Reflection: The Illusion of Privacy

There are parties downstairs at my apartment building a couple times a year. We munch, we chat. Someone that I have spoken to at those occasional gatherings -- and said hello to on the elevator now and then over the years -- said a curious thing. He said he has wanted to talk to me at times, but I seem like a private person.

Private? That is very much not how I see myself (and it is probably not how people see me who communicate with me mostly online). It tends to floor me when people say that. I think the misconception stems from people mistaking indifference for resistance. I am not more resistant to people getting in my face; I am simply more indifferent... to those who don't.

Once again, it's underwhelment masking as overwhelment. I am drawn (when I'm drawn) to people who are more intense than the norm, more emotional, more over-the-top, and often more needy. Interaction has to simply sizzle. Normal interactions tend to pass below the threshhold needed to... to stir up anything at all in me beyond the intellectual awareness that, hey, there's another human in the vicinity. The irony is if that person had been more in my face, they might have broken through that false veneer of privacy. Some people have created strong bonds that way. The illusion of privacy is more apt to vanish if you're the kind of person who (marvelous in my eyes!) can't contain your energy within your own borders.

Evening Nigh's Year in Reflection 2

And so we have moved into January, I commented to the summer basil. Many people would, I imagine, say that it is the basil plant's presence here in January that seemed most improbable. It appears I have not an annual but a (very) tender perennial. The tender perennial would take some work to maintain through winter even if it had not had an encounter with the Crips... I mean the thrips. Oh, but I decided to care for a basil plant, and a basil plant is just not the sort of thing to object to being cared for. And so here we are: Scraggly and speckled, we make new green leaves.

Ad so this is the second annual... well, not Year in Review, but Year in Reflection. Some of my favorite soapbox posts this past year have been, once again, on the subject of attachment: A Loss of Pliability, A Glimpse of Heaven, and The Kitty Carryall Metaphor -- a piece that feels like more than a year ago. This very related one one goes back to a time early last year when I was attacked and had my purse stolen: Situational Strengths There are others that wear that favorite label "Soapbox Post". Though...

It has sometimes been a struggle to write regularly on this blog in recent months. There is a three-fold reason: There have been weeks that I have freelanced 70 or 80 hours a week. I have done well with the writing, but there is a separate project that... well, I did not even get paid for. I learned, if I didn't know already, that I have trouble tracking information across the columns and rows of a spreadsheet -- which maybe relates to Mirror Writing. I'm getting more efficient at the writing thing, and working on pulling all my other writing activities back in -- though tiredess has a flu-like pain spreading once more into the shoulders and fingers.)

There are times I have wondered if there was anyone out there reading. (Or should I say who is out there reading?) And there are times, conversely, the blog posts have gotten channeled back into letters. This blog grew out of Letters to... (Who was it years ago who said he preferred the letters over the stories, to publish the letters?) Conversation on a Bus came straight out of a old letter. And the writing, the 'soapbox posts' and other things, can still be siphoned off into letters. (It Was Then That the Fox Appeared)

But this blog is in my resolutions. I'm contemplation re-enrolling it in day camp. (It did a Creative Every Day Challenge last year, with weekly sharing sessions and show and tell, but it didn't attend real often.)

Reflection: A Loss of Pliability

A soapbox post -- not the one I was planning, but a very 'me' one. I have hesitated sometimes to mention the cat -- aware of people here and there, just freezing at the mention -- but it has been a long time since he died. For a time, I would go to a support group at the humane society, and I was aware how some people hesitated to bring another animal into their life because they were afraid they would love it and it would die. I was aware also how people would sometimes interpret things I said that way -- like once when I was talking about how maybe it would be better to get a foster animal. Someone heard in those words that I was afraid of getting attached and having an animal die. No. The pair bonding impulse in me is so strong that... I have never in my life even one time that I can remember resisted any attachment because of a fear of being hurt. Quite the contrary. I can't imagine being hurt by the people around me because I can't imagine loving them. But that's not because I don't mold myself to others' shapes. It's because I do it too much.

When I was a little kid, I was like Play-Doh fresh from the can. By the time I was a teenager, the pliability was down. I wrote before about the classic storybook image of the little girl who can only love her doll, and not even another doll someone buys for her that looks just the same. Up to a point, that tendency is part of the beauty of being human. But too much of that is a barrier to normal living. It's normal for a person who's been married to someone for thirty years to say, "I will never love again," and be a perpetual widow. It's not normal for a young teen to already be moving in those directions -- finding it progressively more difficult to love, not out of fear, but out of doing it so completely (We're not even talking romantic liaisons here!) that anything else just gets a "But that's not my rose!" reaction.

So many issues people have are normal -- even good -- traits and drives that are just upregulated beyond the norm.

This picture was titled "Helping Hand". But what do I title it? "A Loss of Pliability"!

Reflection: Strong Bonds

When I put a new blog, I tell this one here it'll always be my #1 commitment in blog-land. When I contemplate a little pot of meandering rosemary, I tell the basil plant, it's my precious little one, it and not that other plant. And as for the netbook... it's this netbook, this, this one I'm committed to.

There's research now that attachment is actually a drive, related to pair bonding, and supported by its own neurochemical system. It's not normally as strong a drive in humans as it is in certain other species, but like other drives, it can be out of whack and out of proportion. (We know that drives can cause strong impulses that can't be explained at the logical or macro level, but do we realize how many small -- well, often small! -- drives we humans have within us?)

What I see in genetic testing is the chance to talk about things that I haven't been able to before -- kind of like web writing, but opening even more doors. (And, yes, there's a little more I know than what I write on the blog at this point.)

Reflection: The Time You Waste For Your Basil Plant

There is a basil plant. I think she has tamed me.

Let me say this: I do not have a green thumb. I have neglected plants in my time. I seldom have a plant at all except the summer basil -- and I have neglected summer basil before.

But this one... The basil plant and I live in a room with two windows facing the afternoon summer, in a city where even in the sun, the cloud cover often doesn't dissipitate until noon. I set the basil plant atop the dollhouse, so it can be right up by the window. Sometimes I move it around a bit in late afternoon, chasing patches of afternoon sun. I poke and stir at the soil to check tht is is very slightly moist.

Two days ago (the last really sunny warm afternoon) it got hot in that room. I couldn't work on the netbook -- on sunny afternoons I can't see the netbook. Closing the blinds wasn't an option as the basil plant thrives on sunny afternoons -- because a good afternoon photosynthesizing followed by a night recouping and rebuilding restores that basil's firm umbrella-like leaves, but it's quick to get droopy when conditions aren't favorable.)

What is it about this basil? It's simultaneously so vulnerable and so resilient -- but so, I imagine, are the others if I got to know them. This, though, is the basil plant I took pictures, this is the basil I wrote about... To echo The Little Prince, in herself, she is more important than all the other basil plants.

Postscript (a day later): Trader Joe's chucked their basil plants last week -- they weren't doing so well. I was thinking this morning -- looking at the rainy sky, at the droopy leaves -- that my basil plant wasn't going to make it more than a few days. But it looks so much better tonight -- and will likely look even better by morning. Today was actually a mostly cloudly day, but I realized that with the window open, I could set the plant directly on the sill with the rail of the day bed to hold it in place. There it sat except when the lowering sun sent some bright rays into the room and we chased them.

And now... nightfall. Goodnight, netbook. Goodnight, basil plant. And (outside the still open window) Goodnight moon.

Reflection: Kyrie...

Kyrie Eleison: a Greek prayer. Across a lot of my life, I have closed letters to particular people with "God bless". Since the word "blessings" carries such a unique meaning in Squidoo culture -- and one can't necessarily go about it for general purposes -- well, I thought I should look up a new blessing.

I didn't now the spelling of "Kyrie Eleison" well enough to enter it the search engine and find out... how to spell it -- but I did find the phrase promptly upon typing "Carry a Laser" into Google. (Carry a laser down the road that I must travel, Carry a laser through the darkness of the night...)

While searching through my files for a picture for this post... I had no awareness of having I clicked on any music files, but I guess I must've because Windows media player popped up and (aptly) began playing Joshua Kadison's "Born to Shine":

...Got on the bus today... didn't get off I just knew I had to take a ride... a strange man sitting right next to me said, "I can feel what your eyes can see, don't you worry, brother, everyone's doing fine"... something must have changed cause somehow everyone seemed blessed.

I am your reflection, and you are mine, all of us reflections of the light divine, so shimmer, little one, you were born to shine...

Indeed.

(Editorial Note: The next post may crop up under this one -- again.)

In-Between: New Friend Selection Technology

If you read the following announcement at face value and use the definition of friend that sufficed for centuries -- well, I think it's pretty funny:

"Facebook's new photo tagging feature selects friends for you."

Sunday Evening Reflection

It's Sunday evening, and Bartell's is closed. You know online writing is a big part of your life when you have the lentils, you have the spinach, you have the garlic... but you lack a disposable camera to record the process.

Photo essays are motivation to keep a reasonably clean kitchen. So is moving from my current apartment, as I noted in a previous post.

I write several places on the internet, and am kind of sorta beginning to have an online community that stretches across sites. But that's not why I've written less on this blog this month. Ah, no. It's that there are things I can't discuss and things I can't not discuss -- and here and there posts that I simply don't want to cover up too soon.

This blog here is my baby. This blog here is my tenuous connection to... important parts of my life. That clock picture got inadvertently left out of a video I put up a few weeks ago.

Once again -- another post will probably pop under under this one.

Reflection: The Fox and the Roses

Sometimes human interaction -- mine -- does seem like something straight out of The Little Prince. Here and there there's a fox; here and there there's a rose... Oh, and there are are a lot of other roses, too, growing together: roses who may be beautiful in their own right, but to whom I have a tendency to say inside my mind,

"You are not at all like my rose... As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world."

"One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you--the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or ever sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose."

I may say it inside my mind... oh, but that doesn't mean I have never let that attitude seep out and show itself on the outside. There were times over the years when letting it show got me in some trouble.

I've been writing to a fox as of late. Some of my letters over the years to different people... well, they can be almost like blog posts. I may soon post excerpts from a letter to a fox. And the post may appear under this one (as I actually begun it before).

Photo Credit

Reflection: People as Poetry

Some of my blog posts grow out of letters. This one grows out of a letter to... well, I started to say "someone you don't know", but do I really know who might be reading on a particular day. It started with... No, it didn't start with, but it included a quote from an author who said poems are to be read --not analyzed -- as they're images from their creators' eyes.

About that quote: I am going back and forth on whether people are slightly like poems in that sense. On the one hand, I do sometimes get into reading people to unlock mysteries. On the other hand, they too can be seen as images from the author’s eye. One surely can get into trouble when they analyze and take apart and go on the basis of what they think they know as opposed to listening to the gestalt.

That picture of me writing is from many years ago -- I scan various things that I might use for photo-illustration, and sometimes I just go on a search through them.

Reflection: Those Who Hide Too Well Away

Another thought in the form of a poem:


We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout
But oh the agitated hear
Til someone really find us out...

Audio Reflection: Keepsake Mill

My folks couldn't have envisioned this when they took that picture years ago: By gummit, that old photo is talking! Actually, it's reciting "Keepsake Mill" -- a poem that (though you wouldn't guess from its somber tones) actually comes from a volume of classic children's poems; it's one of a couple poems where the author, Robert Louis Stevenson, steps out of his 'child's garden' and speaks from across a span of a great many years.

It's a pragmatic thing in a way, finding more ways to put up audio online. I can put up another site/ domain with my InMotion hosting, and I hope to have Audio Reflections up within a few weeks. The site can give some support to other things I have on the web, so it's a practical move as well as a pet project. You know I'll maintain it! (I can get too exhausted to write, but I seldom get too exhausted to read aloud.)

This particular poem is also for people in my life, and those I miss. Speaking of which... The phone just rang, and I didn't answer it. Oh, bad me! Of course I'm not avoiding anyone -- just news of them. (How very... me.) Got to ease myself back into gear: Breathe in, breathe out, center...

But here's a poem, a slightly abridged version as I needed to get the piece down to sixty seconds (without going at too ridiculous a pace).

Reflection: Scrub Scrubbing Away...

In one of my first attempts at magazine publishing (my brother and I had a magazine company that summer and gave our parents a subscription) I gave my mother and father step by step instructions about how properly to clean house. I know, I know... It seems a likely story.

Flash forward to the present: After 5 hours this weekend of cleaning -- appliances, walls, floor, windows -- does my studio apartment sparkle? Heavens, no! When it comes to the insides of cabinets and drawers, the clutter will make it quite a job -- I can't actually scrub 'til I can 'see ground'. At some point, I may need to bite the bullet and actually sort things. (I am much less fond of filing, sorting, and trashing than of scrubbing.) Of course, when it comes to the inside of stove and such the scrubbing itself is quite a job -- and I need to replenish my supply of abrasive sponges. Off I go again...

To what does the apartment owe this flurry of cleaning? Truth is, I think I'm going to need to move somewhere cheaper. The cost of some medical tests? Well, in an extended season of difficult times, that's the last straw in some ways. If those tests are so very important to me... well, looks like it will take some sacrifices elsewhere.

I still have my 'bad news shield' up as I rush about, busy-busy, trying to accomplish things and to put up some insurance again the dry season. I do need, very soon, to lower the shield a wee bit and let in a bit more of the world, and those people I love. Ah, now they're the ones that can make me fragile -- and sloppier and less accomplished. (They're worth it, though.)

Reflection: A Note to the Person...

A note to the person who's voice filled me with so much panic:

An intake of air -- Oh -- and I held the phone away from me and began to cry. And after a little while I was aware of the dial tone.

Of course I am talking to you. I am not talking to you tonight.

Reflection: Community

That's my mother long ago with a group of Eastern Airlines pilots -- a big part of what was then her community(and, I will note, a different world than any that I knew her in). I myself have been a part of different communities at different times: a dorm, 2 co-ops...

I don't think there are more than a few people who really have an idea of the cascade of events that led me to find myself finding myself online. There's pain in the cascade of events, and there's a lot that's not ideal. But there are times I have had reason to love some of these virtual communities and some of these still-real people!

Now then... about another another community not quite so long ago as to be rendered yet in black and white: At my latest scanning session at Online Coffee, I also scanned one more photo for use in a second verse of "Time After Time".

Reflection: Netbook Attachment II / Beautiful to my Ears

I read somewhere that if a netbook quieted down when you picked it up, the noise was probably coming from the fan, and not the hard drive. So does that mean netbooks are like babies -- they seek human contact and go hush-a-bye when you hold them? (Or do you suppose it has more to do with circulating air?)

The netbook in the picture is mine. It was christened Aubrey, but it answers to Snookums. I have thought at points of doing a Squidoo page for this here netbook. It could recommend some products/ security programs, and I could include some blog posts where it appears as the charming creature it is.

Perhaps I shouldn't personify it too much, though... I've been concerned about it this week. It's a bit noisy, though not as noisy as the noisy Acer netbooks people have seen fit to post to YouTube. If it were to need a major new part... ah, well, better than getting a new netbook.

Snookums, you and I are going places! This here is the best netbook because... well, rather than give you pragmatic reasons I could give a mishmash of stuff straight out of The Little Prince and The Velveteen Rabbit. Seaking of which... do you suppose there might be a Blue Fairy for netbooks, a fairy who swoops down and gets them eventually, and says thing like, "You have been an absolutely awesome Acer Aspire One netbook. Before you were real to Karen. Now you shall be real to everyone."

Reflection: The Difference Between 'Illogical' and 'Not Logical'

Can everything be classified as either logical or illogical? I don't think so. I think a lot of people call behavior 'illogical' when it is merely 'not logical' -- and that there is actually a huge difference between those two things. So much of our experience, whether we're normal or not so normal, is not about logic at all -- it's about drives and impulses and changes in arousal level (perceived as either interest or fear).

Is motivation logical? Well, it's mitigated by logic -- hopefully-- but that's not the same as being driven by it. There's quite a bit of evidence of brain reward systems running on chemicals (ie dopamine) in kind of a 'ka-ching ka-ching' fashion. There's scientific evidence of reward system irregularities being implicated in various disorders. Is a person less logical because they fail to experience reward or motivation in the more typical ways?

Ah, and then there's the issue of drives. Just about everyone has heard the term 'drive' applied to things like sex, but there's also a drive toward monogamous/ faithfulness, supported by its own system of neuroeptides. (Some of the early research on that came from studying prairie voles, and why it was that they formed pair bonds and nurtured their young for a long time when other related species didn't.)

Of course I've also written recently about the issue of sensory processing -- having the 'volume of the world' turned up unusually high or turned down unusually low. Ultimately... I think it's illogical to expect others' non-logical parts to operate the same as our own!

Reflection: A Glimpse of Heaven

A new section of online CLEP begins today -- I'm expecting probably a couple students -- and I think it's understandable that I've shut out news from the world (taken the phone off the hook) these few hours before. Here I sit writing... and I want to write more about my 'underwhelment' theme today. It can be difficult to know what another's experience is like. Sometimes it's hard for me to tell to what extent I'm experiencing or feeling things less than others -- and to what extent I have a stronger need to feel them.

Understand: Some of us need a lot of 'whelment' to function optionally. It's not that I want another human to cost me or bring me pain, but it's hard for me to imagine experiencing real pleasure in human interaction that isn't based on the willingness to incur tremendous cost. I don't see that there's that much pleasure or excitement in flirting with another person. And I don't see that there's that much comfort in a hand on the shoulder. There some, yes, but compared to the strength it takes to get through this life the comfort seems awfully flimsy. As for people getting highs from stuff like sex... well, to me it seems not much of a high compared to looking at another human in an "Anything for you" way.

Being really, really 'whelmed' -- whelmed by obsession, whelmed by love -- that's what I depend on. Some of us are made of pieces that seem contradictory or paradoxical til you look. I don't let others put me through things because of low self esteem. I let them put me through Hell because with that willingness to go through Hell comes the only glimpse of Heaven that I've ever seen.

Reflection: News

My brother called yesterday to say he that it looks like our mother isn’t going to live much longer; I had known that there comes a point where dementia — or the disease that causes it — takes away not just memory but the basic neurological functions necessary for life. It’s good to hear from my brother — I don't think he realizes that I am the type who would feel frightened when I don't hear from him, but instead of responding by calling I would respond by not calling. I don't think that he realizes that there are a few people in this world who perennially trigger my protectiveness and fear of bad news, and that he's one of them. That's why I used to tell people that if anything happened to anyone in the family, it had to be my brother who called. They didn't really listen to me... until more and more it got to be where he was the only one who could call.

I'm asking myself what it's appropriate for me to write on the internet this week -- what would a normal person write. This is a week for memoir. I'd told myself long ago that when I finally heard from my brother (assuming I did) "Best Superman Brother Ever" would go up on Squidoo. I did that. I got my old computer, Ravenna, going; it's sluggish, yes, but I can retrieve the creative writing pieces from "My Documents". There is a piece of flash memoir that focuses on the granddaughter of a neighbor from back when I was small. I wanted to incorporate that into a piece that I put on Squidoo connecting it to some of my recent readings and thoughts. I hope people think that it's okay for me to continue with that plan this week, even though that piece doesn't focus on family.

Squidoo (Best) Ever Project: Best Superman Brother Ever

Reflection: Situational Strengths

I put a couple paragraphs on my squid blog, too, about yesterday's attack and having been dragged still hanging onto the purse. Alex first interpreted my description as having frozen and that was why I wouldn't let go even when someone was dragging me; I wrote back that that wasn't quite the case, that the keys belonged to the office at the apartment and I had obsessively drilled into myself not to lose them. It seems that in a moment of crisis I protected what I had obsessively drilled into myself to protect, and that took precedence over fear that I was or should have been feeling. I can't remember experiencing fear except in connection with maybe losing the keys. It's kind of bizarre that I was in that zone and hung on so tightly to the keys, which are so much less of an obsession than a human attachment or pet...

I will say, though... A lot of people see my obsessiveness as fear-driven, and it certainly can be, but there tends to be something underlying fear that is larger than the fear, and that something is attachment. Maybe it's because people don't see the attachment driving the fear that that they get surprised by the crazy levels of strength that can pop out.

I am thinking of somebody who told me once to grab his wrist and "hang on tight" -- and then did this tai chi thing where he spun around and broke my grip... or would have except that I was still holding his wrist. That kind of floored him, so he had to do the whole thing over again. (He did the same thing six more times, and I did the same thing six more times.) See, it was because of who the person was that the symbolism of the whole thing wasn't lost on me -- that it bacame more than just a party game to me. I got this notion that if I could just hang on everything was going to be okay, and I was going to hang on tight, so help me ---!

I sure don't like to get in the kind of situation I did yesterday, but I will say that a part of my attraction to obsession in other sorts of situations is because I've tasted before the kind of strength that "This I will protect if I bleed" can find in me.

Yesterday I made wrong choices; I am kind of puzzling over how much danger I might have put myself into. I also imagine that I should have let their professional fix the knee. I said it wasn't any worse than taking a fall, but I was overlooking that I did get once an infection from a fall that I took a few years back.