Not Quite Through the Looking Glass

Meditation From Dummies

Sat, 21 Jul 2007 00:59:23 GMT

So, lately I've been reading some Pema Chodron, and some of her friends and co-authors, and for the first time in my life -- all due to their knack for translating these things in the Western terms, and describing the inner furniture of my mind -- I began to understand what I'm supposed to do when I sit down and meditate. And why I should.

Now, I don't mean understand on any deep and abiding level. I mean in any basic way -- at all. I've always thought I "should" meditate, and sometimes I'd try it. I'd sit down, maybe on a pillow, maybe light a candle, and try to concentrate. I'd sit, and "focus" for a while, and my mind would run rampant, and then finally, the timer would go off, and I'd feel a little smug because I did it. And also a little stupid, because I knew I had no clue what I was doing.

Then, I read Chodron, and some of one of her colleages in a book called "How to Turn Your Mind into an Ally," or something close to that. And it explained in the clearest of terms that my mind was an untrained horse, which I had no control over. I could relate to that, because once I actually had an untrained horse, and it did take the bit in its teeth and run like hell in the worst possible places, and I never did get the upper hand. The horse won the battles and the war.

So this book taught me that my mind was the same, and that my mission was to tame the horse. And the way to start doing that was to sit, and stay. It explained how the mind flickers then sets on things like a fly, from this to that and this to that. To the point that it's not really accurate to say that we've spent time thinking about anything in particular. The mind rambles. So the goal is to train the fly to sit on the breath, and stay there. And if you can accomplish that, you may begin to meditate.

Most people also suggest you begin a meditation journal. I guess maybe the reason why is that meditation is really hard, and really humbling, and discouraging. I mean, I've given it a serious effort for five days here, and I don't think I've learned much. I don't control my mind. And if I'm at all tired, which I usually am, I slide off into this sloppy dream state where my mind plays movies for no particular reason, and I get caught in the movies, and forget about my breath. If I try to meditate for 10 minutes, I'll spend the last five slipping around in that sloppy dream state, unable to come back or get a grip.

Frustrating. But maybe if I keep going, it'll get better.

hard to believe

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 04:18:13 GMT

So, sort of out of the blue, a sort-of family member sent me a photo from my cousin's wedding. Five photos, actually. And in that sort-of-meddling family way, they included a photo of my mother. Who was at the wedding. But we didn't talk to each other, just like we hadn't talked to each other for the previous, oh, maybe five years? I had been horribly unprepared to encounter my mother, but I wanted to be at my cousin's wedding, so I went. And at the last minute I dragged along my husband as moral support. And I barely made it, but I made it. I was also prepared if my mother should choose to talk to me, though she didn't. So I spent the whole night without actually seeing her, since she was seated behind me at the ceremony, and in a dark corner at the reception. I left without seeing her, even though we shared the same room all night.

So the relative sent me this photo, and I see that in the photo, my mother is old. I mean, OLD. I mean, her hair is white. And thin along the part, like an old person's, even though she always had the thickest, most luxurious blond hair. And she is heavy, and wearing a dowdy old person's shirt, and the skin sags heavily on her face, and in short, she looks exactly like all the other OLD people in my life, my DH's parents and their friends, even though my DH is older than me, and his parents had him late in life. She looks older than some of my old relatives. And not joyful, even though her mouth is turned up. And it finally dawned on me that even if my life hasn't yet really begun by any standard I can measure, and even if I don't look much older now than I did 10 years ago, time is still passing for my mother, and will eventually will run out.

Let me try to calculate this ... I think she was born in 46, so that means my mother is ... 61? In August, her birthday? My mother is 61. That's not so old, and yet it's hard to imagine. In my mind, she's still that 30-something tyrant of my childhood, the one who never changes, never gives in, never lets her roots show, never fails to win a match or the battle, especially against her children.

Today ...

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 01:29:01 GMT

I sent my response to Very Big and Scary company who sent me the C&D letter.

So, eventually I will find out if they truly merely want me to cease and desist, or if they prefer to squish me flat, because they can.

It was hard to send that letter, because it led to the next step of finding out the answer.

Business Ain't Going So Well

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 17:07:50 GMT

It's weird ... a lot of kind of bad things at once. Bad customers, the kind that don't read the descriptions (at all), and then get mad. And then a few mistakes I've made, like orders that didn't get placed, somehow, and labels I didn't enter properly in the vendor's site. One vendor who screwed up their page and stopped tracking my sales, while another vendor changed their feed so it wouldn't import, and I spent two hours trying to track down the problem. And then, a C&D letter from a very big company ordering me to cease selling several of my most profitable products, by far. All this sort of at once. Am I being sent a message? On top of this, I can't concentrate on or throw myself into work like I used to. I can't program like I used to. I feel kind of useless, and it's harder to concentrate with that maniacal single-mindedness I used to have.

I mean, I felt COMPELLED to work before in a single-minded way that sometimes kind of scared me and wore me out, but now, I feel like I can't really be effective at all. I feel like half or maybe a third of the person I used to be, work wise.

At the same time, I regret the relationships I have avoided forming all this time. I wish I were better at that.

Soooooo ...

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 07:55:10 GMT

I just joined this online group for borderlines who want to learn life skills, which focuses very heavily on learning to get more control over our own minds, which is a doozie. Anyway, I have that car-crash fascination with most of the emails that go through this list because almost every. Single. One. Describes the same tortured process my mind goes through. The ones you could never describe to anyone else. But I don't have to describe it to them, because they understand.

So anyway, I've been having a really tough time with that seeming big selfish patch my husband's been going through. It really took the wind out of me because I'd been moving in some uncomfortable ways (everything's uncomfortable for me, especially normal intimacy) in my efforts to be more of a couple. I had taken some big steps under a leap of faith that we were working toward being a closer team and less of two independent satellites, and then I got slapped in the face with a big bout of "your needs don't matter to me right now." So that just ... floored me. And I've been having a really hard time since. Although slightly easier since tonight when husband announced he was exhibiting dry drunk behavior and would start going back to AA.

But, with my falling apartness of late, I've been shitty at work. I mean, really bad. I mean, I've been seriously wondered what would happen if I were unable to continue in my line of work, and was forced to see my business wither away. Competition is fierce in my line. My competitors are spending about 5K a month on SEO, which I do not do. I have succeeded by working like a friendless, isolated maniac (which I am) at all hours of the day. But lately, I can't concentrate. At all. And I have little ambition.

Until I got so upset by this last issue with DH that I started staying up all hours. And for the past few days, I have this workday that starts around midnight and ends between 4 and 5 a.m. And that's not a full workday, but it's a huge improvement over where I've been. AND, during these quiet hours, it's like I'm my old self. I have ideas. I have little inspirations. I can carry on correspondence. I can invent little things. I can do business.

Who knows ... I'm keeping an eye peeled on my list for whether this nocturnal coping thing is a borderline trait too.

Well ...

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 05:13:15 GMT

My husband is being SO selfish. Or more accurately, has been being a selfish prig in some really important, significant ways for some time now. This always happens when he stops with the 12 step meetings, sooner or later. It is also partly my part for focusing way too much on him; on trying to self-soothe by making everything all about him, by trying to make him my security blanket by giving him too much and asking too little. Much too little.

Of course, it's possible that I have totally lost perspective, and am sort of destroying our relationship. It is always very, very difficult to tell. Am I recognizing boundaries and asserting my needs, or am I being a psycho bitch throwing out unreasonable demands? You wouldn't believe how hard it is to be sure. The only way to find out sometimes is to see what happens, down the road.

I recently came across the realization that I have an honest-to-god personality disorder. What this means is daunting. It means my brain is essentially, physically, chemically damaged. It was damaged by what I experienced as an infant and child. I believe I am what's known as "borderline," which means borderline psychotic. I can pass into psychotic when I experience enough stress. Otherwise I exist on the borderline.

I know beyond a shadow of doubt that my mother is borderline. I just finished a book on borderline mothers and it explained what I thought was inexplicable. In a way it took a weight off my shoulders. There is no explaining what happened to me as a child, but there are other people in the world who understand, because they went through it too.

And they have damaged brains too.

The upside to all this is the realization that no matter how long I work, no matter how hard I work, I will never be normal. I will never experience a normal life. I will always be much closer to suicide than normal people. I could easily be one of those people who commit suicide at 65 to the total confusion of their friends (if they have any) and relatives (if they have any). I will never have a normal memory. I will never remember much of my childhood. I may never feel particularly good about myself, no matter how hard I throw myself at that wall, trying to recover.

I may never care enough to have a clean kitchen or clean floors or weeded gardens or watered lawns. Never. Death may be a huge relief when it comes.

That means that my failure to get well so far is in a way, normal. Strangely, that comes as a sort of relief. I have a disease, like people with leukemia or addison's. I have a disease, like Jane Kenyon did, and if you scanned my brain, you would see its traces, and there is no cure for it, although if you keep at it for years and years you may see the symptoms abate somewhat. But there is no crossing over into normal.

It's times like this when I wish I had a mother,

Fri, 04 May 2007 03:01:00 GMT

you know, the Dream Mother, the one I could tell hey, guess what? I just walked down the street and donated $4000 to the local library, and I didn't even feel the pinch, or have to move money around.

The one I could not-say-but-she'd-get-it-instantly, I'm becoming the kind of daughter you'd be proud of.

In real life, of course, my mother and I are Not in Contact, and probably never will be.

In real life, my real mother was never able to muster up much love for me, and her relationship to my relationship to money was to see if she could get some of it.

And yes, that's sad, and yet it's possible to imagine a different kind of mother, who would be proud and gleeful even. Who would say just the right warm kind of thing and a few tears would spring to my eyes as I let it sink into whatever gooey part of my innards that link to the tears. Maybe she'd send a little notecard a few days later, just to back it up.

I just donated to the local library ....

Wed, 02 May 2007 21:53:11 GMT

$4000 to be exact.

I've never done anything like that before.

And I didn't even have to move any money around to do it ... I was able to just suck it out of what was sitting in checking.

The feeling is ... great. They're a small outfit (who have gotten me scads and scads of wonderful books at no cost), and 4K makes a big difference in their operations this year.

untitled

Tue, 01 May 2007 13:38:14 GMT

The bright coin of the moon
surprises the black water
as we ride by, lightless,
unprepared for whatever longing
kept us on the road even after
the ducks skidded into the marshes,
complaining,
and the beaver splashed off the bank
like a show girl, then patiently pulled the threads
of water to the other side.

Tomorrow

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 06:20:47 GMT

... or today, actually, I'm quitting coffee again. It's time to stop the madness! My skin is dry, like fish flakes, and I'm breaking out from the overdose of adrenalin going night and day.

Fun, fun.

One more through the looking glass, fer sure ..

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 06:00:00 GMT

I haven't been blogging (remember way back when, when blogging wasn't a verb and only compulsive Dear Diary types had one?) for a while because I've been e-commercing, a hellish process that I now have second thoughts about -- wasn't it easier just to let Paypal handle all the (insert EXPLETIVE CHAIN) details? I mean, it's ugly: merchant account, payment account, extra relationships and fees for Visa/Mastercard, way less fraud protection, interstate taxation nightmare, security fears, and a typical two-month process to get the powerful but very, very-unsuitable-out-of-the-box shopping cart going which, incidentally, is also a favorite target of Estonian hackers or something. WTF was I thinking? Really?

I think it might have been a big mistake. Big, big. Especially since I don't want to be a shopkeeper. I just want to be a marketer. There's a theme song in there.

Also, Chris left my car window open meaning the electric bits were ONCE AGAIN subjected to 2.5 days of constant drizzling rain. If I let him borrow my car at all I can ensure that one of two times it will be rankly abused. I really hate it when that happens. It gets under my skin.

Also, my tax guy didn't submit our taxes! I can't believe it. I worked my ass off to make sure I got him all the numbers a month ago, I did all the calculations and hard stuff myself, I called every few days toward the deadline to make sure we were going to make it, and he didn't file them. He said, "it's complicated." He said, "one day late is no big deal." Even though I have to pay both state and fed taxes, and one day late could very well be a Big Deal to one of them apples!

My tax guy is officially my ex tax guy as of tomorrow, assuming the taxes get filed.

Monstruous

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 22:51:11 GMT

Chris is on spring vacation, which means I write a lot less.

Things have been really topsy-turvy, both on the work and home fronts. Tough, really. On the work front, I made $100 mistake today and upset a partner (a partner, however, who I sent thousands of dollars of business to). I've spent thousands of dollars on ad buys, I'm spending about a thousand more on a decent shopping cart and all the toys that go with it, and my whole goal is to make a ridiculous amount of money over the summer so that I can have my house worked on -- an actual office built, actually. I'd like to have pretty things in my house by summer's end, and that means making bank. Installing a complicated shopping cart, installing an SSL certificate, getting a merchant account and a payment gateway -- frustrating. But probably the right direction.

On the home front -- I can't really even begin to describe things, except in a long therapy session maybe. Things have been very tough here too. Tough with Chris, as I change and my perceptions change. (Plus, those weeks he stays home and I work are always tough. Hoo boy, summer vacation.) I find myself attempting to tear down some walls, and in the process, I'm afraid of finding that Chris really isn't there on the other side. And sometimes he seems not to be, but my mind is a hall of mirrors when it comes to things like that.

I've been reading my 14 year old diary. It's pretentious. It's also familiar, and extremely predictive. I seem to have formed some so-called "core beliefs" during the brief but intense time I was writing this diary. It was a damn weird year of my life. I had a freaky dream that predicted my remaining high school and college years to a tee. I could see where I was going, and it scared me.

One of the things I realized, and said, was that it wouldn't have hurt me at all if my mother, father and brother were to just cease to exist. I could care less if they died, I wrote. And I think this was very true. Living in my family was something you survived as best you could. I didn't survive very well at all. At the same time I realized and wrote that the sudden death of my entire family in a car crash would hardly affect me, I decided that also meant I was a monster. A psychopath. And ever since, I have felt like a horrible monster.

When people disagree with something I did, I assumed it was because I was monstrous. When people seemed okay with me, I assumed it was because they weren't very observant. When the various people in my life failed to take on the role of fixing my fatherlessness or motherlessness, I assumed it was because they also thought it was a monster. Occasionally, especially in my late high school years (maybe my counselor told? The one I was always asking for suggestions about how to move out of my house?) someone would be my surrogate parent. The Newspaper teacher, for example, who somehow figured out I was completely alone and took me mountain climbing, and to journalism conferences.

Basically, if you took the premise that I believed I was a horrible monster getting through life by trying to hide it, you could pretty much predict how my life and relationships would go, and the things I did to prove I wasn't a monster, and also to prove I was.

Whew ...

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 15:59:34 GMT

I'm just about to splash out 5 grand on web advertising and text link buys. And I know in the world of advertising, that is not a lot. Still, for me, this is big. A big commitment, even though I already spend about 5K a year on celebrity news.

Big big big.

Fighting Food and Being Dead

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 19:17:34 GMT

What Chris worries about: money. Ex-wives.

What I worry about: well, it varies from week to week.

This week it's food issues. I have a long history of them. We had moved halfway through my junior year, my never-strong family began falling apart in earnest, my father left for another state, and I was trapped deep in the heart of miles of suburbia for the first time in my life. Before this, I'd been surrounded by wilderness -- literally -- and I covered miles on an average day, but now I felt there was nowhere to go, at least after a few halfhearted attempts to jog down the sidewalks of the ugly strange neighborhoods I lived in now.

I began to put on a little weight, but I couldn't do that, so soon I became a real bulimic. My problem with actually binging in sticking my finger down my throat eased a bit after I left home for college, though it took about a year to start tapering off. After that my weight was pretty stable, except it began to climb during my truly awful first marriage of 10 years, and I forced it off again. Then, when I divorced, I went through detox and also some fasting and probably lost about 20 pounds.

The whole time I would have told you I had food under control now -- I binged and purged once year at most -- but that wasn't true. What was true was that I was managing my bulimia with anorexia. I thought about food far more than the average person. I thought about food when I was stressed. I thought about food when I wanted to become numb. I thought about food when I was in danger of being vulnerable within a relationship. But I didn't weigh a ton because I was also extremely good self-denial, something my father taught me. I felt bad about enjoying food. I felt bad about eating breakfast. I felt bad about being seen buying something that tasted good at the store.

More recently, I decided that if I were going to somehow stop letting food dominate all my thoughts, I needed to let the anorexia part unravel. Which meant I might start gaining weight again. Which is, in fact, happening. And for someone like me, that's really scary.

I have a therapy session tomorrow, and I dread it and look forward to it at the same time. My business mojo has been almost dead in the water since my mother-in-law died. But I see a little more about how I structure my day with activity after activity after activity, so I'm never stuck just being. And as for food -- well, food has always been my great comforter. So much of my life has felt like being lost in gravity-less, lightless deep space. And for me, each and every meal has been a marker that said, here is a little outpost of comfort. Here is a full belly to tell you, if you should die in the next few minutes, that there was something warm in your life.

Not only does food give me this little proof against the total meaningless of my life if I should die, it's like a vaccination that ensures me against disappointing relations with the people in my life. They may give me nothing, I think, but food will get me by. The problem, of course, is that I no longer live with the kind of people who will give me nothing. And ironically enough, in that way that always turns up in therapy, my using food as a crutch to make my life bearable in fact keeps away the real people who are standing there wanting to be part of it. In other words, it keeps me hungry, and now it's making me fat on top of it, which I hate.

So I'm spending these days sinking. Sinking isn't bad -- sometimes it's how I feel when I let go of something that needs letting go. But it feels bad. It feels dark and formless and directionless, like those early years in a loveless family, and I literally feel like I'm in a slow freefall all day long. As for work, I could barely care less. And this morning I had a long and incredibly detailed dream about being dead. It was spring. There was a learning curve involved. There were some dead children who needed some cheering up. I had to learn how to walk over the mud and not sink, because it was no longer necessary to sink, being dead. I was awkward at it. I was seen by a kind woman tending a memorial garden for people like me. Other people sensed me; one angry man wanted to exorcise me; most people didn't see me at all.

When Being Yourself is Actually Good Enough

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 03:39:52 GMT

I discovered one way to have a PR 7 blog that's capable of supporting an entire family today. Look like a supermodel, write like an angel, take photos of your photogenic mutt everyday, have a wild and crazy history in LA, and be so naturally amusing that your posts about your baby daughter's bassinet sheets take on an epic quality.

Back to real life. In my DIY fervor, I slapped a bunch of primer over these downstairs shelves my stepdaughters have been using as a giant dollhouse. Unfortunately, I failed to notice that the primer was oil-based, something that made itself pretty clear when I tried to wring the roller clean with a little soap and running water and ended up gloving in my hands in insoluble oil paint. Sadly for me, we had no "mineral spirits" in the house, although I was able to rub off a bit of the paint with vaseline. Not the smell, though. Lucky for Chris. Hope my wedding ring somehow makes it.

$96,820

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 21:55:19 GMT

That's what I pulled in in income for 2006. Not bad for my first real year in business. The year before I made something like 25K.

After business expenses, deductions, blah blah blah my AGI was something like 55K. But all told, a stunning success. My accountant was muy impressed.

And I'm paying FAR less in taxes than I feared. Which means I have a bit of money to spruce up the house this year. Not, like, buy a heated indoor pool or pop the top money. But a solid 10K, which buys a lot of DIY stuff. I started by ordering a pack of router bits off Amazon. And I bet I'll even learn to use them this year.

That Seven Year Itch Makes Sense

Sat, 31 Mar 2007 23:11:50 GMT

The fun part about marriage is that eventually, all the things that made dating such a wonderful escape -- the new sex, the feeling that someone has finally gotten you and can never misunderstand, the feeling that someone in the world is literally waiting by the phone for you to call -- totally disappears after marriage, and what's left is what you had before ... you.

You have all the same fears, the same selfishness, the same secrets you might not admit even to yourself, the same prejudices, the same tendency to reduce other people to black and white, the same abilities to misconstrue even your spouse's choices as ones intended to be hostile toward you. You're left with yourself, but your spouse is a better mirror than anyone else.

Friends and acquaintances can be fooled, but even the most high-in-the-sky husband or wife eventually comes down to earth, and knows who you are. And you betray them, because you're human -- not necessarily with infidelity, or even any malice, but because of your weakness or self-absorption. And when you do, you have to earn forgiveness, but all the time your spouse knows who you are and the places you could go on a bad day.

Having this type of mirror held up to yourself is tough. And I think it's no wonder that now the divorce doesn't necessarily lead to a lifetime of social stigma, that people trade out these relentless, all-seeing mirrors before too many years go by for someone new and fresh who doesn't necessarily see who they are, right away. I can see how that would be a big break, a feeling of infinite possibility (and I've only been married for a year).

Still, I'm grateful for what marriage has to offer me in terms of seeing who I really am. I'm forced to either grow as a person, or hurt my husband repeatedly by telling him he's something much smaller and colder than he really is, out of my own fear or ignorance. It's a tough choice.

Making Room for the Brain to Breathe

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 10:39:05 GMT

It's always a trip when my brain starts reprogramming itself, because the dreams get crazy... and exhausting. Not bad, just tiring, so that by 5 a.m. or so it's easier to wake up and just wait until I get tired enough to really conk out. Last night the dreams were about being in a small clear pod with a few other women, tumbling out the back of a pickup truck at high elevation, and plummeting far, far down to the ground while I screamed, "God protect us! God protect us!" right before the others informed me that we'd already hit the ground.

And then, the one about being in the same pod, rolling down a conveyor belt in a dark tunnel toward a sign that said, "RADIATION." And I dug my way out of the pod with my fingernails and press the alarm button to make the conveyor belt stop, again and again... which it did...

That sort of thing.

This all started when my mother-in-law died, on February 21, I think. It started off a long chain of processes which forced me to compare how people in my family died. They died bitter and alone, and scared, and without fanfare or any loving ceremonies -- unlike my mother-in-law.

Before that I had literally been praying for my compulsion to work on my business to be lifted somewhat, because I felt imprisoned. I felt like a horrible taskmaster. Not only did I work all day long, I worked all night long and on weekends, too. This was all accompanied by the horrible feeling that if I stopped even for a minute, my competitors would overtake me.

Then my mother-in-law died, and we were there for over a week (it was a full Catholic funeral), and when I came back everything was topsy-turvy.

Right now, I'm taking a break from work. I haven't seriously worked for going on two weeks now. My excuse, when I bother to have one, is that I'm doing taxes, which is true, and laborious. But that's not really it. I'm just making space for my brain to rewire itself, which is hard to do what I'm constantly scurrying after the next project like some robotic gerbil with no end to the hamster wheel in sight.

Instead, I sit at my computer, or on the couch with a book, or outside with an edging spade in my hand, and I ask myself over and over, "What do I want to do? What do I want to do?"

There's a pleasure with asking that's there no matter how often I do it. And this too makes it hard to go to bed. It's easier to sleep without that nagging sense of possibility and opportunity hanging around the hours.

It Ain't Easy, Being Married

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 18:38:17 GMT

Filling out the "interest" section of the profile seems kind of revealing. It's like being a pre-teen again, taking those little quizzes in magazines, and feeling like you learned something. Oh, so I am the kind of person that likes John Lennon, wants to have a certain kind of wedding (cheap), is childless but wishes she weren't, comes from a dysfunctional family, benefits from a lot of good therapy. I am the kind of person who thinks marriage is hard. Not surprising.

I go to very expensive therapy, usually about every two weeks. I say "very expensive" with pride because I found the first therapist who was ever able to help me (and here I am, almost 37 years old) and I still can hardly believe that I'm better than I was.

My first marriage was very damaging; 10 long years of one Dark Night of the Soul after another. I chose a man who would dump me on the roadside without a thought (and did), and took on armies full of problems that were his, and tried to solve them, at great cost. In other words, the classic codependent. In all fairness I didn't love him, although after awhile I convinced myself otherwise. We married for legal reasons, a nasty custody case, and for that reason I consider my current husband my first.

My current husband, Chris, is everything I'm not. I'm an oldest child, and he's the baby of the family. Although it's been said before, I just came across an article pointing out that these kinds of marriages have a lot to offer, but can also drive you crazy. I am a nagging, critical perfectionist. He is terrible with money, cars and yard work, and barely knows how to change a lightbulb. He's also insanely funny, creative, loyal, loving and a terrific father to his three daughters.

He's made so many poor financial decisions that I pay all our living expenses, save some of the food, and his car and gas. Having a child together is out of the question. I grew up without money and refuse to put a child through that. If we had a child I'd be worse off than a single parent, because there'd be no one else to give of their time or money, however inconsistently. That sucks, but life doesn't always serve up exactly what you want.

I grew up in a cold family, and inherited a lot of compulsions about doing, instead of being. Sometimes I measure my marriage by a "doing" yardstick, and judge it a failure. I have strong feelings about financial contributions when it comes to marriage. I remember writing a bitter essay in high school about people who were parasites in their marriage, because they didn't contribute financially. I was determined not to be one, and I certainly never planned to marry one.

My ex was pretty good at bringing home the bacon when he worked, which was most of the time. I worked hard too but may a lot less money. By my 'doing' POV, I was the parasite, but the marriage was good. By the being POV, my ex was incapable of caring for me in any way, and my efforts to bring in money were equally valid, not to mention I was attempting to parent his three kids singlehandedly.

Sometimes I look at my current marriage and just blanche. We can't have a kid, but I have to deal with three stepkids (who, by the way, are total sweethearts). Chris doesn't even pay for the utilities. What's worse, he soaks me here and there, borrowing money and never paying it back. He can't pay it back because he's too busy bouncing checks. Little repairs around the house? I do them, or I pay for them. Yardwork? Occasionally there's a nice surprise in store, and he's pretty good about sharing the mowing, but the lion's share falls to me for sure.

So from one POV this marriage is a miserable failure. His last ex-wife thought so too. She left Chris for a very wealthy man when their child was about a year old. They now live in a looming mcMansion where she raises one daughter who lives like a princess. This little girl's college was completely paid for at age five by a doting grandfather. She'll enjoy everything life has to offer, and of course, Chris pays child support on top of it. I'm jealous of what this woman has. I would kill to have the beautiful daughter in the giant house who eagerly looks forward to having it all, and knows nothing about getting by or cutting corners.

Chris and I buy our clothes at the thrift store. Right now, my business makes pretty good money, but with me paying all our expenses and shelling out for self-employment tax on top, there isn't much left over. It's stressful.

And yet I know that if I got the cancer today and my hair fell out and I became a walking bag of skin and bones, Chris would walk with me all the way. Because he really, truly loves me, and he's the first person to do so.

As much as I'd love to finish off my taxes tonight,

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 04:08:36 GMT

I am just too damn stupid, so I'm going to bed.

I will say that without this propitious combination of Quicken, gmail that gives away a ridiculous 2 gig of email allowing me to save everything I ever received, bank accounts that keep check images for a really long time, and free CSV-to-Quicken converters, I would be really screwed about now.

Letting it All Hang Out

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 20:25:57 GMT

Ah, the freedom to write what I want, and not worry if an ex-husband is reading, or someone anonymous who may/may not be a friend, or people who I'd just prefer not to know. It's like upgrading to a larger house. Which speaking of ...

... as mentioned, there's a little financial tension Chez Nous over finances. And money looms large as I go over my zillion-entry accounting records for tax season 2006. Accounting is never been one of my strengths, and I pretty much ignored it all year. You'd think the fallout would be fatal, but it looks like (thanks to gmail) I've reconstructed about 95% of those blank-faced entries, pretty accurately. And I've got religion at the moment, so for a while at least, my 2007 records won't be such a stinking pile of crap.

I'm taking a vacation this week (other than taxes). It's a delicate state of mind. Also, the universe is conspiring, since none of my potential interviewees have responded to any of my e-mails, which is rare. And then, spring sprung. I spent an entire day in bed eating a multitude of Dove dark chocolates and devouring The Time Traveler's Wife. This is very unusual behavior for me. I'm compulsively driven when it comes to my business.

And then, I have these binders with my financial records, and I actually went to the bank today, and actually made two deposits of that my personal checks wouldn't get mixed up with my business checks, and that's so different from normal behavior too that it almost qualifies as pathological.

Night times ... after quitting coffee, I was going to bed on time, but lately I have such a girlish "ooh, I get to stay up as long as I want!" feeling going, I'm hitting the sack closer to 4 a.m. again.

It's true confessions time.

Does everyone have crushes on people they're not married to?

I have star crushes, mostly men but including Scarlett Johansson. I find her strangely erotic. So sue me.

I have a lingering crush on a former boss who is this hyper-literate, fluent-French speaking mental giant with full lips in an other Germanic physique and a wicked sense of humor. We chat periodically.

I have an indefinable something for very old friend who propped me up and comforted me when my last husband dumped me. It was him, I think, that gave me a sense that something good could be found in men after all that. I don't talk to him much now because I find this dynamic complicated.

That's about it for me.

In my next true confessions episode, I'll explain exactly what makes me a bitter, jealous wife who wishes she had what my husband's ex has. No, I'm not proud.

A Slapdash Intro -- Hi!

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 03:32:45 GMT

Hello. :)

This is my first time here, because I finally got tired of some wicked privacy invasions involving my old blog, which I meant to be anonymous, but wasn't careful enough about. I whittled it down to password-protected posts, and gave the password to only two or three people, but this morning I got a look at the stat counter and find my latest reader is an attorney from DC, and I definitely didn't give him the password, and what's worse, someone mailed it to him, someone I trusted with the password in the first place.

Eh.

So here I am, starting as if this blog began years ago, which it did in another universe. I'm kind of glad that's gone. Because now is much better than then.

Still, now falls something short of perfect. I made a lot of money with my business last year (100K?), but it seems like I won't get to keep any of it after I pay taxes. Like, none. And that's so disappointing because I'm a frugal black belt. I drive a 1995 car that's creeping up on 200,000 miles. I don't have cable or any kind of television signal. I borrow books from the library. I call out through a calling card to save on long-distance. I buy my clothes at the thrift store. My only extravagance that comes to mind is a tendency to buy organic food. It's discouraging. Even more discouraging is tax season, which involves sifting through brutal amount of information. I really need to handle this better next year; try to get control of it monthly instead of waiting until the whole thing dumps on my head in April.

Many, Money, Money, money. It sure is the topic of the month, and my husband and I are fighting over it. Because he doesn't have any, so I pay for all our living expenses myself (mortgage, repairs, utilities, majority of the food, most of our meals out), and even then, I get soaked on a fairly regular basis when he can't cover something, and needs to "borrow money," or an expense comes up, like a hotel room when someone gets sick. It's rare to never that I get paid back for these events. It's starting to really frustrate me and when I looked back over the year in Quicken today, and saw really a shocking amount of times that I "lent" him money for this or that, that was discouraging too. And I said something, and he got mad and stomped off to the bedroom.

I had the customer from hell today, too, but that's another story, and I didn't realize this was going to turn into one long rant, but so be it.