May her memory be blessed

A year ago today, a friend - a poet, scholar, teacher, and all-around excellent human being - threw herself from the top of a building. Just a few short months before her incredible second book of poems came out.

I've never been so close to a suicide before and at a year's distance I continue to be surprised at the lack of closure, at the inability to progress from sadness and shock.

Sarah, I miss you.

Foreshortening

This video could have been so much better if it were about 10 seconds longer... emblematic of many of my artistic endeavors, I guess. This poem could have been better if it were about a stanza longer. If you'd only held on to the last note of that Chopin Nocturne for another moment. If only you'd stayed in relevé longer.

March 29, 2006. A farewell to the old woman across the alley, about whom I wrote this in an email to a friend:

The old woman across the alley from me reappeared. I haven’t seen her in what seems like months, and I always worry that one day I’ll come to the window to find her windowsill stripped of its empty bottles and plants, her strangely hung curtains torn down, and I will only be able to infer that she has died or moved on to a nursing home.

Her hair seems a bit more unkempt now. And she just spent a good 20 minutes looking at her hands in the light, sticking them out the window and pondering them as though they were brand-new to her. Then she fussed with the curtains for a few minutes, checked the leaves on the plants, and now she has disappeared into the small, black triangular gap in the curtains.

I’m trying not to make too much of this. Trying to view it as a performance piece, rather than what I know it is all too well – senility in progress. I watched my grandmother decline in the same way, and I can’t bear to watch it happen again. She lived with us for a while and at night I had to lock my door, because she’d become lost in her wanderings and open the wrong door trying to get back to her room. I remember that once when I came out in the middle of the night to help her back to her bed, she was so happy to see me, smiled her dentureless smile which was the most adorable thing, and gave me a big hug.

In my old building there was a very aged man who took a liking to me, we were pals and he even once came to my apartment to try out my piano (he had been a pianist and composer). Then I moved from the building. I kept seeing him, and then I stopped, and then his wife told me he’d moved to a nursing home. I didn’t see her for a while. Then about a month ago, I saw her on the street and she told me he’d died. She said, “Mr. S... died.” Mr. S... – as though he had not been her husband for fifty years. Perhaps, being old herself, this is a convention, but to me it sounded so anachronistic. His obit in the New York Times indicated that he had been a major in the Persian Army of the Shah, before leaving Iran to come to the U.S.

She’s back now, running her fingers along the metal bars of the child guard that fits over her window (these are everywhere in NYC, and apparently required in order to prevent kids from falling out, though God knows there are other hazards more dire around here). Now she is back in the black space behind the curtains and... oh, no, she is back to tugging the curtains in such a way that I see only her hand. She is checking for rain now. She appears to be chewing something, so I hope she is feeding herself. I know that if I see her in distress, I will probably call 311, the city’s non-emergency number, to see whether they will send someone around to check on her. But I don’t even know what apartment she’s in!

I received my wedding dress today. So I came home from work, tried it on (needs taking in on top, of course), rehearsing my role as a bride. And now I look out the window and see this woman playing her own role so intensely (elderly shut-in). It is heartbreaking to imagine what her non-window-gazing time in there is like. I always see the TV flashing abstractly against the frosted window in her living room.

Down to the spinach

The day goes by not in coffee spoons, but in meals, the baby's. Breakfast (which I sleep through), second breakfast (he gets banana, we get cappuccino & cereal & yogurt), mid-morning snack (I try to curb my snacking on his toast-with-honey crusts, because it's fattening & because he sometimes gives me the stink-eye when I eat his food), lunch, afternoon snack, dinner. And innumerable nibbles in between. The other day on the playground I suggested we visit the fish, meaning the big yellow whale sculptures sunk into the ground. Baby J found a goldfish cracker on the ground and was going for that, instead...

As a result, I find myself utterly focused on food as well. What will my snack be at naptime? I typically take time away from the baby to eat things I can't share with him, like apples. He still can't chew them properly, but insists on taking huge bites that can choke him. Like chocolate, which he had for three successive birthday parties and never again since. (Is that fair? I dunno.) Of course, my metabolism cannot sustain the eating I'm doing, and despite "busting it out" (as my trainer says) at the gym, my weight is standing still, and despite momentary feelings of power as I heave weight around, I ultimately collapse back in to myself. Last night while we ate dinner Big J suddenly looked at me and said, "Are you slouching?" Am I slouching? How could you only have just noticed? I was practically bent in half. Amazing the food could go straight down.

I am capable of extremes in terms of eating. I can impose structure on myself and deny myself pretty much anything. Like, I could even choose to ignore delicious sandwich cookies sitting right on top of the cereal containers on the counter which I could see if I turn my head barely 45 degrees to the left just now. But despite my current state of disgust with my body/cage, the underlying motivation to improve it is lacking. Or fleeting. I make sweeping, half-true statements about self-disgust which Big J then has to immediately (and very kindly) rebut.

This is just one manifestation of the extreme shift that motherhood has wrought. Almost 15 months into this, I still feel alienated from my former self. I sit down to write something, banalities stream out. Language sounds hollow. Intimacy is affected. And diet. And political engagement. And taking part and taking sides in the world's affairs.

I'm looking for Popeye's magic stuff. Can actual spinach bring change? If not, what virtual spinach could help?

sos

I pride myself on figuring things out, but Blogger is defying understanding. Why can't I get all of my posts into a standard font/size?

OK, all but one post are in the same font now. I guess I can live with that.

North by northwest

The baby didn't sleep much yesterday. But was a trouper about it. (Or is that a trooper? A member of an ensemble, or a military dude?) He's catching up today. And so am I, here.

Yesterday morning it seemed that the day would flatten me, like a crop-dusting plane gone haywire. There were people to be "managed," errands both self- and super-imposed, a snow-covered car to be moved - twice - for street cleaning, and not enough hours in which to cram everything. But it turned out to be a beautifully choreographed series of interactions and coincidences, including a pseudo-karmic exchange in which I loaned my snow brush to a guy trying to clean his car so he could exit the very spot I needed. Also, I had extracurricular caffeine at lunchtime, in the form of a Thai iced tea, and it blew my mind how effective a coping strategy that was, in the face of a sleepless baby. Instead of shrinking internally at his refusal to nap, or even cursing externally (and ill-advisedly, given his rapid pace of language acquisition), I merely shrugged (which should have hurt, given all that I did at the gym yesterday with my trainer) and bundled him up and took him out to play. Also I eked out a few non-prose words about the placenta, and read them aloud to J in the evening, and found to my surprise they did not completely suck.

The moral of this non-story? Some extra caffeine during the day may not hurt.

There is some there there

The election can pretty much be summed up by this. I don't need any further commentary.

J is 14 months old today and decided this would be the perfect day to morph into a toddler: mood swings, unpredictable appetite, throwing every single piece of macaroni from his high chair when we were out to lunch (the same macaroni he'd eaten with gusto last night for dinner). He is changing so rapidly that I think even his face changes from the morning to the evening. His diapers' contents smell worse and worse with each passing day.

I just watched this video of the mistreatment of cows at a slaughterhouse. I am a lifelong carnivore, and have never before considered the source of the beef that I'm eating. I don't think I can continue to ignore that in good conscience. I'm not going to give up eating beef, but I am planning to scale back my consumption to meat from reliably humane sources. Of course, I don't even know what that means... must do some research. A few years ago I switched to free-range chicken, so hopefully there are similar options for beef? (All pricey, to be sure, so we won't be having steak nearly as often as we have been.)

Finally, one of my all-time favorite sites on the WWW (which I discovered back when folks still used that charming acronym) is back! For all of your agricultural clip art needs. I think I like the descriptions of the simple/naive/pixellated clip art perhaps more than the clip art itself. The notion of someone sitting at a desk all day and coming up with captions for some of these bizarro images is very satisfying.

I present to you: Man pushing a cart which has pigs in it.

I am he and he is me and we are me and he are all together

An entire day spent projecting my own sleepiness onto the boy, with little success until 4:45 p.m., long past the safe window of naptime. [Hmmm... interesting - I start writing a post here and it feels like a pole goes immediately up my ass. What is my blogging style? Can it evolve?] He projecting his needs onto my day. I projecting my needs onto his. Who wins out in this game? Usually, he.

He is self-aware in that he knows when he needs soothing, sometimes gets into a posture of surrender to accept it. The diaper ointment tube has magical powers, or else tastes good to him, and it's the only thing that can induce him to allow me to have the privilege of changing him.

This morning I spied him playing with something under the table, and that something turned out to be a hardened pellet of poop that must have escaped his diaper before the morning change. I hope that was the only one, that there wasn't another one in his mouth for safekeeping. There must be a lot of valuable things in that mouth of his, he refuses to open it to show me. He smiles while he averts his face from my prying fingers, my imploring, "peek peek peek?"

How will I know when I am losing myself? How will I know when I find myself? I'm in the process of doing both.

In a tube, darkly

What I don't enjoy so much about my new gym are the monitors attached to most of the machines. I give TV a pretty wide berth at home and try to extend that to my activities outside. My old gym was not fancy enough to have this type of machine. At Fancy New Gym, there are some machines with no screens, but at peak times, those tend to be taken up by people who (I imagine) are like me.

Today I used a treadmill with a screen, leaving the screen dark. It was uncomfortable at first. I was unable to avoid an interaction with Exercise Self. Exercise Self looks a lot like me, except she wears tighter, stretchier clothes, eats energy bars, and logs her workouts online. Exercise Self probably doesn't have a lot of time to read or write poetry, since she is obsessed with sites like ExRx and what the right kinds of stretches for a sore groin muscle. The one thing that's good about Exercise Self is she likes a lot of the same music I do, so it's not hard to come up with a good playlist for her workouts. Exercise Self probably would not want to listen to Glenn Gould's hour-long radio tone poem, The Idea of North, though. Exercise Self doesn't really want to know about persistent rotator cuff injuries, the Feldenkrais technique, or yoga, though she ignores these at her peril.

Is there a way to exercise without becoming Exercise Self? I am not sure. When I speak Italian or Spanish, it's hard not to become Italian Self or Spanish Self. (Those selves are both a wee bit shorter than me, more effervescent, and seem to use lots of idioms.) Is fragmentation of the self a bad thing? I guess not, if it doesn't take half a day and a lot of alcohol to get back to your functioning primary self?

at last.

It took a lot of attempts to find a title for this blog. The vast majority of the blog titles I tried were for attempts that seem to have been aborted before they actually existed. The best of the squatters I found was this one: One post, and one comment asking whether the name could possibly be freed up for another "lover of Mike."

I finally settled on a line that Mr. Johnson, the zookeeper responsible for the care and feeding of the seals, says in Sammy the Seal, just before the protagonist sets off on his Great Quest. I have adopted this line to signal to my son that mealtime/snacktime is over, so I say it a minimum of five times a day. I have taken the liberty of giving Mr. Johnson the voice of Mr. Moviefone.

This blog's title is a reinforcement of a lifetime of promising fits and starts followed by woeful underachievement - that lifetime being, of course, my own. So, there may be posts like this one, or just phrases, or maybe just random photos. Or perhaps there will be just this one post and none to follow it, and if that occurs, please know that it was intentional and that I'm not fucking blog-squatting.