My life on unemployment: set goals.

My goal is to become mayor of my daughter’s preschool. In a world of meaningless yet achievable accomplishments this would make me feel ironically proud

Foursquare is not giving it up.
Now I feel passed over.

One of Michael’s today was to eat properly. What with all the everything that’s happening I have not been paying attention and eating. I haven’t had much appetite

But now it’s time for a treat

It’s summer. It’s hot.

This is the perfect time for ice cream. We just celebrated Independence Day last week, and I am sure that all over America there were ice cream cones, sundaes and floats. It makes me happy to think about it.

My home state, Alaska, is known to have the highest per capita ice cream consumption. That doesn’t make any kind of sense, because it is already cold there. We didn’t have a need to cool off.

Why then? Ice cream is a comfort. My oh my, what a good feeling it is to have a bit of ice cream. Or a whole carton.

When I was old enough to live on my own and choose my own serving size of ice cream, I felt so empowered. I was a grown up! I could have ice cream for breakfast if I wanted to!

And then there was a time I used to eat ice cream every day. I made a point of getting the healthiest kind I could, but I ate it every night: a great big bowl.

I got a full-body happiness when I ate that bowl of ice cream after a wretched day of work. No wonder I ate it every day. There was a lot of wretchedness at work.

At a certain point, I could feel the pleasure fill my body. I could feel my mood lighten and improve. Not forever, but at that moment and maybe a second bowl later, everything felt right. I started to wonder how out of balance I must be for this one thing to have such an affect on me.

In this day and age, we can get all the ice cream we want any time of day or night. I remember reading Farmer Boy from The Little House on the Prairie series, and the description of how the children made ice cream for themselves when their parents were out. It was hard work, taking all day and even longer to plan, anticipate and salivate.

If there is comfort in the food itself, and I swear there is, maybe there is a comfort in working to get that payoff.

Nineteen years old in Mirnyy, Yakutia Russia I had one friend: Masha. As I am finishing my manuscript The Russian American School of Tomorrow  I am closing out the story of our adventures. The cold, the isolation and the desperation of living in the ruins of every safe and confining institution that the world had to offer were the air we breathed.

There was nothing anyone could do.

But Masha and I? We had a mission. Somewhere in our town, there might be ice cream for sale. In the handful of cafes, ice cream might show up without warning. The supply would run out the same way it arrived, never lasting more than a day. So we prowled the streets to look for the possibility of a sweet creamy reward.

Fur hats and boots, scarves pulled up over our noses and mitten hands jammed in pockets or holding the elbow of the other’s arm as we walked and talked across the icy streets. One shop had no ice cream, and then off we went to another.

We knew that most days we would come up empty. Weeks went by with no ice cream. The search was the adventure. The comfort of the ice cream was real, but not as real and reliable as the comfort of our companionship.

The last time I saw Masha was sending her off to university in the big city. They had a reliable supply chain of ice cream. What with the advent of capitalism and the free market, whole square miles of the town center had become and open market. Every block we walked had several ice cream sandwich sellers eager for our custom.

We bought them all: life’s riches suddenly available for the taking. For Masha and I. For then. For that day and that time.

After I picked up my habit, ridiculously disguised in a fat free package, I realized ice cream was not the solution for me anymore. The problem needed a real solution. Like the song says “I know it’s not a party if it happens every night.”

I did give up the nightly ice cream party before I figured out I needed to give up the wretched job.  I had to change me and bind up some of the wounded emotional expectations.

Ice cream is a treat, that is for sure. It’s a kind of feel-good medicine that we can reach for. Just follow the directions and watch the dosage.

I think there are about 300 sentences I have to write to get to the end of my magnum opus.

that’s the last chapter of the book I’ve been writing for more than a decade. What the hell. When I finish it I will cease to be the person who is writing this story. I will have to be the person who is doing something else.

What am I doing? I am looking for a job. That happens–being in between jobs. I am sure I will find a job eventually. Or I will find something.

I should worry about that, I think. I am worrying a little. And then I think, “Stop worrying!”

because worrying doesn’t help anything.

So. I have to write 300 sentences. Or so.

It is hard to write those sentences. They are tricky.

And when they are done it gets even trickier.

ah damn. It’s a dangerous business, making your dreams come true

The bogeyman paid a long visit last night. She fell asleep 3 1/2 hours later than normal. Much sobbing was involved

Then she woke up three hours later with more sobbing. I tried to ask what bad dream shed had

“It’s just… it’s just that…” she dreamed that she couldn’t find the Reading Rainbow app

And she asked to get a story to help her fall asleep. She asked specifically for “Briar Rose”

She did not ask for sleeping beauty. Sleeping beauty is a watered down version of the brothers grimm pstory. She asked for the original. She asks for it by it’s true name.

We are all exhausted this morning. But I am proud

Had an amazing conversation with a friend about the lure of placing myself in the position of getting a check mark of approval. I want so much to get that check mark. And I know I didn’t work this hard to find my own voice and my own story just to put on the easy trappings of someone else’s tires vision

My first year in Los Angeles, I looked up an actor friend. A couple years before I’d visited him at UCLA and he talked of his joy and finally being able to study to be an actor. By this time, he was graduated and I’d lost track of him.

I knew he was still in LA, and I remembered his passion for acting. So I looked for his name in on-going plays. I went to see him, surprising him from the audience of one of his performances. We had a drink after and talked about his ambition.

He wanted to act. Well, let us be clear. He wanted to make a living as an actor.

There is a big difference.

A new friend, a musician, talked about how she never wanted to get a job she liked because that would be “giving up.”

I don’t know about that. If it’s your dream, if this art is what you are meant to do, then it will be done regardless, won’t it?

There is a story attributed to Mark Twain:

A man went to heaven and saw St. Peter at the Pearly gates. He asked St. Peter “Who was the greatest general of all time? Napoleon? Alexander the great?”

Peter points and says “That man over there.”

“But I knew that man! He was no general, he was a laborer.”

St. Peter replies, “That’s right, my friend. He was the greatest general, but he didn’t perform that role.”

Part of me calls bullshit.  We are what we are and we find a way to be that wherever, don’t we?

Don’t we?

I guess it is a fear a lot of people share, that we aren’t living up to who we could be.

This article I write, my weekly wonder, is an expression of that. I have a dozen ideas for what I could write each week. This week, I started three versions of what it would be.

I finished just this one.

Like that laborer who never launched a military maneuver, I had an idea and failed.

All except this last time, and the only definition of success for this one is completion. In my head those first two versions were genius.

And this is the one I finished. Win by default.

I listened to a lecture this week, a woman talking about a group of entrepreneurs. “Would you still do this if you won the lottery?”

It was their business, their soul’s work. They searched their hearts and said yes.

I know I would still write if I won the lottery. Probably more. I’m doing it because it’s who I am. And my actor friend, I have to wonder how much he was an actor if he could conceive of stopping.

Fish gotta swim. Birds gotta fly.

You know that feeling you have after you watch a movie that takes over your brain and changes how you see everything?

How the laws of physics, or what love really means, or the geopolitical balance of power is now up for debate?

Some people, they want to sit and think. Take walk, contemplate and see everything in a new way.

A lot of people want to talk about it. They want to talk about it with peole that have seen the movie. Repeat lines from that movie…or go, “Remember that part…?”

For friends that haven’t seen the movie, they want to try to explain it and go, “Oh man, you have to see it! You’ll understand. This thing when…”

I hate it when people try to re-tell a movie. A joke or a scene, and it’s all awkward. If someone has seen it, they can fill in the blanks, but a person who hasn’t, well…the explanation sounds idiotic.

See the movie or don’t, don’t try to re-tell it. Can’t be done.

So, while we are in the fog of dual realities, the one the movie showed us, and the one we used to inhabit (let’s call it “reality”), we are imbeciles. And we kind of know it, but we also know we are enlightened.

Enlightened imbeciles.

I was looking at some friends on facebook, friends I haven’t seen in years. And I am of the age where friends I used to party with, guys I have dated and people I haven’t seen since grade school are posting pictures of their kids.

Scrapbook leavings all over…cake faces and halloween costumes and anecdotes.

I do it too.

And I know it’s not for the unitiated. I have friends who are childless, and I know that I can’t share the toilet escapades and the sleep routine tortures with them.

I still love them.

But they are unenlightened. And I am an imbecile.

I can’t repeat the jokes, because if you weren’t there…ALL the way from the first ultrasound to this morning’s handoff at preschool…you had to be there, or it’s not funny

Or profound

Or even a little bit interesting

It’s a new obsession, and I’m not sure when the air will clear. I suppose I’m watching the movie every day. And I don’t want to break it off with my friends who aren’t into the “Parent” show, and I’m sorry, but for a while…a LONG while

I’m gonna be stupid.

It’s the price I pay for enlightenment.

Boo

Did I scare you? No?

Oh well. All I really wanted was to make you laugh. Laughter is the best medicine. And it is a great aphrodisiac. Doesn’t everyone want to be with someone who can make you laugh?

We learn to laugh before we speak.

I hear that humor is really about surprise. It’s what we didn’t see coming. The wrong face at the window. The pie in the face.

Surprise! And we laugh.

It’s good to be surprised.

When tension gets high people might get brittle. They might snap. That kind of tension is the perfect setup for a joke. Tautness could pivot just as easily into laughter–a cathartic release that sets things in motion.

If tension is close to laughter, then the opposite of laughter is not tragedy. Tragedy is a state of heightened sensitivity. If I am stretched tight, I can ping in any direction. But when there is no hum, no vibration at all, then nothing will make me laugh.

I’ve been there. Numb and sleepy and monotonous. That’s a sorry state indeed.  When I remember myself enough to know I’m in that state, I recognize a red alert. And then I worry about myself and maybe cry. And if I cry right, I end up laughing at myself.

There are a lot of kinds of humor. Me, I don’t judge. If a fart joke gets the biggest laugh for you then go for it. I tend to have a darker sense of humor.

Google tells me that Aristotle takes humor pretty seriously. I found this quote from him:

Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.

I wonder if the original Greek was as obtuse as the translation? Still, I agree with his idea here. If something is worth thinking about, it’s worth making a joke about. I suppose people could argue about which is the lowest form of humor: bodily functions vs. puns. Body functions is just life. And puns are language. If our bodies are precious and our language is important they be strong enough to be poked at.

If my life is worthwhile I better laugh at it, and surprise myself.

Chris and I are going to the Huntington Library tomorrow.

He’s been asking me to go for more than a year. Somehow, I never made time to go because of work. It’s not that I never took days off from work but we didn’t make this trip a priority.

So. Tomorrow.

We shall go.

I could be using tomorrow to prepare and set up interviews. I have several good leads I really should follow up on.

And

Chris has been wanting to go to the Huntington for years.

So I am going to take the whole day and go. I am grateful to have a man who want to take me to see beautiful art and gardens.