currently reading: "perfect girls, starving daughters" by courtney e. martin

     "How much of our obsession with food and fitness, our daily evaluation of our bodies, even our textbook eating disorders is an unconscious expression of our loyalty to or rejection of our mothers? We speak to our bodies as well.

     "To reject the pressure to be thin is to reject our mothers' lifelong efforts. On the one hand, to extricate yourself from the culture of dieting and overexercise is to miss out on a huge part of female bonding -- the dieting promises exchanged between mother and daughter, sisters, friends; the self-disparaging watercooler talk about that holiday weight; the chats at the gym. On the other hand, some girls starve themselves expressly to avoid growing into adult female bodies and inheriting their mothers' lives. Some girls overeat and get fat to wound their weight-conscious mothers. Some girls become sports-obsessed, in part, to drive home the point that they will not be dainty and domestic like their powerless moms.

     "We see that our mothers cannot love their own bodies, and this translates, albeit unintentionally, to a lesson about femaleness, about form, about our own futures. Marion Woodman writes: 'Because our mothers could not love themselves as complete feminine beings, they could not love us as feminine beings. So our fear is archetypal, monstrous. We have a tremendous sense of something within behing shut off, abandoned.'

     "All daughters say to all mothers -- sometimes in words, more often with our own bodies as substitutes for words -- I came from you, your body was my first home, and you didn't suspect I sensed how you felt about it? Your genes imprinted themselves indelibly on the moment of my birth, creating an equation for what I would look like when I emerged. It was you. Even if I have Dad's knock-kness or Grandpa's curly hair, it is you that I become."

-- From "Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: How the Quest for Perfection is Harming Young Women," by Courtney E. Martin

yesterday, on the Metro...

iPhone nation

the lone exception

A week after finishing "The Shallows" by Nicholas Carr, I can't stop thinking about how the Internet has so proliferated in our lives. I'd always speculated that the growth of the Internet has made us more scatterbrained; Carr actually argues, citing various scientific studies, that using the Web and computers to get information instead of books reroutes how we think, making us crave fast, quick and bite-sized information over comtemplative, serious thought. Even reading on a Kindle changes our reading and learning experience.

What do you think? How do you read? Do you ever fear that, with all we gain from the Web, just maybe we're losing something important?

what i'm listening to

No good live video, but sweet song. Simple and sweet. Enjoy your weekends, everyone.

today's commute

wisdom or vanity

I never had a yoga teacher know me so much, without knowing me.

She took her time. One minute after class was scheduled to begin, two, five... Everyone, several with iphones next to their mats,
looked on, as she sat there, breathed a bit, set up her music, situated her large blonde free curls around her ear, settled comfortably onto her haunches...
when is she going to start? She wore a long silver necklace with a round pendant over her black tank top and I wondered how she would stretch without it flailing around, hitting her face or getting caught somewhere inconvenient.

And then, suddenly and without hurry, she talked. It went something like this:
"I am so honored to be with you today. But before we begin class I want you to know what this is about. It is not about impressing anyone or even yourself. It is not about meeting an expectation.

It is not even about the poses. In fact, there is no such thing as a perfect yoga pose. All of our bodies are different, so the poses are going to look different, they are going to reflect our bodies.

What this is about is you being here. Just being here, and moving where your body takes you, where you need to go. It's about finding that place where you feel something. Not the place where you sweat or cry or hurt, but the place where you get a message that you're where you need to be.
The place between 'too much" and "not enough.'

And that place will be unique for everyone. But as long as you're here, and you feel something, you're exactly where you need to be.

Just like with life. You don't need to go anywhere. You're already there. Just be there."

There were wide eyes and skeptical eyes and squinted eyes and peaceful eyes, bored eyes and excited eyes. Faces that signalled they'd heard it all before, and ones that looked stricken with new wisdom. She asked for questions, and we all understood or we all didn't dare ask or maybe we all just wanted to get on with it. There were no questions.

"Let's begin," she said.

And as our differently shaped bodies started to move she watched them admirably.

And when some were off-center or half-bent, when some took variations, she nodded in approval but did not touch. No reposturing, no lessons.

And while we moved to more and more challenging poses and our limbs shook and the sweat dribbled onto the mat she posited, "Wisdom or vanity. You choose."

And when I, perhaps overly ambitious, reached too far and fell to the ground, she whispered, "There's a good lesson."


When I ignored an instruction and sunk into child's pose, my left thigh shaking, I felt safe.

The place between too much and not enough. The ever-chased balance. To seek it just not on a yoga mat, but in life, as well. To be at peace and feel love and presence in every moment. This is my ultimate goal. It was refreshing and beautiful to hear someone put into words and to believe so deeply in what I want for myself.

around town

that girl

i will never be that girl who stands up straight.
i will never be that girl who wears the tasteful white dress,
the solid red earrings as the only accent, her hair pulled
back, loosely, in a simple bun. that girl who takes
two bites to eat one french fry.

i will not laugh cutely at what you say.

i will not lightly touch your arm at the right moments.

and i certainly won't excuse myself when i go to the bathroom.


i am not without manners,
but i am without filters. i don't understand simplicity for
simplicity's sake. the point of a monotone outfit.
a face without black eyeliner. a laugh without the belly.
a beer without (at least) a little belch.
a mouth of teeth without at least one pointing in the opposite direction.

sophistication belongs on the shelf with the dictionaries.
i will take my coffee black, with lots of cream.
when the milk collects above my lip i hope you'll laugh, then lean over
and lick it off,
tell me that you've never seen me more beautiful.

daily life, as seen through my iphone

glass half full

I am so, so tired of being a nobody.

Ok, I am somebody. I am a curvy body and a brilliant mind and a deep heart. I have wide thoughts and can paint vivid pictures with my words, I feel the vibrations of people, pulses beat in my ears, new songs fall on my lips, I dream of guitars and tambourines and sometimes I have realizations -- what those in churches or religions might call "epiphanies." I can also hear the breathing of flowers, I can sing on key, and I think you and you and all are/is beautiful.

... but you wouldn't know it.

... because I am afraid.

I know I am meant to add a chapter to the big Book of all the men and women before me but I don't know where to start. I don't know, exactly, what to say. What. to. say. So many ideas, but where are the Ideas?

Fear of imperfection, long within my veins. Since I came out of the womb with black hair and wincing, skeptical blue eyes. The big birthmark on my milk-white skin that called out that I was different, that this was a unique and marked child. My quest, all my life, to cover it up. To do all right, but not great. To sing, but never into a microphone. To climb, but never to the top. To look, but never leap.

To live, but in peace -- do not disturb.

And while I know there is maturity in peace and thankfulness for the daily breathing and blessings -- the waking in the morning, the set schedule, the available food and roof, the decent sleep and the accepting love -- there is equal pain in denying what you can possibly be. A dissonance and an easiness. At night I am not tired. My resources are full and unused. I fall into my pillow instead of collapse.

But the words and phrases and ideas keep coming in. The stir to get them out gets stronger. I don't know what it will look like, in the end. I don't know it it will help anybody. I don't know if it'll stand on bookshelves for years or simply be stumbled upon by a few random Internet explorers.

I don't know, I never will. But I'd like to try anyway.

nietzsche & the typewriter

     Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

     But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
     “You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
    The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

From Is Google Making Us Stupid?, by Nicholas Carr. I just got his book, The Shallows, in the mail and am so excited to read it. Especially after discovering my man Jonathan Safran Foer said he "changed [his] life in response to it."

aubade by philip larkin

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
-- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused -- nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear -- no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

good morning, freedom

so delightfully retro. (a bee bow bow b'b buppa bow...)

and i said WHATEVER,

i don't care what you and you and you think!
take your rights and wrongs and ideas and judgments and ...

and then suddenly life got a whole lot better, and
my breath came back into my lungs.

this man is amazing



Phoenix Police Officer Jason Schechterle's life changed forever when his patrol car was struck from behind by a taxi going over 100 mph. His car instantly burst into flames, and 50 percent of his body was scorched by the fire.



I can't imagine the reconstruction of faith it must require for someone who is able to go through an experience like this and come out with this perspective. I speak solely from observation, but I think humans can take extreme tragedy in two ways -- they can take it as a grave and bury in it with an extreme, all-questioning exhaustion, or they can take it as a beginning and be reborn from it with a profound new wisdom. Simply continuing your life as before is not an option.

Those two processes are not mutually exclusive. I believe it takes a lot of time and a lot of grief before you get to the point of acceptance of something truly life-changing, and I believe that, once you are there, the fight is not over -- you must constantly restrengthen yourself and realign yourself with what you want out of your altered life. The inner resolve that must take, day in and day out, battling with loved ones, strangers, your faith and yourself, with your own questions and doubts and anxieties, must be exhausting. I can only hope that, should I ever face such an experience, I would possess such fortitude.

Please watch the story of Jason Schechterle and share your thoughts. Like NieNie, whom I have been following for years, he amazes me with his strength.