Roll With It

There's a new bakery in my neighborhood. It has a brave little sign and a punny name. There's a chalkboard for pricing, and a small glass case behind which huddle scattered cookies and three lazy susans of cinnamon rolls. There's coffee, and occasionally some bread.

I want this bakery to succeed. I want it at least as much I wanted that scruffy guy in high school French to ask me out, but less than I wanted not to be in high school French at all. But I worry about the bakery. It's the neighborhood, see.

My neighborhood is a university town without the university. The university decamped in the early part of the 20th century; what was left of the town succumbed to the advances of the ever-expanding metropolis. Today, there are boarded up buildings and prostitutes and grocery stores with security guards. There's also a community council, a lot of young families, and a small commercial strip with a variety of independent businesses. Can you say gentrifying?

Since I've moved here, stores have flared into life and burst, like stars. A few, like the new pizza joint, have stayed. The neighborhood is off the main drag. It scares people who are scared of black people and/or the down-at-the-heels types who frequent the plasma center. Most of the people who live in the neighborhood work downtown and aren't around during the day. In short, it's just not QUITE a great place to do business.

Two months ago, the tiny grocery store closed. A gift boutique, two sandwich shops, a dog bakery, and an art gallery all bit the dust. I really really really really want the bakery to succeed. Even if they only ever make cinnamon rolls, I want to be able to buy them.

I hate wanting. Want is a terrible burden. I feel a leaden responsibility, as if I singlehandly have to eat enough cinnamon rolls to keep the lights on. I will eat more cinnamon rolls than is prudent. I will start dreaming of cinnamon rolls. Soon I will come to resemble a cinnamon roll, round and soft and sticky-sweet. I will eat so many cinnamon rolls they will have to roll me out the door and transfuse my plasma. Good thing the plasma center is handy.

I'll let you know how this goes.

Yes, And...

Here's what I wanted to be when I was nine: good.

Yeah, good. Good in preference to happy, good in preference to smart, good as opposed to an incipient lawyer or dentist or dancer or fairy princess or whatnot. Good especially in preference to becoming President of the United States, which I had divined was the proper ambition for little girls, but which interested me about as much watching paint dry.

While doing long division. In my sleep. I mean, the president was a wizened, wooden-looking white guy. Who wanted to be that?

Looking back, I blame Little Women. I first read Little Women at the vulnerable age of six and proceed it to slam it down monthly for three years thereafter. If I could have injected it intravenously, I would.

Everyone in Little Women wanted to be good. Good was where it was at, even if, in the process of sublimating parts of yourself into sublimity, you croaked, like Beth. Meg figured out how to be good. Amy came around. Even Jo, who began the book so gloriously far from goodness, straightened herself out, and at the end of the novel she received her reward in the form of a wizened, wooden-looking white guy.

Problem was, I was not good at being good.

I tried, I really did. But every time I turned around, there I was: self-interested, stubborn, and fond of getting my own way. I was kicked out of two preschools and gave my parents fits. By elementary school I had acquired a veneer of civilization, but underneath I was the same. I beat myself up about my lack of goodness for years, and then I accidentally read Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard was like methadone. Kierkegaard told me I only had to hold myself accountable for my second impulse -not my first. I was free. I was -damn it!- good.

I laughed! I sang! I frolicked! And then I settled down to flagellate myself for various other shortcomings, including my overbite, my anxiety, and the degree to which I self-flagellate.

Which is why, every so often, I read Oprah Magazine. Oprah Magazine has nothing on 12-step programs: it is cheerier, more hopeful, and has better layout. Oprah magazine keeps me on the straight and narrow. It tells me what to read and what to think and steers me forcibly back toward a nuanced understanding of morality.

Martha Beck is the life coach/personality guru. She is odious and I hate her. This month she ordered me to swap conjunctions. Instead of saying "yes, but," I am to say, "yes, and."

I don't get enough done, I tell myself.
Yes, and I booked that concert, I tell myself back.

I don't try hard enough at work, I tell myself.
Yes, and I worked late on Wednesday, I tell myself back.

I eat too much cheese, I tell myself.
Yes, and?

Substituting "Yes, and" for "yes, but" allows for constructive self-criticism but stops you short of self-abuse. It embraces complication, subtlety, and the very real possibility that things are not all one way. I loathe that Martha, bless her annoying, self-righteous little self, is right.

Yes, and thanks.

Friends & Strangers

I've got a fan. At least, I assume he's a fan, because otherwise I have no idea why some random guy who works for a hospital in Northeastern XXXXXXX would want to friend me on Facebook. I don't have many -OK, any- connections in that part of the world.

But I did give a concert there the night before last, and my name was printed in the program, along with where I went to school and the city I live in now. That performer bio may seem like a joke, but it contains the truth, and the truth is a powerful thing. If it doesn't set you free it sure as heck makes you searchable on Facebook.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I've joked about wanting hordes of early music groupies, but now that I'm presented with a single mildly enthusiastic cyber-fan, I'm mostly just unsettled. You mean those people in the audience are REAL? You mean they have lives and agendas and wants, and those lives and agendas and wants can intersect with mine?

It's more than that. I'd somehow convinced myself that, in going onstage, I was exposing only a small part of myself. The ankles, maybe, if ankles had pitch and rhythm. In no way did I think I was stripping down, offering my whole self to be scrutinized and labeled and friended, for God's sake. The music I'd take public; the rest was private.

Possibly that was naive. I mean, can you really get up and blow into a metal tube in front of six hundred people and pretend you retain a right to invisibility? Can you be anonymous if your picture is on a promotional poster? And why even try for invisibility if visibility is what powers your career?

As with this blog, I want to control what I expose and what I don't. Is that my prerogative? Is it even possible?

Accept? Ignore?

I Am Here

Yeah.

Grrrrrrr

I'm flying into a "special weather statement" tomorrow morning and am practically incapacitated with fear. Why do we fly, anyway? Isn't the ground good enough? I like the ground. It is nice and for the most part stable and it grows lovely things, like trees. And beets. I like beets.

The difficulty with fear is that it's there even when you know it's doing you no good. There's nothing I can do, at this point, to avoid tomorrow. All the nausea and the shaking and the dread is window dressing, superfluous to the bare facts that I will fly and there will probably be weather and so it goes. But the fear is so present, so dehumanizing. It's an animal that's crawled inside my gut and made its den. It reeks. It growls.

How do you run the varmint off? I'm taking suggestions.

Thanks, Dudes

Thanksgiving! Turkey! More turkey! Turkey with gravy! Making turkey shapes with your hands!

Yeah!

My pies are done, which is making me preternaturally euphoric. Thanks for bearing with me.

Actually, I'll blow up that last balloon of gratitude: thanks for bearing with me for...GEEZ...these past two and a half years?! How many hours have I wasted blogging that I could have spent singlehandedly saving the world from itself? Or SLEEPING?!

Ah, well: it's done.

And honestly it will probably continue to be done, at least until I get saddled with old age or soul-crushing work or small, obnoxious children. And I've even (mostly) enjoyed it! In the spirit of holiday navel gazing (I always want to spell this naval gazing, but that's what you do when the hot young sailors come ashore), I'm offering up a few favorite entries from the last year are so.

Unfortunately, these are process favorites, not product favorites. Sucks to be you! They made have come out misshapen, in other words, but they sure were fun to shape.

In Which You Are Forced to View My Dinner
In Which Jesus Cramps My Style
It's a Trap!
In Which I Accidentally Read Cosmopolitan
Don't Do This
Sad School Stuff
Black Friday

Thanks for reading, all.

Autumn Blab

"I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its tone is mellower, its colors are richer, and it is tinged with a little sorrow. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and it content."

–Lin Yutang

Yeah, OK, but what is this quote doing in my American Speech Language and Hearing Newsletter? Are they hinting that speech therapists are, um, autumnal? Or mellow? How is resting content with one's limitations consistent with a mission to improve functioning in individuals with special needs?

The mind boggles.