beccalive

The Gayatri mantra has taken up residence inside my head. It's very interesting -- I started to learn it a couple of days ago, in preparation to beginning practice of it in the new year, or thereabouts.

It seems this mantra has other ideas -- wants to be here now. Okay.

I've been getting more and more involved in mantra practice the last few months. This is working really well for me -- it really does impact my mind on a very subtle and helpful level. And it's something I can do in my car or on the train. (Sounds like Dr. Seuss, doesn't it? "Can you chant it on a train? Can you chant it on a plane? ...)

Lovely sky. Lovely day. A good day for doing stuff.

Not big news. I'm sitting up here in my office. It is pretty tidy. I have nice music playing. I even have some nice pictures of family on my desk. All nice nice nice nice.

(It would be even nicer if I could see properly out of my right eye, but let's not go there.)

So, how about some work? I am trying to get back into coding. This isn't the first day. I have done some. But it's remarkably hard to dive back into it.

I am treating my return to coding as a creative recovery, and for good reason. The past five or six years of work have really ended up macerating my coding self-confidence, at the the same time as my "career" was taking off so nicely. I can't be in software anymore unless I can re-ground myself as a coder. So here we are.

Eh, I can't let these bastards get me!

I am so totally not dead yet. Really.

Well, a week ago today my friend Steve apparently slipped in the bathroom, fell, and died. Today was his funeral, and his body is no doubt beneath the earth now. He was almost exactly two years older than I. I only found out about this last night, when a friend called me. I'd already missed the viewing/visitation/whatever-you-want-to-call-it, but I went to the funeral today.

Now, Steve was gay, and partnered with a lovely man for many years. Steve was pretty prominent in the Internet gay community. But his partner was not mentioned in the obituary nor during the funeral service. He was a pallbearer, but ... okay, I know Steve would have given this considerable thought and actually chosen it, but -- his partner T is the PRINCIPAL MOURNER. His life partner of -- what -- 15 years? twenty? And he gets to sit in the 10th or 11th pew, and take his place unobtrusively at the side of the casket as it's wheeled away. My friends, there is something wrong with this picture. I keep hoping T will get a chance to have whatever he needs to truly mourn. This service was very clearly for Steve's mom and sister, cousins and neighbors from his hometown.

Memorable image from today: T's hand resting gently on Steve's casket, while they waited for help getting it down the church steps.

So, just to set the record straight: these guys were/are very smart, very aware, and chose whatever complex arrangement I just saw today. My observations are from afar -- I don't have any backstory. From afar, I have to say that I don't much like it.

Anyway, I have been flooded with memories of Steve since last night. Steve telling me what Nolio pizza from Bertucci's is (caramelized onions, lemon cream sauce, and prosciutto -- amazing!). Steve sharing many a Nolio pizza with me as we code late into the night on a shared project. Steve hating the dentist because he used to get sent there as a punishment. Steve explaining gleefully that for some reason all the members of the boys' choir he belonged to in school turned out to be "queerer than a three dollar bill." Steve's intelligent sympathy when I talked to him about my best friend's death. Steve explaining that three of his four siblings died young in accidents, and that he hated the smell of lilies, because they reminded him of funerals. Steve clarifying that he wasn't the home-decorating kind of gay guy, and he didn't want to talk about upholstery fabric.

Steve, after his father's funeral, saying in a strange way that he had just met the man who would prepare his own body for burial.

Steve saying that both he and T hated weddings, didn't wear jewelry, and had separate finances, so they didn't see any benefit to getting married.

Even though at the funeral it sounded like Steve did almost nothing after winning a full scholarship to Harvard, the online tributes make it very clear that he touched a lot of lives. Made a lot of difference. Steve always seemed to be a lot better at taking care of other people than he was at taking care of himself.

Bye bye, Steve. Good journey.

Thinking it over today, I can't remember when I had a goal that came purely from myself. The best I can do is things I decided to do in order to impress or please someone else, without their having said anything about it -- or even known about it, actually.

I went to grad school to impress my parents. At least I did in fact impress them. Some small comfort, I suppose.

What do I do to express myself? I eat. Or I sit very still, intensively not doing something very important to me. I am so very good -- I can actually not do several things at the same time. It's not just talent, you understand; it's the constant practice.

Something horrible will happen if I am myself, without endorsement or encouragement. What could it possibly be?

Well, I'm not dead yet. It's time to do things differently.

How many of you believe you'll actually be able to retire -- as in not work -- ever in your life? I think I've just lost this illusion.

I had my doubts even before the economy took a huge bite out of my retirement savings. Now, it just seems even more doubtful.

Saving for retirement takes place over so many decades. It depends on a fairly reliable return on one's investments, and claims it can rely on that because the market will "average out" over many years.

But the devil is in the details, isn't it? If I work another 25 years, I'm told I can recoup my losses from last year. But I'm 50. So you're saying I won't even catch up to where I was till I'm 75?

Retirement planning takes into account stuff in the 90% probability range (say -- number pulled out of my ... hat). But we just had a "black swan" event that rivals the 1929 crash. Outside of the probability curve -- so sorry.

This whole retirement savings thing sounds like a convenient fiction that just keeps me on the treadmill even past the point where I've met my immediate financial needs. Added bonus: I'm socking away my money where the big guys can get at it and squander it whenever they feel like it.

Of course, I'm not bitter.

Every year I get this cute little email from Social Security telling me how much I'll be able to collect from them when I reach retirement age. Now *there's* a darling little bit of fiction! If Social Security will just see my mother safely out of the world, it will be okay with me. I don't really think they'll be around to help me, too.

My mom retired in her early 60's. She's 87 -- almost 88 -- now. She has truly had the decades of leisure that we middle-aged folks blither about planning now. But I suspect that style of retirement will be well out of fashion by the time it's my turn.

When you hit 50, it's time to view the whole concept of deferred gratification with a jaundiced eye. If it ever made sense, it really doesn't make any sense now. A noticeable percentage of us will not make it into our 60s. You can guess that that's not you (it never is, is it?), but you can't know. The healthiest person I know has metastasized breast cancer now. Last year I would have said she'd last long into her 90s, at least. She may still. BUT -- you don't know. Nobody does.

It's time to start balancing the books on a more fine-grained basis. I have been carefully coloring inside the lines all my life. I'm starting to find that I DON'T CARE ABOUT THE LINES. I never have, actually.

A friend of mine said that, when she hit 50, she found it very hard to pay attention to anything she didn't actually care about. I find this is happening to me, too, whether I want it or not.

I don't know what I'm going to do with this knowledge. After all, I'm still only me. But ... it's time for something to change. I don't care about the lines. I need to find something I do care about, to pay attention to.

Okay, so I had my excitement at being laid off. Not a big surprise, but definitely ... an event. Upset, anger, all that jazz.

Then I had the relief at not having to drag myself in to the job that I now realize I had come to hate. Big win.

Then I had the exhilaration of realizing that I could do ANYTHING now. Anything at all. I'm not a software engineer anymore. I'm just a person who has no job, and maybe has a little space of time to think about what she really wants to be when she grows up.

NOW we have rubber/road time. There is *nothing* now to regulate or determine the content of my days. Just me.

I feel like a six-year-old who's been left home alone with no adult supervision. I have a tendency to stay up way too late, get up way too late, miss my meals and do nothing. I feel cranky and weepy and lonely and uncared-for.

And I just realized that I probably can't afford to contribute to my 401K right now. Ouch.

You know, it's one thing to make a brave noise about how everything's going to change, that I'm poor now but it's okay, blah blah blah. It's another entirely to realize that being a poor non-software-engineer means actually having less money to spend. Or save.

It's like I've been running around the neighborhood with my wooden sword, playing at pirates and saying, "arrrrr," all day long. And now I realize that I have no fine warm dinner waiting for me at home when I'm done pretending. There isn't anyone to fix it.

Just. Me.

Ouch! I think I'm tired of this game now. Can't we play something else?

It's been something like four years. And at least five wall-building parties. Last year nearly nothing happened to further the fine stone wall I fantasized for my (largely theoretical) sunken patio at the back of the yard. And that was not the only lost year wall-building year.

Last summer I found some wonderful kids on Craigslist to help me with some of the heavy garden work. I was just getting to the point of asking them to work on the wall for me when they evaporated.

I've heard of spontaneous human combustion, but ... spontaneous human evaporation? Well, technically sublimation, of course.

Anyway, no wall.

So this spring I hired a set of professional wall-builders, and they have FINISHED IT.

It's gorgeous.

They corrected my design to something really marvelous. They complimented the work of the wall-building parties ("Nice job," they said. Honest.) They tore nothing down, but created a wonderful upper wall that snakes out of the hill in the front, loops around the raised flower bed, and twines back around the sunken patio at the back, cradling the cherry tree gently as it disappears back into the slope. Lovely.

Why didn't I do this two years ago?

I need to hock some things and get them back to do the patio floor back there. And, if I can just sell these magic beans, get them yet again to deal with the raised dirt behind the house, where I'd like to see yet another pretty garden space.

It's not a good financial year, but ... I've been in this house for eight years now. And I'm fifty -- believe it. It's time to finish some things and move on.

This year shall be a gardening year.

Ya gotta believe.

I totally don't buy what I wrote the other day.

First of all, the men in my life have not been murderers.

Maybe what we derive from this is that I'm still mad at them.

Or mad at me.

I've said it before, but will also enshrine it here: I have had the same relationship with a lot of pretty different men.

And that's another, much more believable reason not to have tried to have a relationship for ten years.

Time to change that.

I can perfectly control my environment: all I have to do is keep the people out of it.

Huh ... nothing wrong with *that* reasoning ...

;-)

I have a dear friend -- one of a few whom I've known for just about 40 years now. She's met every man I ever dated (except one) -- including the one I married -- and she summarizes my "type" as "The Unabomber."

My summary was, "Lone Madman," but hers is more catchy.

If he's kinda solitary and a little different. If "only I can understand him." If he creates his own reality, and can only be related to if you enter his world and play by his rules. If you find yourself wondering whether he's actually crazy or maybe really onto something. If he's a little dangerous and more than a little angry.

That's the guy for me.

Is it really any wonder I haven't dated for almost ten years?

I'm not even sure I *like* these guys, looking back.

How can you transcend your type? Can you?

Well, back from my Sedona retreat and coach training.

First thought: a seven-day retreat followed by a three-day coach training was TOO MUCH, even for Sedona. I played hookey for a couple of hours the last day, and my under-self had been trying to get my attention for a couple of days before that about needing to not be there so relentlessly.

But though I feel less blissful, clean and empty than last year, I'm still feeling less stuck.

And ... Sedona a really really really really beautiful.

Really.