The Continuing Saga of the Self-Centered Man

[copied from dland]

So somebody comes in early in the morning and schedules her class to come in here and work later in the day. As soon as she leaves, I see that SCM has taken out the equipment the class is going to need to work. I ask why he has taken it out now when the class is coming in for seventh period (assuring him at the same time that I probably heard it wrong.) He says he thought he heard second period, but his hearing is bad, too. His general take here is that his hearing is as bad as mine, if not worse. He begins to regale me with the tales of how hard it is to hear the TV at home. At least he has stopped asking me what volume setting I use on my TV. "I have to turn mine up to about 32," he used to say. "Do you listen to yours that loud?" "Mine only goes up to 10," I would point out. "Every TV works on its own system." Duh.

So he's telling me about his hearing problems, which are basically the degenerating hearing of any aging baby-boomer who's listened to too much rock'n'roll. Hello, hello! I had my head cut open so they could see my brain! Somebody disconnected the nerve that hears so it doesn't go from my ear to my brain anymore! Hello, hello, clinically deaf person over here!

So once again, an encounter with SCM leaves me wondering if I am not as self-centered as he is. Perhaps, perhaps not. Sometimes he just drives me crazy.


ENTRY #13

Living the Stress-Free Life

[copied from dland]

Is this even possible? If there's no stress, is it really still life, or what? One year ago I would not even have been able to believe that anyone anywhere lived life without stress. If they said they were, they were lying, and if they really thought they weren't, then they just didn't get it. One year ago, stress was like a cargo net that contained all the details of my daily existence. Now, it's gone. No net, no threads connecting the dots as it all swung and slipped above the harbor. Dots seem to be connected on their own now, thank you very much.

It is a way of life unfamiliar and strange. If I'm not dashing from task to task all day every day putting out fires, what am I doing? It turns out that I'm not doing much of anything, a little errand here and there, a daily phone call to dad. Life without stress, it turns out, is somewhat boring.

But not unpleasantly so; I wouldn't want to sound ungrateful. No stress is also no pain: no headaches, no gut pain, no body aches (except the backache I've had since I slipped on the ice in 1974, but that's another story). No pain is a good thing. I can tell you exactly when I realized the pain was gone (and so the stress). I made peace long ago with all of this making me sound like the worst person on earth. I'm not.

It was May 27, a Monday, Memorial Day. I had spent the morning with daddy, going to the funeral home with him, picking out the casket. Mommy died the day before, on Sunday. Mommy died. When I talked to my sister later, after we got home from making the arrangements, we both noticed that suddenly our pain was gone, both of us. All because Mommy died.

I was at the hospital with my sister and her daughter, 24. We three were there. Daddy was home. We didn't know that she would die that day, and anyway, he'd already taken his medication and couldn't leave the house. Sister and I went with her to the hospital. Niece arrived about an hour later.

We were in the emergency room all day. They talked about controlling her internal bleeding, about taking her for a CAT scan. It was about noon, I guess, that Mommy stopped knowing we were there, or that anything else was going on. She looked frozen. Her eyes were open. She looked scared, as if she had been frozen about one second before she was going to be okay.

Some tech person came into the cubicle holding two giant cups of yucky something to drink and said brightly "You need to drink this for your CAT scan!" The nurse shhd her and turned her out again. About a half hour later I realized that the nurse had been with us the whole time. That's when I knew what she knew: that mommy was going to die any minute now. The nurse wanted to be with us at the end, not for mommy, but for us.

But, tough old girl, she just wouldn't go. For eight years we had been saying to each other "Doesn't she know she's got cancer? Doesn't she know she's not going to 'beat this'?" That's what she would always say, "What's going to be with me?" She was wasting away, physically and mentally, and she still thought that one day she would get better, would drive again, would go out to lunch. She was 81. She'd been smoking a pack or two of cigarettes a day since she was 15, and had only just stopped in March when she was in the hospital for a week.

"What's going to be with me?" She wasn't asking anymore, even though now we knew the answer. We knew what was going to be, and it looked like it was going to be any minute. We held her hand and talked to her and looked into those scared, frozen eyes.

Niece turned up and took center stage. She told grandma that she was beautiful and strong and wonderful. She was a source of stress and pain to her daughters, but to this grandchild, she was still beautiful. Imagine.

Sister went outside for a smoke and to make a phone call, while niece and I watched the heart monitor beep less and less often. Finally the nurse turned it off; it kept setting off alarms each time it went below a certain level and it freaked us out. Sister returned. We watched, all three of us, as the heart monitor went lower and lower. I felt like I was having a stroke. I felt light-headed and foggy. I'd been having blood pressure problems for a few weeks; my blood pressure went up each time mommy called on the phone. I was thinking, this is it and I'm going with her.

And then it stopped. She hardly looked different. Still frozen. No heart monitor beeping. But we could see that there was no line any more. Over. Over.

We went home and told daddy. He went into captain mode, telling us what had to be done and who to call. No one was stunned or startled, except niece, of course. She thought grandma would live forever, always suffering and dying, but living forever. I called mommy's best friend, who was in the bathroom, and her husband gave her the message.

I went home so I could tell my daughters in person. As I entered the house I saw #2, age just 18, standing in the middle of the room with the phone to her ear and a horrified look in her face. She saw me: "I don't know what she's talking about!" she said softly, gesturing to the phone. I took the phone from her. It was my mother's friend, calling back for details, and telling my daughter how sorry she was that grandma had just died. So that's how she found out.

I told and hugged both girls, and my husband expressed sympathy. Within minutes, we four were imagining where mommy was now: sitting someplace in a comfortable chair, her feet up, with a cigarette burning out of each side of her mouth, both nostrils, her ears, and one in each hand. There were clean ashtrays everywhere. She was sighing in constant contentment. Ah, death!

Am I macabre? Black humor is our crutch, all of us. Mommy liked it too. And I liked thinking that wherever she was, she was happy.

As was I. Eight years killed her, and took its toll on all of us. I thought I was getting old, going through menopause, developing an ulcer, maybe. My heart was going, my blood pressure was going up. I'd been wondering if I would live long enough to be a grandmother.

Then she died. My mommy died, and my pain all went away. Living the stress-free life. Now I just have to figure out what to do with it.


ENTRY #12

In 77 Days, I Will Be This Many

[copied from dland]

I want a cool birthday countdown counter on my diary page, and I want a cool birthday, too

My mind is all a-swirl with anticipation at the upcoming-ness of my annual birth anniversary. Really. If there's anything I look forward to with the eagerness of a ... (imagine a cool metaphor here) ... it is my wonderful birthday.

It's not as if everyone doesn't have one, so this then becomes the epitome of my negative/positive, optimist/pessimist thing, that personality quirk that I tend to apply to everything. But the birthday thing goes to both extremes, herewith:

Everyone has a birthday. Every day is somebody's birthday. There are places all over the world where impoverished or otherwise calendar-impaired aboriginal peoples don't even know what birthdays are. It is so not a big deal.

But it's MY BIRTHDAY! MINE, MINE, MINE! It's so cool, it's going to be MY BIRTHDAY!

And not for two months yet, and I'm already experiencing this exultation over this event that will be ordinary in the lives of everyone else I know and don't know. MY BIRTHDAY!

Will anyone notice? My family will notice and say happy birthday and that's nice. Maybe I'll bring in cupcakes for the lunch crowd at school.

Let's review the other landmark birthdays:

18 - Don't remember a thing about it. Actually, I think there was a teacher strike and the school was closed so I probably sat at home by myself thinking "Wow. Birthday. Wow."

19 - Landmark because it was my best birthday ever, at least up until then. Living in the dorm, great friends, great day, about 75 degrees in January.

21 - Not so very good. Feeling not so very good, later found out unpleasant medical news, taken care of, but birthday rather sucked.

30 - FREAKED OUT! 30 ... moi? Couldn't be. I was weird all day until someone pointed out that my mother might have feelings on the subject, since her baby was 30. Once my perspective was properly adjusted, I was okay.

40 - Felt pretty damn good to be 40, considering that I'd had a brain tumor removed at 39 and was still around to be 40. Excellent birthday, 40.

50. 50 is coming. In 77 days, exactly, but I couldn't get the birthday counter site to work, so I had to use my fingers and a calculator. Another day, perhaps.

50 in two months, January 12, 2003. I want ... I want this:

I want a birthday party, with all Mickey Mouse plates and napkins and cups, and I want everyone to wear hats and have noisemakers, and I want to hear "Who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me?" playing in the background. I want to get presents that I can open, but I don't care what they are. They don't have to be anything but key chains from the Disney store or the like, but I want them to be wrapped and I want to rip off the paper. I want a cake, but not a chocolate cake, although it would be okay if the cake were made out of Hostess chocolate cupcakes with the squiggle on them. I like those. I want all the people I care about to be there, but not other people I don't care about. I could make a list; I guess there would be about 20 or 30 people. That would be a good number.

50. First birthday without mommy there. (Too old to call her mommy? No problem; I don't call her that anymore.) I thought it sucked about four years ago, when I called her on the morning of my birthday and she told me all her aches and pains and forgot totally that it was my birthday until daddy yelled in the background "Say happy birthday!" and she said it. I was pissed off, there she was so caught up in herself that she didn't even remember her own offspring's birthday. I wasn't asking for a lot, just that she pull out of her own inner-directed angst for 30 seconds. She did apologize afterwards, so that was nice. And she was dying, after all, even though she didn't reach the end until just this past May.

So this year, 50. No phone call to or from. And most likely, no party, Mickey Mouse or otherwise. That's what happens when you tell your loved ones there's no need to make a fuss. They fucking believe you.

Nothing is ever as clear as you think it is, or should be, or can be. Nothing, at least, that I've ever thought about.


ENTRY #11

So This Is What Hot Feels Like

[copied from dland]

It's a quarter past three -- there's no one in the place .... okay, okay, but it really is just about quarter past three in the early hours, and I just had a dream so I had to get up and write this down. I don't remember the dream now, except in it, everyone was reading my online diary, it was the thing to do in America, man, it was popular and getting attention, press, etc., and just before I woke up I knew I had to write about what it felt like to have this diary that was all the rage, and the title of the entry had to be

So this is what hot feels like

cause I was on fire. But now I don't remember why, exactly; that was the early part of the dream and I've lost it. But the really cool thing here is, I get to dream again now, and although I don't actually remember the details, mostly, I am aware of dreaming all through the night, and that my dreams are generally amusing and entertaining and full of activity, plot, and, appearing in cameo roles, just about everyone I ever knew or read about or saw on film.

I'd about had it with the insomnia just about six months ago. After bouts of it -- cycles, really -- since the age of 12, I was mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore. But the thing that really got me were the creepy dreams.

Typical creepy dream:

Exhausted, I get into bed around 9 pm and fall asleep almost at once. (Really, not in the dream.) Then (in the dream) I become aware of something frightening. Perhaps there is a prowler in the house, or some awful animal in my room. And -- in the dream now -- it is about 9 pm and I am lying in my bed, asleep, but now awake and frightened. (Still dreaming.) I try to get away from the danger by waking up, but I am paralyzed and cannot move or speak or call out. I am terrified. I know that [the Hubs] is just in the next room and will come as soon as I call, but I cannot move. At last, in my terror, I realize that I am asleep and I wake up.

At last, awake. The danger is past. Needing to reassure myself that all is well, I attempt to get up and look around the house, or get a drink of water. But I am still paralyzed. I struggle to move or to speak. I know now that the Hubs is sleeping right next to me, I can see him, I want to wake him up, to pound him into alertness so that he can help me. But still I cannot move. At last I realize that I am still really sleeping, and I urge myself to wake up.

I wake up. It is about 9:15 pm. I do pound one hand against the empty part of the bed where only a moment before I was certain he was sleeping. Awake now, truly, I can hear a TV in an another room. I open the bedroom door and see the lights on in the house and step out blinking into the light. Someone is there somewhere, watching TV in the evening hours, the Hubs or one of the girls. "Are you okay?" they would ask. "Did you have another one of those dreams?" I would nod.

I looked it up in a book, as is my wont to do. It's a condition called Sleep State Misperception. Your body-mind can't tell if you're asleep or not, and doesn't know whether to paralyze your muscles (which keeps you from dancing around the house all night, or killing your spouse, or generally acting out the activities of your real dreams) or how much to let you know about it.

The creepy dreams scared the living shit out of me, and made me afraid to go to sleep at all ever. That and the insomnia, and so I was getting about 20 minutes of sleep a night. That's when I started taking the sleeping pills. I could fall asleep at 10 pm, wake up to go to work, and sleep a solid night in between. Of course there was the time I got up to go to work and took what I thought was an allergy pill, but it was a sleeping pill, and when I did get to work I fell asleep for the day in the nurse's office, but that's another story.

Thanks to the sleeping pill there were no more creepy dreams. In fact, there were no dreams at all. If I did dream, I didn't know it. I've not been aware of dreaming at all for the last six months. I didn't even know I missed it. Then just about two weeks ago, after the Hubs saw me sleep-walking in my drug-induced deep sleep (and sleep-falling on the floor, just managing to avoid cracking my head open) I stopped taking the magic pill. I was afraid of the creepy dreams, but more afraid that I would fall down the steps or try to leave the house while I was drug sleeping. So it was a question -- sanity or safety? As the Reverend Jim would say, tough choice. I went with safety.

Haven't had a creepy dream yet, and I am so enjoying the amusing dreams. Although I am definitely sleeping much lighter and not as much (remember, it's a quarter -- now half -- past three in the morning), I'm really awake when I'm awake and never groggy or feeling all druggy, so in general it seems to have been a good choice.

Even though the diary dream is no more than a shadow now, I do know what hot feels like. Because like nearly every other time I wake up in the middle of the night now, I wake up with -- and maybe because of -- a nice little hot flash, you know, that lovely little experience women of a certain age get to have. So when I woke up just before with those words in my head "So this is what hot feels like" I was actually also mopping off my face with a towel and feeling the sweat on my back.

I love irony. Irony is one of my truly favorite things in the whole world and all of life.


ENTRY #10

Two, At Once!

[copied from dland]

As Bullwinkle said. Wanna see me pull a rabbit out of my hat?

Two entries on the same night. The first one, whiny. There's really no other way to say it, no excuses. Whiny whiny whiny.

Now, more than anything, intrigued. As Mr. Spock would say. Really, if I hadn't been raised a television junkie in the 1950s, I'd never have anything to say to anyone.

After my first entry, about an hour and a half ago, I thought I would spend some time reading other people's diaries, or blogs, or whatever they should be called. Here is what I learned:

1. Some people are really really good at this.

2. I am not so very good at this. I'm working on it.

These seem to be the two essential truths. So I checked to see where they got their guestbooks and counters and all those neat little tricks, and I added a guestbook and a counter to my diary and now it looks so cool.

I guess now I should really work on the writing.

I like to write and I have always written. My earliest efforts at communicating with a mass audience and in written form were when I scribbled with crayons in my mother's hardcover Norman Mailer novels. I thought that if I wrote in the book -- literally -- I would be a writer, I would be writing a book.

Fast forward. For a very long time I thought that being a writer had to mean that there were people somewhere reading what I wrote. So when I wrote stories or novels or whatever, and the only people who read them were my husband and my sister, I was pleased with what I wrote, but felt I hadn't quite gotten it.

So about twelve years ago -- hmm, is that when that pesky old brain tumor started growing? -- I decided to write for myself. No reason, except that I wasn't exactly pulling in an audience, and I guess I had to write. I convinced myself that I was just writing everything down (by then, typing everything in) so that I wouldn't forget it all. Remember, somebody was about to drill a hole in my skull and expose my soft little brain to the open air, just to pull out that little lump of annoying nerve tissue, and it occurred to me that maybe I wouldn't remember my stories at all. This way, I guess, I could have read them as if they were new, the same way I would have had to re-read Shakespeare and Steinbeck. Anyway, happy ending, only the tumor got pulled out (along with all the hearing in my right ear), and I did tend to wobble around a bit and walk into walls for a few years, but all in all, thinking and memory remains in ... in ... intact, that's it.

So I've been writing for me, to save what I want to remember, or because I had no other choice but to write. For everything I've written in these last ten or eleven years, I am quite certain that I have no intention of showing any of it to anyone ever. Unless, of course, my therapist twists an arm hard.

And then I started doing this diary thing, for just about a week now. And I have written every day (I think), and I'm writing mostly because I have to. But if I have no intention of showing it to anyone, then why don't I just type it out and save it on my hard drive and password protect the file? Why do I have to keep a diary site, and tinker with the colors and fonts and links and check the code every day to make sure it's just perfectly what I want it to be?

If I don't expect anyone to read it, what the hell do I need a counter and a guestbook for?

Again, who would bother even to care about little insignificant me? Looks like the whole attraction of this project is to see if anyone reads it, cares at all, will notice that I even bother to do this. Considering my previous entry, it would certainly be best if my colleague at work didn't stumble across it.

But I will check my counter and my guestbook and see what happens. How does anyone find anyone else's diary to read, anyway? I'm not even sure how I found the few that I've started to read.

Fascinating. It's like having a penpal who doesn't even know she or he is writing to you. So far ... intriguing. Yes, Spock; intriguing.


ENTRY #9

Self-Centered? Me?

[copied from dland]

I may be self-absorbed, but I don't think I'm self-centered, as in the world has to revolve around me and my concerns. If anything, I don't think that anything should revolve around me at all, since I'm a pretty insignificant cog in the machine. So I thought I would record my observations about the very good yet very absorbed individual with whom I share my workspace.

For someone who survived the hardcore guts of the 1960s, he is amazingly unconcerned with the welfare of those around him, except in a kind of generic-people-don't-deserve-to-be-randomly-murdered kind of way. Peace and love are okay with him as long as they're happening to him; he really doesn't give a shit about anyone else. The deceptive thing is that on first appearance he absolutely appears to be a renegade from a commune. Then he'll start to talk about his portfolio. I think he just doesn't like getting haircuts, and it adds to his hippie mystique. Also the fact that he owns one single sports-jacket, and this, a brown corduroy deal with a belt across the back (circa 1975) adds to his hippie mystique. He's really about as hippie-like as George Bush.

Every so often I have a conversation with him that leads me to say to our third colleague "I'm going to kill him today." Generally she will answer "Not if I get to him first," but sometimes she'll just say that he's not bothering her today. So here's what bugged me today:

He was extremely concerned that our work schedule for next week turned up three late shift days for him and only one for me. (Monday doesn't count.) He's been stewing over this for weeks. It really just worked out that way. I'm sure that there's another week somewhere down the road where I've got three late and he's got one. The difference between late and early, by the way, is leaving school at 2:30 or 3:30. This is the time by which most people in the real world (i.e., not working in a public school) are just getting started. It's also significant here that we worked out a schedule so that each of us would have exactly the same number of early and late days each month, and for the whole year. Okay, I worked it out, and he agreed to it.

So finally I said I would make one of his late days mine. His emailed reply was "Thanks, I think that's very fair."

Bullshit. It's fair to him because I gave him back the one fucking hour out of 180 days. One hour. How is it fair to me? Did he offer to give me back one of his precious little hours?

Here's the difference: although I'm miffed about his obsession with this and his pouting until it worked out his way, to me, the hour doesn't mean a thing. What could I possibly need to do at 2:30 that I can't do at 3:30? How can it mean that much to him? And even if it does, why does he think it shouldn't mean as much to me? Why, ultimately, is one hour of his life so much more important that one hour of mine?

And there it is. I guess when you're that self-centered, each hour means another opportunity to do what you want, get what you want, and screw anyone else. And when you can't imagine why the universe would care about you to begin with, the hour doesn't mean a thing.


ENTRY #8

Health: What Is It Good For?

[copied from dland]

I just got off the phone with an insurance company nurse, who called from Minnesota (to New Jersey) to quiz me on my condition so that I can qualify for long-term care insurance, which seemed like a good idea of something to get. So she asked all the questions one might expect, you know, the kind of test that if you get 100 on it, you're probably already dead. But I was listening to myself answer all her questions ("no, no, no, no, no") and it occurred to me that I seem to be in way better shape than I generally think I'm in.

Okay, I wasn't all that truthful about the weekly exercise routine. Maybe I told her what I PLAN to do, instead of what I really do, which is basically not a damn thing. What I described was what I did during a six-week period this past summer, when I joined a gym and actually went, until the ragweed bloomed and I was nauseous and congested for about a month. But I'll be going back to the gym any day now. Really, I will.

The trick was this: almost all of the nurse's questions involved that magical period of time known as "the last five years." And since the imminent breakdown of all my body systems that appeared last spring turned out to be all stress, and actually went away the very day after my mother died following an eight-year illness, I don't think that counts. It didn't fit into any of her questions, anyway.

She did ask if I'd had any brain disease (encephalitis, tumors, etc.) And I said "In the last five years?" "Yes," she said.

So I actually never had to tell her -- no lying, no deception, I really am a remarkably honest person, not counting the exercise thing -- that I had a brain tumor removed from right out of my head about 11 years ago, and that I'm missing a chunk of skull about three inches across as a result of that surgery, and I'm totally deaf on one side because they had to snip out a significant section of my hearing nerve, while they were at it. It was a tumor of the hearing nerve, so I just got to end up being half-deaf and with a hole in my head as a result, instead of being actually dead. So all in all, a good deal for me.

Can you believe it? This nurse on the phone thinks I am the very picture of excellent health. And me with a head hole as big as a racquetball. Huh.


ENTRY #7

Heaven, What I Plan to Do There, and EBay

[copied from dland]

Have you ever watched Inside the Actor's Studio, and at the end, James Lipton asks those questions invented by someone or other in France? Here are the questions:

1. What is your favorite word or sound?

2. What sound or noise do you hate?

3. What is your favorite curse word?

4. What profession other than your own would like to have attempted?

5. What profession other than your own would you never like to have attempted?

6. When you die and go to the pearly gates (that's what Lipton says), what would you like to hear St. Peter (the gatekeeper) say to you when you arrive?

So the first three questions -- maybe the first four -- no big deal. Number 5 is easy: soldier. I would never want to be a soldier.

Number 6 is the good one. Here is what I'd like to hear someone say to me when I arrive at the gates of heaven:

"Come right on in; Grandpa's waiting for you."

What I expect to do in heaven is that I expect to be between 6 and maybe 11 years old -- it could change from moment to moment -- and I expect to be with Grandpa pretty much all the time. The best would be that I'm sitting in the den at the house on 33rd Street, the knotty-pine semi-basement room in the split-level house. I'm sitting on the old gold-colored vinyl couch that was so uncomfortable, like every other couch or chair in the house, but it looked right for the room. I'm setting up the game board for "Meet the Presidents", getting ready all the little silver coins, one for each president, and the big dial that you spin to get your presidential trivia question. I've got it all ready. I'm just waiting for Grandpa to come downstairs and play. He's coming, but first he has to use the bathroom.

And then he's there, coming down the steps. He's never changed, not at all, not since I was born. He's always the same. He wears gray trousers about two sizes too big for him, and a button-up shirt, probably plaid, buttoned all the way up to his neck. Unless it's really hot outside, the shirt has long sleeves. He wears glasses -- I never saw him in wire-rims, only plastic frames -- and he comes downstairs with a light step. He's about 70 now, and probably tops the scales at about 125 pounds. He has a round nose and a deep tan, unless it's December and he hasn't been to Florida yet, in which case he only has a light tan. A swarthy kind of guy.

He sits down and we play. There are four levels of difficulty in the questions; I always answer the easiest level and he takes the hardest, or second-hardest. He never went to school after he learned to speak English, but he loves American history, and especially he loves anything about the presidents. This is our game.

I would make him play for hours. Sometimes he could convince me that he had to stop for a minute or two to go to the bathroom, but usually I would take a lot of convincing. I was the baby grandchild, and I was indulged, at least by him. He would do anything I wanted him to do. I would have done anything to play games with him forever.

The heavenly scene shifts, and now it's Passover, and nobody in the house cares or gives a damn about tradition or religion except Grandpa. What we all love about Passover is watching him do the whole shtick, the whole seder routine. He says the prayers, sings the songs, eats the matzo, while we all eat dinner, watch him, and occasionally murmur "homain" when he gives us the high-sign. If this is an especially good seder, Grandpa will have too much wine and then will giggle all through the songs he sings afterwards. One year he giggled so much that he couldn't stop, and laughed for hours, even after the dishes were all done and we sat around the living room, watching him laugh and being delighted throughout.

James Lipton does not ask other questions, such as what quirks do you have? Not enough time for that one. One of my quirks is that I have begun using eBay to recapture my childhood. I started by looking for and buying some of the books I remember reading. More on that another time, perhaps. Now I'm looking for "Meet the Presidents", in good condition.


ENTRY #6

Metacognition, and All It Stands For

[copied from dland]

Some of what it stands for, anyway. When a graduate school professor overused this word a few years ago, I never thought it was anything but more of that education bullshit, another buzz word to throw around. She wanted us to use the process of metacognition constantly, to make it a part of everything we do every day. Because I had the time to add another process to my daily chores.

According to this babe, metacognition means that you should think all the time about how you think. You should understand how you think, why you think the way you do, you should examine every move you make and think about it: why, why, why, why, why, why. This was not my most favorite class ever.

So it was education-ese bullshit. But the truth is, I do think about the way I think. Not so much the why, but I sure am aware of thinking all the time and about the way I do it. The way that I'll usually come up with a logical approach, ever the Vulcan. I can remember things that happened to me way way back, like when I was three or four. Okay, not so strange in this family where pretty much everyone remembers practically back to the womb. But I remember thinking things when I was three or four, and I remember the way I figured things out then, or understood things.

Is that normal, or does it just make me more weird? Does it matter whether I'm normal or weird? I think I like being weird. Sadly, I have always craved normal, too.

I wonder if going to therapy ever really makes you better, or just keeps sending you down different twists the road until one day you're dead. You never do find the end of the road, or maybe that's what the bright light is.

Next time: Heaven, and what I plan to do there


ENTRY #5

It's like Rear Window, but without the wheelchair or murder

Having spent some time in the last few days trying to get these pages to look the way I want them to look, it seemed like a good idea to look at other people's pages and figure out how they did what they did. I'm especially fascinated by the layouts, colors, things they chose to include and so on.

I thought a good way to find pages that might appeal to me where to go through the webrings that had titles I could relate to. (This was after spending two days going through the member directory at random, first the Ms, then the Ts, and so on.) So here are the webrings I looked at: all the ones with the word Mom or Mommy in the titles, and everything that said Disney or Mickey Mouse. Because that's a whole lot of who I am. I completely forgot until just now that I could have looked at the Star Trek rings; there's no chance that there isn't one. I also tried the Moody Blues ring.

Funny, these web rings. First, except for two of the mommy pages, not a damn one had anything to do with any of the webrings they were in. So I guess I don't get the webring thing.

Second, and I guess I'm not the first genius to figure this out, was that, after checking out the layout and all, I had to start reading the entries to see where was the mommy stuff, or mickey mouse, or whatever. So I've basically been spending the last couple of hours reading essentially random blogs.

In the Hitchcock movie Rear Window, a guy who basically refuses to get really involved in life finds himself with a broken leg and stuck in a wheelchair in his New York City apartment during a hot summer. He can't get out and he has to have the window open, looking out into a kind of courtyard the the other apartments also look out on. The plot is that he thinks he witnesses a murder and tries to prove it. But the magic of the story is that this uninvolved observer of life -- a professional photographer, hmm -- watches and watches these other people in other apartments go about living their ordinary lives. They are lonely, they are troubled, they argue, they live, they survive, they find love. (And he solves the murder, of course, and gets Grace Kelly, too.)

It is like reading these blogs, looking in at the ordinary lives of strangers by reading the little bits they leave for us. Some of them seem so personal and private, as if they were written because they needed to be, but not really for anyone else to read. And here I am reading them. Some of them are funny, and you know they were intended for an audience. Some of them are desperate, as in, I know I am alone and no one will ever see this. And I'm reading that.

Why am I reading that? Why am I spending my Sunday afternoon reading other people's blogs? Why am I sitting at the window? I don't have a broken leg.

entry #4

And the child shall lead

Although I had tried keeping a blog once before, over a year ago, I gave it up about a week later when buildings fell down in New York, about ten miles from here, and the world changed. I came back to it this week unexpectedly, and in an unexpected way.

Testing out a new search engine someone told me about, I put in the name of the high school where I work and got more results than I ever had seen before with any other search engine. Exploring some of these results, I came across two blogs that are written by girls who are students at the school.

It was revealing on many levels. Of course it was revealing of them as individuals. Although I can't tell who one of the girls is -- a generic first name, the expected lack of spelling, grammar, and punctuation, nothing written that would indicate who this unique individual might be -- the other is someone I know. I've run into her where she works, I know which clubs she belongs to at school. She is the only girl at school with her name. And so, she is revealed.

I have known her as a reasonably good student, a responsible girl, a good worker. I know her brothers, her parents from past years. She is pleasant and good-natured. I once taught her to make a web-page.

But her diary tells me that she is passionate, most especially about her friends and about someone she loves, or might love. Her diary tells me that she feels art and beauty. Her diary tells me that she writes with depth, not about James K. Polk or some other school-type thing. Her diary tells me that she knows the passion of living and can make that passion live in her words, and the way she makes her words do what she wants them to do. She writes with beauty and grace, and a style that is her own.

She has been revealed to me as a person of warmth, and depth, and of love and hurt, and of the fullness of what people are meant to be. And in so revealing herself, she has brought about something in me that is connected to that.

What do we reveal when we write? When we write in a diary or blog such as this, what do we hope to reveal to ourselves, and of course, to anyone else? Can my young writer from school know that I, one of her teachers, now knows the feelings she has chosen to reveal? Would she be embarrassed if she knew? Would she change what she has done, or do things differently from now on? I hope not.

I wish I could tell her that just reading her diary has revealed in me the seed of the thought that this is something that might work for me too. That I feel priveleged to have been allowed this look into her soul. That I admire what she has done, what she can do, and that I have learned from her.

In the first blog I looked at, I saw a 14 year old girl who was bored by school, annoyed by her f--ing math teacher, and who was killing time in Biology by writing a blog entry. I liked her honesty, and I respect her feelings. I remember those feelings, too. But I wish she would capitalize the word I, and throw in a comma here or there. Not because I want her writing to be correct, whatever that means; I just want it to be easier for me to read.

Both blogs expressed a more raw kind of revelation than I've ever really written myself, although I've been writing for almost all of my nearly 50 years. It is good to know that there is something I still need to learn, want to learn. One of things I like most about teaching is that I get to learn things from students, sometimes. It doesn't come up as often as I'd like it to, but it's a good thing, when it happens.

Thanks, girls.

entry #3

Driving near cars with morons

I was driving past the high school today on my way to a meeting at another school when I saw an ambulance with its lights on coming towards me. So of course I slowed down and steered the car over to the curb, keeping on eye on the ambulance coming towards me while also looking in the rearview mirror.

Where I saw some fucking moron who was driving behind me -- too close -- take this as an opportunity to pass me. So he passed me, and drove straight on down the street past the ambulance, which then passed me, and I drove on.

Did these people not learn to drive in the same country -- or on the same planet -- where I learned? How do they get drivers' licenses, or, like kids at the high school seem to do, did they learn what they needed to pass the test and then immediately wipe their memories clean, like lifting the plastic sheet on a magic slate? I'm not saying I'm the best driver there is (as my recent speeding ticket, the first one since 1974, will prove) but come on. One of my lesser fears is that I'll be following the rules of the road and someone will kill me by passing on the right, or else they'll kill a kid before my eyes by not stopping for a school bus.

But this, after all, a lesser fear. Larger fears I've got plenty of. They're just not mostly tied in to driving and cars. When I was learning to drive, in high school, I was going over railroad tracks once and the teacher jammed on his brake, scaring the crap out of me. He said I needed to slow down at the tracks to make sure that a train wasn't coming. I pointed out that if a train had been coming, the gates would come down, the lights would flash, the bells would ring. This made him mad. "Are you," he asked, "going to trust my life (and yours) to the mere functioning of a mechanical device??"

Like we're not driving around in a two-ton mechanical device at high speeds. It is for such stupid words that students throught the history of American public secondary education have believed with all their hearts that teachers are assholes.

Perhaps this is true, perhaps not. Deep down, or maybe not so deep, it generally appears that most people, even nice ones, are assholes, at least sometimes.

But especially people who are driving in cars.

entry #2

I still don't have a column of my own

Since it doesn't look like USA Today is giving me my own column anytime soon, and I'm unlikely to see myself sprawled across the side of a bus like Carrie on Sex and the City, if I want to write a column and whine about everything around me everywhere, it's going to have to be here. Since I tend to waver between crankiness and life-affirmation, sometimes minute-to-minute, what I put here is likely to be somewhat random, not to mention too wordy and perhaps not such a pleasure to read. This last sentence is probably the best description of myself I have ever put together. So here I go, blogging on.

entry #1