3. enjoy beer.

Were I a writer of odes, I’d dedicate a book of them to my beverage of choice.  O, the bitter bite of hops, the sting of bubbles on my tongue, the heady scent of yeast that fills the head with a nostalgia for a life not even lived—full of knights and castles and beer goddesses with trays (and corsets) overflowing with nectar and big tables of heavy wooden planks, a visual and aromatic palimpsest of rings of ales sweated down the stein and spilt from the tankard!  And laughter.  (“Does anybody remember laughter?”)

Ahem.  It’s been 18 days since I’ve drunk a beer. I embarked on this endeavor to eliminate mother’s hoppy helper because I wanted to deflate my beer belly, and I was certain this, along with a sugar ban, would work. 

My company’s diet plan recommends you make goals that are SMART—that is  Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-based.  Specific: I gave up beer and sugar—mostly for weight loss.  Measureable: My clothes should fit better; I can count the beers I don’t drink.  Achievable: I can go a month without beer and sugar.  Realistic: People don’t have to drink beer or eat sugar.  Time-based: What the hell—it’s a month.

But does this make my goal smart? 

In the eighteen nights, the more than 400 beerless hours, I have lost at least 216 ounces—13.5 pounds.  Of beer.  My body, on the other hand, empty of sugar and wheat, deprived of beer, has lost not a sip of weight.

And I am sad—perhaps sadder than I’ve ever been.  And it’s not the alcohol.  I’ve had a couple shots of frozen cake vodka.  Not beer.  I’ve had some gin and diet tonic.  Also not beer. Could I go a month without it?  Yes.  I could go a month without playing my guitar or taking a picture.  But why would I? Why should I?

My husband would argue that I should because it's good discipline.  He once stopped drinking beer for a year.  The following year, he gave up ice cream.  To what end?  Some people climb mountains because mountains are there.  Others climb them to get to the top and experience the breathtaking view.  That's me.  I want the cherry on top.  (Not only because I enjoy tying the stem in a knot with my tongue and teeth.)

Every day, just like most other people I know—happy or unhappy—I go to work.  I have a long commute and a nine-hour day.  It’s dark when I wake up, and it’s dark when I get home.  And life, as the death of my 75-year-old father proved, is just too short.  In half of the time I’ve already lived, I’ll be his age.  Twenty-five years.  That’s 9,125 beers.  Of course, I don’t have to drink one every day.  But unless my physical and emotional health and those of my family and friends are impinged by my 12-ounce golden-brown liquid in my special snifter, the goal to go even another day without a can of joy, a bottle of pleasure, is stupid.

Why live without the things that bring delight to your life and cause others no displeasure?  Put a beer in my hand, and a smile will light up my face.  And you will be happier, too. 

So tonight, all ale (well, one) will break loose.  In the words of a band whose very name is something I’d banned this month:  “Stick around for joy.”  

2. call bullshit

I call bullshit where I see it, and I’m not going to stop, despite the letters from a motivational speaker disguised as The Universe, despite Internet memes that spread like a plague of Airwick flowers, despite those who let go and let karma, and despite the conscious breathing I’m doing in the new year.  Bullshit needs its callers.

Every day, someone I like passes on one of those misattributed stories or partial truths or total hoaxes.  Once, when I Snopes’d someone (yes, I just verbed a proper noun—is that bullshit?), she wanted to know who made me the Internet police.  Ouch.  But take the five seconds to enter that thing you’re sharing into a search engine to check the veracity, or the bullshit callers will be on you like flies.  It's not just a lie, and it does more than stink.  If you don’t believe me, try becoming the victim of a rumor or admiring the emperor’s threads in front of people who know he’s naked. Smart people. People you want to impress.

This photo is making the rounds (complete with extra comma and comma splice):

It’s tough to argue with the good advice that warns us away from the drama of others and steers us toward people who love us.  So by all means: weed out the folks you don't need in your life.  A regular weeding is good for the friend garden. 

drawing by Kurt Vonnegut

But if your friend is an asshole, please supply a swift verbal kicking before you pluck him.  Because a prayer only sends that asshole out to leave his bullshit in a bag at someone else’s front door.

It may surprise you to learn that even assholes have feelings. In fact, all but the sociopaths and narcissists among us really don’t want to be thought of as assholes; some don’t even know their behavior is asshole-ish.  But it’s not enough to tell someone his behavior sucks if you continue to reward him with the pleasure of your company or an action that says it doesn’t really matter to you. 

“You know, you come over and eat all my food and drink all my beer, and you never contribute anything.”

  Sorry.

 “That’s OK.  Can I pour you a beer?”

Will your complaint and its consequences precipitate a change in your friend? Depending on the friend, probably—but at least possibly.  And if it isn’t worth the effort to save the friendship (some relationships aren’t healthy for a host of reasons), at least send a mean person off with a performance review.  Praying for a meanie doesn’t heal the meanie or your heart, and it doesn’t make you a better person.  What does?  The favor of telling him why it didn’t work out.  After all, when you get fired from your job, don’t you want to know how to prevent the same fate with the next one?

Yes, life is too short to surround yourself with assholes (regardless of the validity of having happiness as a goal).  

Last year, my motto was ask for what you want.  I still live by that, and it works.  I don’t mean you always get it; I mean you learn to stop wishing in silence and act toward a goal.  If you don’t get what you want or need, you move on—sometimes just to a slightly altered goal or a step closer to it or to a workable compromise. 

Asking for what you want works with friendships, too.  If your friend is an asshole, it might be simply that you didn’t ask him to stop being one, which is like asking him to continue being one.

Here’s a second message co-opted from the Book of Face.

I had a friend who let everyone borrow money, and no one ever repaid her.  When they needed more, she reminded them, gently, about their prior debts, then she forked over more cash. She asked me why so many people took advantage of her, and I said: Because you let them.

Those people who create drama in your lives create it because you let them, and simply cutting them loose might not help you.  (It sure doesn’t help the rest of us!)

In truth, most people are damaged.  If we love them, we help them mend the cracks as best we can, and they help us mend ours.  But people who don’t treat us right don’t need our prayers.  They need a bullshit caller.  And maybe so do we.

1. breathe

The nail that holds my kitchen calendar is in the side of a bookcase, and it's pretty tight despite the hundred times we lean on the pages hanging from it each year.  So my 2013 calendar goes up unceremoniously.  I don't tap the nail with a hammer for good measure, a gavel bang to say that it starts right here, right now.

I'm a sunrise person.  I like the promise of a fresh start each day, a way to do good, make amends, create a thing.  So Rosh Hashanah and New Year's Day and my birthday are favorite holidays because they are the beginning of something, unfolding like a flower, lush with promise.  

And pressure: to be better, skinnier, smarter, funner, livelier, fitter, fancier.  To be -er right now and every day.

So at 12:01 a.m., I wished the world joy, pretty hair, and loose pants—with a typo.  It was an unintentional-but-deliberate Freudian slip of a typo.  I began my wish with "My 2013," instead of "May 2013."  I cringed a little as I hit Enter anyway.  With that, the pressure to be perfect was off, and I simultaneously declared 2013 my bitch.

This past week, bloggers have been posting their wisdom about how to handle the coming year.  They've shared aphorisms and quotes by famous people.  They've given advice on making manageable goals.  They've compiled unconventional resolutions and even non-resolutions.  Someone even suggested goals that have you working out less and eating more carbs.  Skinny people suck.

For 15 years, I have battled severe insomnia.  It began with some early waking and accelerated into a complete inability to sleep.  I was on anti-anxiety meds, anti-depressants, and sleeping pills, and I still slept only half the nights.  It wasn't until I gave up sugar that I started sleeping normally again and got off all meds.  I went from relying on lots of pills to needing none.  Before last night, my last sleeping pill was in July, while I was crying in a hotel bed during a work convention after my father died.  For the last bunch of years, I mostly need sleeping pills when I travel.

Last night, though, I was frustrated by the four teenagers awake too late in my attic, and I succumbed to the little blue pill at 3:00 a.m.

It ruined the entire year.  Unlucky '13.  Right?  As day one goes, so goes the year? 

I took that sleeping pill, and I hugged a stuffed monkey until I drifted into unconsciousness for six blissful hours, missing the first sunrise of the year.

But I saw the sun set last night, and it was beautiful.  And I said goodbye to 2012, the year my husband lost his job, the year my father died.  A sleeping pill at the end of a very bad year is understandable.  But a sleeping pill at the end of a very nice day—one that included a good movie with my husband, my favorite sushi and beer with my best friend, and cocktails at a favorite restaurant—just is.

I have things to do this year—a novel I want to write, some work goals to tackle, some health improvements to make.  But most of the work is going to have to be done in my mind, the place where everyone's real work gets done, sort of like that Silver Linings Playbook in the movie. 

This morning, the crows greeted me at the back window.  My husband rubbed my shoulders.  And I'm about to walk down to greet my friends and neighbors at the annual block party pig roast.  The only thing that I absolutely must do each and every day is breathe.  That's tough to do right.  Breathing is automatic, but good breathing must be practiced.  My own breath catches.  I inhale, and then I hold, expelling an inaudible gust of air in a thrust.  Breath should flow in and out smoothly.

I figure if I work on the breathing, the rest of what I need—whether it's sleep or exercise or relaxation or concentration or strength to renew, get fit, rest, write, or just get through life's tragedies, old and new, great and small—will come much easier.

I have everything I need right here: air, airways, beating heart, and 365 fresh, new days in 2013.

love bedes

On the oak bookshelf in Jim Hill’s treatment room—or torture chamber, if you’re me—sits a stone bust of Quan Yin (Kwan Yin, Kuanyin, Guanyin), Chinese goddess of mercy.  If you’re me, she’s an ironic figure, considering that my cries during his weekly shiatsu-acupressure treatments do not temper the intensity of Jim’s elbow jabs or finger pokes.  Then again, Quan Yin lives in the suffering. 

Quan Yin means one who sees and hears the cry from the human world.¹  She hears prayers and observes sounds.  And this is Jim, who, during treatment, will often stop what he’s doing to fix a pain in me that he can feel within himself. 

If you’re me, you don’t believe in any of that mumbo jumbo until it happens to you.  And it happens every week.

I covet that bust.  I want to cover it with shards of pottery.  Sometimes, when I’m in the thick of it during a two-hour treatment, I’ll meditate on Quan Yin, who, until today, I thought was a skinny, female Buddha.  I close my eyes and breathe and think about her beauty and watchfulness and all the broken teacups I would glue to the flat bridge of her nose.  I think about her mosaic head and about spring.  I think about a strand of beads, too.

Jim and his wife Karen make jewelry—glass beads and whatever can be made from them.  Some are Klimt-like, ornamental for ornament’s sake.  Juxtapose Jim—he of the comfortable sandals and chokers and new-age spirit (he even teaches t’ai chi) with glitzy, decadent beads and flashy, hand-made findings, golden curlicues sprouting from necklaces like tentacles. 

I first met the Hills at the Out of Hand craft fair at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Homeland probably 15 years ago.  My mom had bought something from them—it might have had a Klimt painting as the center medallion—from the ACC Craft Fair.  Out of Hand is held each year on the first Sunday in December, and it’s an annual tradition for me, my mother, and my sister. 

Though it’s a small space with only about 20 vendors, many of them the same year after year, it’s choice stuff.  Potter Elaine Ozol was there most years, with her wonderful pumpkin pots and moon mugs.  I went to college with her son and always enjoyed catching up.  My commercial-art teacher from high school, Ed Smith, sold his wicked cool clocks before he died.  He thought I was a weirdo, but I think he was weirder, and I loved that about him. Sandy Magsamen is there every year; she painted a cover of Joe, my coffee magazine; it's hanging in my kitchen. The year before last, the Masking Tape Guy was there, and my mom commissioned my favorite present ever—a masking-tape portrait of me surrounded by crows.

But she couldn’t make it this year; Mom was on Long Island at a bar mitzvah or something.  My sister was taking her boards so she could give Novocain needles.  I took my friend Kim, who’d never been—and who was a good sport when I made her traipse around the graveyard next door in the foggy cold.  When we got there, I checked in with the button lady on behalf of my mom.  She had a knowing look in her eye when she asked if everyone was OK.  I told her that my father had died, and we both cried a little.  She came out of the booth to hug me and tell me that she is now driving my uncle’s car after having answered an ad for it on Craigslist.

I bought a pair of earrings from Mary DeMarco, as usual, ogled some silver jewelry with birds on it, and got a WORD onesie for one of my dearest friends (who had her baby today!).  And then I visited the Hills.

Karen’s jewelry is more my mom’s style.  But last year, I fell in love with some single-strand love bead necklaces.  They were pricey, or I’d have bought one on the spot.  I have thought about it all year—always meant to ask about getting one at a because-I’m-a-weekly-shiatsu-customer discount.  Nearly every visit, I’d meditate on one of those necklaces, and I’d forget to ask.  There they were, still nearly $200 because of all the antique, 100+-year trade beads on them.  Maybe after Christmas, I said.  I couldn’t justify it right now.

I walked around a bit more and poked my head in the food area.  My mom and sister and I would usually get a snack there—a muffin or a cookie or some savory pie.  Those lunches were made by the former owners of Puffins, a vegetarian restaurant with some of the best food anywhere.  They and the Hills are best friends.  Their daughter was married to my father’s business partner until recently.

I introduced Kim to “my shiatsu guy” and Karen, and she went off to look for gifts.  Karen called me over with an offer.  “I want to trade you,” she said.  “One of these necklaces for one of your calendars.”  I laughed.  Ten calendars, she meant.  No.  She just wanted a new calendar, like the one I gave them last year. 

I left with the necklace and plans to ritualize it.  I dunno—maybe I’ll wave some sage over it and say a prayer.  Jim tells me that the word for bead and the word for prayer are the same. (So prayer bead is redundant.)

I had a shiatsu treatment today, instead of my usual Thursday.  I asked Jim if I could take a picture of the Buddha head, and he finally corrected me: “Actually, she is Quan Yin, goddess of beauty and mercy.” Maybe he'd told me before, but I was too busy meditating on Buddha.

I took off my necklace and hung it on her, saying, “Maybe after they hang here for two hours, they’ll be infused with her mercy.  I’ll put the necklace back on, and my wrinkles will disappear.”

After the treatment, I put the necklace back on, and I smiled.

Now if that's not a miracle, I don't know what is.

I'm not not happy. Hope you're not not happy, too.

“'I’m happy
hope you’re happy, too.
…sordid details following.'”
—David Bowie, “Ashes to Ashes”

My face is naturally like this. 

At rest, my lips curl slightly downward.  Engaged in an activity like talking or kissing or eating, my lips, not too thick or too thin, move.  When something is funny or beautiful or delicious, their corners turn upward, and sometimes they draw back their pale mauve curtain to reveal a few off-white teeth.  It is not infrequent.  But in that split second when you or I take a picture of me, it might be gone.

No matter where I am or what I’m doing, strangers tell me to smile.  I could be in line at the grocery store or walking down the street or at my desk or at the park enjoying a beautiful day, and someone will invariably confront me with his or her demand and, worse, adding fuel to my ire, a rationale for it: “Smile! It can’t be that bad!”

“Can’t it?” I’d always wanted to say.  Instead, I’d alternate between scrunching up my face like a pet monkey to give the people what they wanted or ignoring them.  A few years ago, I decided I’d had enough. 

“How do you know my mother didn’t just die?” I said to the stranger in front of me in line at Safeway.  My heart was beating out of my chest, as if saying that aloud could make it happen.  The man was flustered and apologetic.  “Well, she didn’t,” I said, with more admonishment than reassurance.  “But how do you know?  How can you presume to know what’s happening in a stranger’s life?”  He paid and left, threatening to never ask another person to smile.

Once I got over the superstition hump—that making such a comment would actually make my mother die—it became easier to say to the next person and the next.  And as I grew older, I could use real experiences—from the deaths of friends and loved ones to financial woes to back surgery and lymphoma.  Still, some smilers are steadfast in their belief that merely waking up at all warrants a shit-eating grin. 

What empowers people to tell pregnant women what to eat and implore non-smilers to smile? 

My daughter is a non-smiler, too.  The other day, she uttered these exact words, the words of my life, to her father: “My face is naturally like this.”  She added, “I’m not not smiling.  I’m just not smiling!”

Yesterday, I posted a photograph of my daughter sitting at the piano.  She was waiting for her date to arrive and take her to the homecoming dance at his school.  She was in a dress, her hair curled, her face clear and beautiful.  I took a picture of her—an annoying habit of mine—and posted it as the daily picture in my photo diary on Facebook.  A few of the usual suspects were moved to comment on her facial expression—or lack thereof.  She was not not smiling. 

But their observation went beyond her face to her spirit.  “She looks happy,” someone said sarcastically.  Another said, “just needs a smile.”  When I replied that we’re not smilers, the friend said, “It’s ok as long as you are happy.”

But I’m not happy.  For a long time, I thought something was wrong with me.  I tried to diagnose myself.  I believed I had dysthymia.  I was convinced I needed medication for it until I realized that a.) lack of a consistently high mood doesn’t mean that my mood is low (“I’m not not smiling”) and  b.) happiness is not normal.¹  

Are you happy? In general or just when you’re doing something you love?  Perhaps you’re the rare sunny personality, and your smile lights up a room.  Maybe you’re content or at peace with your circumstances.  Maybe you feel sheer joy when the sunset is breathtaking.  Maybe you wake up and thank your god or lucky stars that you didn’t stop breathing in your sleep. 

But regardless of how you feel: do you think happiness is within everyone’s power or, more important, is everyone’s will?

It’s in our Declaration of Independence that we are guaranteed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!  Because we are always going to seek that which brings us joy, but do we ever remain in a permanent state of happiness once we surround ourselves with those things we think will cause it?

"I'm stuck with a valuable friend," sings David Bowie in "Ashes to Ashes."  "'I'm happy, hope you're happy, too.'"  Enough already!  I don’t want to be happy.  I want to enjoy the things in life as they really are, as they move me.  I want to revel in the barking of crows and their congregation at rush hour in the tree across the street.  I want to get naturally high on the pride that comes from my daughter’s music.  I want to lust after rock stars and eat the hell out of cake and red curry duck.  And, yes, I want to wallow in the sadness of my father’s death until the day that driving past the hospital or the funeral home or a Lexus, seeing hospital socks in my drawer, hearing his voice in my head, or needing a rescue stops making me cry.

My poetry doesn’t come from tra-la-la-everything-is-beautiful feelings.  Happiness is not necessary for me to go to work, raise a child, sing, write, take pictures, pay my bills, cuddle with my dogs, make love to my husband, cook dinner, breathe.  I treat myself to good beer and pretty boots and original art.  Happy?  Who cares if I’m happy? Happy has nothing to do with it.

I’m not not happy.  I’m not not smiling.  What about you?

¹Here are a few other things that aren’t normal: thoughts of suicide, the desire to hurt yourself and/or others, the inability to get out of bad, excessive sleepiness or excessive wakefulness, lack of sexual desire, constant despair.  This is not a complete list.  If you have any of those symptoms, please ask for help.

The Tit Show!

I was on WYPR's "The Signal" this weekend with Aaron Henkin.  Here's the interview.  For the entire episode, go to The Signal.

I did this interview to promote poetry and The Tit Lit Show at the Creative Alliance this Thursday!

armed against cancer

In a photograph, Susan Spence is wearing a green swimsuit covered with peace signs, her outstretched arms revealing names written in grease marker. These are the people for whom she will swim the open waters of the Chesapeake Bay: in honor of those on the left, in memory of those on the right.

She and her brother had returned to their childhood passion of swimming to assuage their grief and loss after a series of family tragedies. As a result of her participation in the Bay Swim, Susan was put on a mailing list announcing the inaugural Baltimore event for Swim Across America, a national organization donating to cancer research centers in major cities. When she read that it would benefit the Kimmel Center at Johns Hopkins, she was all in.

"I knew my return to swimming had a bigger purpose than just relieving stress," Susan says. In September of 2006, she lost her sister, Chris Weitzel, to metastasized cancer, origins unknown, just six months after her diagnosis. Before she started treatment, however, Chris lost her husband, ostensibly to broken-heart-syndrome, so Sue accompanied her to chemo at Kimmel, where she says she was treated with compassion and professionalism.

Swim Across America was a convergence of her passion for swimming and her love for her sister.

Tomorrow is the anual event, and Susan, combining passion with cause, will continue her tradition of writing on her arms the names of those touched by cancer. "Unfortunately," she says, "some of those people had moved over this past year to the 'in memory of' [arm].

This year, I am sorry to say that I have had to add to the lists on both arms, and my arms are not long enough."

But they are strong.

When I wrote this Swim Across America story for Johns Hopkins  Magazine, Susan's portion was cut.  She was my lede and my close.  Two days ago, I received an email from her that at least two more names would be added to her arms, one on each.  They are mine and my father's.  Thank you, Susan.  Thank you.