given how much passion she had for books when I knew her in college.

I remember the nerve it took me to Facebook her a while back. "What is she remembers how dorky I was around her?" I worried. "Or what if she knew I had a crush on her?" She always was kind to me and often patted me on the head (somehow this didn't insult me because it had happened before and still does with other people) and I just always had the sense she kind of knew and it didn't bother her. Still, I was pleasantly surprised when she not only accepted my request, but wrote me a nice note back.

She is probably the one (of the very few) people I ever had feelings for that I could be perfectly normal around. Maybe it was because she could put anyone at ease and had the most terrifically bizarre sense of humor and she accepted everyone.

Tonight, when I saw her photo (with a favorite professor of mine whom I also looked up to and who gave me my crazy passion for Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne) I felt joy. She is really, really happy, I thought, her dreams have come true and she is doing what she loves and she deserves it so very much. I remember her for so many reasons and I will never forget her for how she made people feel when they were around her: alive and thriving.