I’ve accomplished somehting recently.

I lost 33 pounds. I lost it, then i gained some back then I lost what I gained plus a little more.

I’ve been working on losing some number of pounds since I was a teenager. Do this day, the smell of chocolate slim fast brings me right back to my first year of community college.

There was a hashtag a while back #yesallwomen

the hashtag was meant to be the response to this conversation “Not all men are horrible”

No, not all men are horrible. But all women have met those horrible men and have to watch out for them

And #yesallwomen can apply to even more.

Yes, all women have had a number in mind for what they want to weigh.

So much energy spent on that number. so many thoughts and recriminations and self-flagellation.

I will tell you, since I have lost my 33 pounds I have noticed more attention from men. More lingering gazes. More hugs.

Hmm.

Reminds me of a time…

I had just had my baby, and i was still nursing. This was not a time when I felt comfortable or beautiful in my body. Post-pregnancy I had a weird shape, with floppy skin on my stomach and piles of extra flesh on my hips.

Yes, making a life and feeding that life with my body was a revelation. But beautiful I was not.

I was stretching to hit presentable.

Right that same time, things were getting weird at my job. I was so happy to be back in my job, with something to occupy my mind and my time. But next thing I knew my boss was being fired.

Wait, what? What did this mean?

And we had a new boss.

Who is this guy? What’s he going to be like? And how ‘Interim” was this?

He worked in a different building, and i had a reason to go over there one day.

This was a day that I felt like I had tried at failed to be presentable.

To be fair, the skirt would have been a comfortable length if my hips weren’t so wide.

Now, it was shorter than I liked. I felt very lopsided and weird.

This too shall pass.

So I went down to the cafeteria and got some lunch.

As I was getting up to finish, I ran into the the boss.

“Hello!” I said.

“hi, how are you?” he responded.

And his eyes did a long peruse of my body.

His head even made a tiny nod, following his eyes.

This was far beyond the usual check-out move. Time stood still.

WHAT WAS WRONG WITH HIM? I was NOT a candidate for this sort of glance. I was not at all at my best, and what kind of terrible taste did this person have to check thisl lumpy body out?

and he was my new boss!

I excused myself, and like the classic female I am, I ran to the bathroom.

I blinked at the mirror. My eyes wide in shock. Emotionally, my jaw was dropped, and remained so for the rest of the day.

What had just happened?

He wasn’t my boss for much longer. And he never did the head bob ogle again. For the rest of the time that he was my boss, though, I had to wonder how seriously he took my contributions.

He seemed to. But who knows what lurks in the hearts of men?

I want a project. but I don’t really want a project.

I want to create, but I am not really inspired by one thing

I used to feel a strong compulsion. I really wanted to complete the project.

but I feel a faint compulsion.

I want to get on the train of a project, to feel the vision of the thing I want to do.

I’ve had a lot of ideas. And I haven’t followed through, just dilletanting.

I have to pick one.

Maybe the thing I can pick is to go back to blogging every day. Or at least several times a week.

I want to start this moving. I have a lot of things rolling around in my head

This woman, as she was first lady of the united states, maintained a daily column.

She was the first mommy blogger.

Really, she wrote about her day, and what was happening in the white house.

Reading her autobiography has been a difference experience than I expected. It’s way more low-key.

Maybe that’s who *she* is. Way more low key that we all expected

A guy yelled at me today.

In a way, he was right. Because there is a way that things need to be done.

We have to do things that way because if we don’t, it just doesn’t work.

And, I hadn’t done it that way.

I know there is a way things need to be done. I completely believe in doing it the way it needs to be done.

And, hard as I try, I don’t always manage to do things they way they need to be done.

My sock drawer will back on me on this.

So, when he wanted felt compelled to repeat to me the way things need to be done, I tried to interrupt and explain what happened.

The tide could not be stemmed. The indignation must be expressed. The standard must be maintained.

We can’t have this. We cannot, and we cannot and we cannot not say so.

He was loudly calling the second foul.

Yes. I probably should have filled out the correct TPS report. It’s IMPORTANT.

I know. I’m trying. My average is getting better.

Me and my sock drawer have our ups and downs.

I am pretty sure yell-y guy has his own sock drawer.

You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

-Pink Floyd

I like to say I was born a hundred years old and I’m getting younger every day. I was born extremely responsible.

I had so little freedom I was very very very careful how I spent it.

In hindsight I am pretty sure I invested well. But like Tomas says in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the only way to know if it was the best choice is to live one’s life all the way through with that choice and then go back and live it all the way through with the other choice.

And that’s not possible, so we have to make the choice.

I made my choices.

I’m reading Less, about a man who made very few choices in his life. He fell into a long life-sharing relationship with a poet who won the Pulitzer. Arther Less is famous mostly for knowing this famous person. A supporting character in his own life. And now he is struggling with turning 50.

Have you heard of this book? In a terribly unimaginative life-imitating-fiction, the book itself won a Pulitzer.

It’s hard for me to tell what is supposed to be ironic and what is unintentionally so. It seems that it was meant to be absurd.

But the thing about turning 50 is it is intrinsically absurd.

Things that were impossible, inconceivable 25 years before have become commonplace. By this time we’ve learned how to pull the levels of power and can move the earth.

Prime of life, indeed. I know how to get a lot of stuff done.

Now it’s a matter of what do I want to do?

Now that I have pulled these levers, what is worth the effort? The stuff I can do didn’t happen by accident. I know the cost now and I’m a little less willing to pay it for no reason.

But I’m not like Pink Floyd. I was not one to kill time. I’m far more willing to waste it now. Tomas is right. I might have jumped that gun and been running full out for ten years in the wrong direction.

I can’t know now.

The best I can do is pay attention to what I like, and do that enough times in a row to start a trend.

I know I have made plans to cry from time to time.

When I knew the audience I was working with, and I had a goal in mind, I would plan to let the tears go.

To be fair, I have definitely cried when I didn’t’ want to, and had to excuse myself to return to the topic– when I have lost my composure and most certainly was not behaving with intention.

Emotions are not under my control. Unless they are. And then I can use them. Like, when I knew it would help to cry. And I could work up the tears to get what I needed out of the situation.

But one thing I haven’t learned how to do is yell with intention. If I yell, it’s a loss of control. I probably feel like I’m in control, but those might be the same times when I think I’m not yelling.

My daughter has a fine-tuned sense of when I am yelling. And it is not always associated with an increase in volume.

But really, when I get yelled at by someone else

a friend

my husband

a boss

Volume isn’t the biggest factor.

It’s the emotional content.

Crying is emotional too. No doubt. As I think about it, however, crying in front of someone is only about myself. It’s admitting that I feel something. It’s an exposure of something inward. If I cry, it’s being vulnerable and exhibiting something about me.

The emotional content of yelling is a push. It is expressing a judgment of someone else. Judgments are sharp things.

I suppose done properly, voicing a judgment that lifts up rather than puts down is a force for good.

Come on! Don’t give up, you can do it!

If you push just a little harder you will achieve it

That might be called cheering rather than yelling.

But judgements most often don’t work that way. And yelling is for the most part a hurtful expression. It most often happens inside my own head too.

I yell at myself so often it doesn’t even require words anymore. And it’s not very helpful.

We were discussing this at my diet support group. We encourage one another to persist, and to keep going in our path to good healthy choices.

The leader said, “I’ve been doing this for more than ten years. I’ve never heard anyone say they hated themself to success.”

Hmm. That leads me back to the question that started this essay. When would it make sense to yell with intention?

or to restate

When would it be useful to cut someone with a judgmental statement?

When I say it like that, the answer is unequivocally never.

But to cheer someone on, to state things baldly and with positivity, I would like to do a lot more of that on purpose.

If it’s true for everybody, it must be true for you.

Or

The universal is personal.

Imagine if the world started spinning more slowly. What would that mean?

The end of the world, right? But slowly. And gradually.

And things that happen slowly and gradually are the new normal.

I just finished reading The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker. It’s science fiction, which you all know I have issues with. And yes, it’s dystopian. The earth inexplicably has begun to spin slower. Days and night are longer, respectively. Other laws of physics we are used to relying on begin to break down.

That would be reason enough for a story. But this story is told from the perspective of a 6th grade girl. In a central California suburb.

It is distinctly possible that everything in the world of a girl that age is dystopian. Her best friend deserts her at the same time and her mom becomes unraveled. There are plenty of girls of that particular age who experience this while the world continues spinning as it always has.

I think that the author used the perspective of a girl as a crutch, not to have to explain why the earth changed spinning speeds. It’s a deus ex machina move, and to leave it unaccounted for is a hole in the story.

But once I forgave Walker for not giving me the sci-fi juice I felt I deserved, I could see the story for what it really was: the perspective of a very privileged and safe little girl suddenly in a world that is not longer safe for anyone.

What is safety? Her doting parents and solid best friendship turn out to be more tenuous than she realized. And when she could no longer assume what she had always relied upon, the lack of her best friend at her school lunch table was far more meaningful to her than the earth’s rotation.

For a 12 year old, that lunch table is vastly more important.

In the same way, our every day lives, experiences and relationship matter a lot more than the big issues.

It matters that someone wishes me well as I start my day. It matters what smiles I meet.

There’s not much I can do about the earth’s rotation. There’s not a lot I can do about a lot of things.

But I can be a force of love and kindness in the world. It makes a difference.

I made up a new word. English let’s you do that .

I’ve been working on the toughest project of my life, and it’s been scooping me out. At the same time I’ve been getting excellent teamwork.

It’s not just the teamwork. Kindergartners know that word.

The people I have been working with have practiced

TEAMSMANSHIP

That’s my word. And to underline this idea, I have coincidentally been reading Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana. My daughter’s been reading a children’s version for school. She was telling me about it, excited to learn about sailors’ life.

At last! I could read a book with her. I picked it up this week and have been swimming in the metaphors and vocabulary of the middle 1800s.

Veronica is telling me she wants to try salt beef. Me too!

Dana’s book is famous not just because it’s a good book–which it is–but also because it formed a basis for a reorganization of the rights of sailors.

He talks about the hard work of the sailors from an American perspective. Living all together, eating together and working together is a whole lot of togetherness.

And it is understood that a sailor should always have work to do. There was no doubt that every single one of the crew on the ship had opinions of one another’s skills in any of their tasks. They had very repetitive tasks. And when one of them took their work easy, it made another’s work harder.

Dana talks about how the captain and the mates would keep the crews in line, bawling the out to keep it all moving and on task.

In a well-run ship, everyone knew their work and did it. But the mates kept the standards.

I don’t work on a ship. Here in the 21st century, we have a different sort of work model. Yet the concept of each person knowing their work and doing it remains.

That’s the teamsmanship I was experiencing. All the people involved were in this were leaning in. I didn’t have to chase anyone down. My team was fully engaged in completing their task to the best of their ability, and communicating with me, the captain of this project.

In these times, people are expected to bring knowledge and dedication to their work. If people don’t bring those things, teamwork can still happen. But when they do bring their best experience and problem solving skills to the task, it’s beautiful.

When we catch each other’s mistakes, and give suggestions about how we can avoid them–That’s teamsmanship. That’s the ideal we are all looking for.

This is the year she gets a second digit.

For her 10-year-old birthday party, Veronica said she wanted to have people to our house and the party should be fancy.

Fancy? What does that mean?

Well, everyone should wear a fancy costume, whatever they wanted. And there should be fancy food.

“Do you want caviar?”

Once I explained what it was, “Definitely not. But I love shrimp! We should have that.”

“I can make that for you, but your friends might like something else. I could make a red carpet for you.”

“That would be awesome!”

Fancy clothes. Fancy food.

But that week, I didn’t have any time to do all the preparation I’d meant to do. My house was a mess, and I’d been up since four AM dealing with a different crisis.

I’d bought some red plastic to be a carpet. So as I shoveled out the piles of mess from my house, made the shopping list of essentials and tried to figure out how to keep the red plastic flat so it could be walked on, I considered what fancy was supposed to be.

Red carpet is what celebrities and movie stars walk on. They dress up and strike a pose.

Fancy food and drink is basic to any party or celebration. But all the birthday parties before had paper plates with bright pictures on them. Some toy or cartoon character wishing the birthday girl a happy birthday.

In that moment, I felt the opposite of fancy. Sleep deprived, and pretty sure I’d failed my daughter in her request. I’d done so little!

I sponged off the glass table outside where the food would be, and put the toys in their places. I had barely enough time to do that much.

Chris did the grocery run for the cake and the children’s champagne- Martinelli’s Cider. I didn’t have time to get the paper plates and napkins that kid birthday parties are supposed to have.

But this was fancy, right? We’d have to use our ordinary breakable dishes.

And we could bring down the stemware. I’d have to trust these kids, but I think we could deal with a broken glass if necessary.

As the kids trickled in–and there weren’t too many of them–they enjoyed the red carpet. Their interpretation of fancy clothes was charming, and kid elegant. Once they’d all arrived and investigated everything, they clamored for the champagne.

We popped the Martinelli’s, and it dramatically bubbled over the side.

I gave each of them a stemware glass and filled it. I explained that this is fancy, and that these were glasses you had to sit with. No running with the fancy glasses.

They were sobered, and before they took their sips, I invited them to make toasts. They each made a toast, the youngest saying “I wish Veronica a happy year, this first year of having two digits. Amen”

And they clinked their glasses, holding the wobbly glasses in their laps for a moment.

It was when they were eating the lunch, Veronica with her shrimp and the rest with their requested sandwiches, I saw this for what it was.

These friends had been with Veronica since kindergarten. There is no insecurity amongst them. Love, trust and friendship.

A group of friends around a table enjoying the finest things in life- that is the archetype of sophistication at any age.

“The lesson we will focus on today is receiving.”

I looked around at the other people in the class, knowing that I was the newbie and I was sure they would all be familiar and experienced.

I’d never been to an acting class, even though this was Los Angeles, Mecca of all acting.

I am a writer. I work with words.

But I write about characters, and acting is about characters. Everyone is a character, so I wanted to explore how people interacted.

This was an improv class. And I was impressed with the teacher

“Every piece of information is a gift. Improv is about listening and giving back.”

Knowledge is power. And if I know something you don’t, it can be really powerful to share that knowledge. Sharing our knowledge can change the world.

Just look at Wikipedia.

So the few of us learned about giving information to each other to start interacting.

Which was really strange and weird, because we were acting. We were pretending.

In this pretend world, giving each other very basic information was a huge gift. In the world of improv, where you are, who you were and what you were doing was enough to hang a whole universe on.

Wait.

I don’t think that’s only improv.

Being aware of the surface of what is happening and who I am is extremely powerful.

And I say that as one with a deep appreciation for what is below the surface.

Who am I today and what am I doing in the world? I can choose that every single moment, but only if I am aware of it.

I want to give myself that gift.