May your day tomorrow start with a flash of energy and love. And if it doesn’t, look at this picture and imagine the beauty of the woman and the spectacle of a sunrise.
I made the picture, merging a real photo of a sunrise and a silhouette made from the profile of a woman. It is the juxtaposition of real and imaginary, color and light that makes this picture work.
I hope your day contains the same mix of real and whimsy; real to earn a living and whimsy to drive your imagination.
Love, X
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When I came home, I let the cat prowl the deck as I painted two metal birds. The sky darkened and the wind grew a bit chillier. As the traffic increased due to the hour, I could hear the approaching train as its horn crescendoed. It was the Arkansas & Missouri excursion train, its middle cars dotted with observing faces. I waved like Forrest Gump. This time, several people returned my wave.
Went I went inside, someone wrote me a message through my blog: “I hope you don’t mind. I made a poster out of your picture after you posted it the second time. There’s something about it that just hits me and reminds me to stop worrying about being so weird.” I smiled as I read the message. What a small world it is, where I can make a picture and have it resurface periodically on the internet. They went on to mention another picture, similar in composition, that they have printed in a smaller frame. I’ll put it below the sign-off.
I’m going to go back to the landing with Güino and watch the slow rain dampen the October air. And I’ll think about the importance of not hiding my light under a bushel, even as time pours increasingly fast into an invisible funnel.
Love, X
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“It’s not just about language; it’s about the futility of not expressing your thoughts.” – X
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If Rapunzel’s hair were long enough to allow someone to use it to climb up, it proves that she suffered from a massive lack of critical thinking. She could have tied her hair to something in the tower, cut it, and climbed down herself. – From The Book, “X’s Stolen Ideas From Children’s Stories.”
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I thought my apartment simplex was a horror show. I can walk to Elm Street in 3 minutes. Though the streets are dark and shadowy, Mr Krueger will not show his face.
PS. A clever person messaged me and said, ” Duh it’s too warm to have a sweater on out there.”
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My name is the truest palindrome in our language. It’s omnidirectional. I don’t know why, but the number of people asking about my name has escalated over the last few months. There are times when I wish I’d chosen a 23-letter name, one that sounds like a mouthful of crickets and consonants. 
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A creative friend wrote this off-handedly; it’s funny and I think I could write a book with this sentence as the preamble.
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Worst football game ever!
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The occasional murder of crows returned this afternoon, their cawing like decibel-driven bird testosterone. These crows are large and full of personality. On a whim, I went outside and scattered four bags of my beloved PopChips behind the dumpster. By the time I went inside, their excited discovery of same caused a melee of activity there. Güino watched and listened in nervous excitement from slightly outside the apartment, his back legs twitching in time to his swishing tail. Though it is the middle of October, it was 72 degrees with a slight, stirring breeze. The passersby in the throng of traffic failed to take note of the crows. “Much to their loss,” I thought to myself.
I had taken a break from painting two more inside doors of my apartment. To my dissatisfaction, the pragmatic part of me had surrendered to painting the doors classic grey – instead of a wild blue or deep red. In a flash of inspiration, I decided to find (or make) a metal silhouette of a crow and put it on at least one of the doors. My bathroom door has been off since two days ago. The cat learned again that it is idiotic to jump onto the top of a recently-painted door. If he does it again, I’m leaving the paw prints as part of the intended look.
I turned on all my inside LED lights to flood the space with color. I wish I had the technology to bathe all the walls in vivid, wild splashes of it.
Yesterday was a day to reconnect to the value of genealogy, a hobby I’d started with doubts as to whether I’d be deeply interested. I was wrong. Almost a decade has past and my Ancestry account at one time held 100+ family trees. It gave me a few more skills to use to find missing fathers, long-lost friends for other people, allegedly missing birth certificates, and reconnect people to their own history. It’s pushed me to determine whether someone has Native American ancestry (few actually do, despite the stories they might have heard). When you immerse yourself into genealogy, you relearn how interconnected we are. Often literally. A couple of people were surprised to find out just how far I’d taken their family trees. I’ve fallen out of the dedicated habit in the last few months; life has pushed my attention elsewhere. As interesting as the document and paper trail side of family trees has been, none have meshed the forensic and undeniable magic that DNA has. It is the inarguable blueprint that identifies us. Libido has always been the x variable in our shared histories. It drives so much behavior and (mis)adventure. Yesterday renewed my urge to continue to flesh out people’s blueprints. Behind it all is my love of pictures. Even though I don’t know the people in most of the photos I unearth, it has always ignited my imagination. For those I love, I mark their death by adding hundreds of pictures to a database that’s likely to survive generations. It’s only fair that pictures be shared. I haven’t mentioned it in a while, but I cringe to think of the millions of unappreciated pictures in basements, attics, boxes, and containers pushed carelessly onto garage shelves or under beds.
Because I have to be more cautious with money, I applied a mathematician’s eye to the lottery. Surprisingly, the most cost-effective lottery option is the Natural State Jackpot game. Tickets are $1. The current payout is 330K – but the odds of winning, though still long, are hundreds of times in your favor compared to the Mega Millions or Powerball. After taxes, I could buy several thousand cans of paint. 🙂 Maybe enough to paint your house while you’re sleeping. Because most people don’t know how the multi-draw option works, I’d recommend you look into it. You’ll spend less and won’t miss a drawing. If wasting your money on smaller lottery payouts doesn’t interest you, feel free to throw some money at bitcoin; those guys desperately need more money.
I came home from work tired but also invigorated. Because boredom isn’t a trait I’m afflicted with, I tried to prioritize how I might squeeze ten hours of activity into a much smaller time span. And that caused me to sit and think of the larger picture: how can I fit more into the unknown remainder of my life? No matter what I do, I know I’ll die with plans still unrealized.
It occurred to me that I might stop to eat. I’m still off-schedule with everything, food included. Most mornings, I down a protein drink before my first cup of coffee. It satiates me in a way that I didn’t expect it to when I started. Dairy was a stranger to me for so long. Now, I eat low-fat cottage cheese, skim milk (for the protein powder, though I eat that raw and by the spoonful at times), sugar-free pudding, and Greek yogurt as if I own stock in the companies. I still drink a V-8 most days and find creative ways to eat fruits and vegetables, many of which I’m certain would make you wrinkle your nose in surprise. The joy is knowing it’s possible to eat a great diet and be as weird as I’d like to be.
While I was writing the last part, the Walmart+ driver sneaked up to the landing to drop my groceries. It’s such an indulgence to have delicious food dropped at the door. This is the first time I haven’t walked down and carried all my groceries up myself. On another note, when you buy your groceries yourself, there are of course, advantages. And you don’t have to tip the driver. BUT, when you consciously make a list to buy whatever you need, you will save a lot of money by not impulse-purchasing. This effect is amplified when you’re buying for one person. As the Walmart+ driver walked away, he said, “I love the decorations.” He laughed at a couple of them. He could see the LED lights reflecting inside, too. ‘I bet your place is full of color, isn’t it?” I laughed. “Not enough. I won’t rest until it looks like a nuclear bomb of rainbows went off in there.” He smiled and nodded.
I went back outside and watched the birds and the traffic.
All the people streaming by, each intent on their respective goal. And yet, they still paid little attention to the crows.
The afternoon and I shared a moment.
Love, X
My first day back at work after emergency surgery.
It’s hard to see, but my brooch is intensely personal instead of light-hearted.
The brooch is a crematory tag of someone who died too young. “Too young” is such a misleading phrase. If you have things left unsaid or deeds undone, especially ones intertwined with your heart, today is your day to remedy it.
Regrets are the poison; revelation is the cure.
Get started.
Love, X
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Yesterday, my long-lost secret sister Carolyn met my remaining sibling Marsha for the first time. I met my long-lost sister on New Year’s day this year. To imagine that she’d meet my other sister Marsha seemed unimaginable to me a year ago. I can’t describe how strange it is to think about how much was hidden. For years, I caught hell from some of my family for pursuing ancestry and DNA; most of them were compelled to silence me due to a misguided sense of family honor. Considering the things I already knew combined with the things I’ve forensically learned through research and stubbornness, I still don’t know what they were protecting. Like many families, the things I unearthed would fill a book. It’s amusing to me that their attempts to discourage me convinced me that there MUST be something they were hiding. It turns out, there were several “somethings.” To know that some of them kept the truth of a sister hidden astonishes me. Part of it for some of them was racism and shame; my Dad took advantage of a young black girl. After she was born, he fled Monroe County, as if he could escape the past. Luckily for all of us, the result of Dad’s misbehavior resulted in a fantastic human being, one who had a big family herself, full of love and stories.
Without bitterness, I still feel that if they would have spent 10% of that energy protecting us from the monstrous actions of some of my family, our paths would have been significantly brighter.
Almost all secrets come out, even 1/4 of a century after someone passes away.
I feel proud that my insistence and curiosity led me to find a sister I never knew I had. She’s smart, humble, and funny. My brother Mike missed the chance to meet the new sister Carolyn. His demons got the best of him. I’m hoping my new sister provides my sister Marsha a template for finding meaning and direction – and for building a new kind of relationship to sustain her.
Most of my family is gone, many of them chased and hounded by addiction into the grave. Soon enough, all of us will be stories and memories.
I’m tickled that I kept my curiosity sharpened; it led to yesterday.
No matter what comes of it, I count finding my new sister as one of my best accomplishments in life. People having access to their stories and truth is essential to make a good life.
Love, X
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It wasn’t until I sat down with a counselor to recap the last few months of my life that I realized how important the ritual of pushups had become. I started on June 1st, after listening to my cousin Lynette, aka Blue Dress Project. Part of my wish was to start doing only what could be sustainable. Pushups are an effective total-body workout – and they can be done anywhere, require no equipment, and are a tremendous incremental workout. Most of my shoulder pain disappeared as my ability to do a lot of pushups crescendoed. Lynette likes to tease me about my reluctance to add more physical activity to my life. I was cautious about further damage; all of that concern turned out to be pointless, and especially because it wasn’t my shoulder that turned traitorous to me. Isn’t it amusing that we worry about things, only to discover that almost none of what we expect comes to fruition – while the stuff we’d never expect blossoms and distracts us?
My job is much more physical than most people realize. When I was fat, it was hard for people to see me and imagine that I walked miles every day and moved tons of medical supplies. Now that I’m thin, people seem to have no doubts. It’s a lesson in self-image and the oddness of how your body sends messages to other people, even though we don’t like to think so. I don’t take it personally. I wish that we had a way to pull people aside and say, “I’m concerned. You’re overweight, and your health is probably suffering.” Yesterday, I went to work for a bit to celebrate a co-worker’s birthday and retirement. I’ve known her for 16+ years, and her absence will be a strange void, especially at 4 a.m. While I was at work for the short visit, a few people who’d not seen me in weeks were shocked at my transformation. They’d forgotten that I’d lost almost 90+ lbs before my emergency surgery. In the interim, my body shape has changed and become what it’s supposed to be, except, of course, for the permanent scar and reminder of life’s capriciousness. Though people have had months to watch my body melt away, they still have an old image of me in their heads. They laugh when I tell them, “Never again.” The other component of my transformation, the mental one, is invisible to me. That’ll take longer to percolate and replace the old me.
Since my surgery four-plus weeks ago, I haven’t been able to do many traditional pushups. In the last couple of days, I’ve done a few, a very few, carefully. I’ve also done more by leaning on the kitchen counter or deck landing to minimize any potential stress to my abdomen. I’ve given the dumbbells a lot of work, but it’s not quite the same, especially since I have to be extremely careful. A return to work is approaching like a snowball. After a few weeks with post-surgery dumbbells, I’ve discovered that I enjoy the ritual of repetitions and increasing fatigue.
My counselor knew I’d started doing pushups because my therapy slightly overlapped the date I started back in June. She looked at me in surprise when I told her I had made it to the point I could do 1500-plus in a day. I also told her that the irony was that I decided to limit myself to 500 a day three days before my emergency surgery. “Just 500?” she said and laughed.
I find myself shaking my head at the irony of spending a year eating healthily and getting in the best shape of my adult life, only to find myself hospitalized for the first time as an adult.
Until I had to stop doing them after surgery, I hadn’t connected the dots explicitly about how pushups are exercise and meditative. They incorporate counting, breathing, and a bit of simultaneous mindlessness. For anyone reading my posts about them, I admitted countless times that I often used them to counteract anxiety. Over the last five weeks, I realized that the habit and instinctive desire to do them was always in the back of my mind. I realized that I had been so successful early on because pushups were my single-best anxiety tool.
One of my most effective tools to help cope with anxiety was taken from me. I have a lot to be thankful for, regardless. Like so many other non-physical ailments, stress can quickly derail anyone, partly because it’s invisible to other people until it manifests itself with undesirable behavior.
It’s evident to me that pushups became an addiction. People scoff at the idea that something perceived as so healthy can be an addiction. It’s one of the reasons I’d already decided to reduce my maximum to 500 a day. It’s still a lot – but not crazy. Going back to work, there’s no doubt I will get more exercise than I probably want for a while.
I’m going back to work on Monday 4 weeks and 6 days after my emergency surgery.
People ask me about my most significant setback during my recovery.
It wasn’t the pain, the staples, regrets, or the disconnectedness I often experience.
It was the unexpected vomiting spell I had last Saturday. Don’t worry; it wasn’t physical. Because I’d hit my physical limit with exercise for the day, I didn’t have the easy tools to trick my mind into quietness. I WANTED to do several hundred pushups, don’t get me wrong. The stress and anxiety hit me like a brick. It was over relatively quickly. I knew immediately I’d oddly strained the muscles on the left side of my stomach, away from the vertical scar running down the valley of my middle. Though the external stressors hadn’t diminished, my focus shifted immediately to damage mode – and my mind sidestepped ongoing anxiety. After abdominal surgery, the surgeons give you constructive advice such as, “Don’t sneeze too much. Or cough. And especially don’t vomit. Or force yourself as you go to the bathroom. Don’t worry about a ‘little’ blood.” Thanks, Doc – now that’s all I can think about.
It was a moment of clarity.
The foolishness of letting external stress affect me like that washed over me. After losing all the weight and getting into surprising shape, I’d already survived an unexpected physical setback with the surgery. Even doing things well, the universe needed a laugh at my expense.
And so it was after I vomited. It reinforced my decision to see a counselor again. People are stressed more than ever, or so it seems. I don’t want to point fingers at the circumstances that led me to be quickly sick. The truth is that it is on me to continue to learn new habits and not internalize things, no matter how crazy, dramatic, or wild they may be. The world is inevitably going to shock me, and people will behave in self-destructive or ridiculous ways. (This explains why some people like rodeos or fashion shows.)
I have to learn to stand quietly, even if I’m in the eye of the storm.
I have to learn to stand quietly, even as people act disturbingly.
There will always be storms and also people to cause anguish.
To expect otherwise is both a form of attempted control and surrender of my peace. I’d forgotten to take control of the thoughts running through my head, justifying it because my concern was for someone else who couldn’t pull up out of their flight path.
I don’t want to disengage from people. Most people are pursuing their interests without inflicting damage. Now, more than ever, I need other people to share moments.
During this most prolonged dormant period of my adult life, I tried to take advantage of the downtime and channel my loneliness. People roll their eyes when I tell them I don’t understand boredom. There is SO much to do, books to read (all non-fiction in this irregular period), TED talks to watch and listen to, colorful art and projects to finish, and a universe idly waiting for me to engage. Not to mention my favorite, writing. I accidentally wrote a 100+ page story in the last few weeks, one so intensely personal that I don’t know if it will ever see the light of day. I became friends with the lengthy spiderweb of streets around my apartment, including many dogs who need attention.
I laugh when I think of all the surprises I’ve done within a few miles of my apartment. Some were noticed, but not all. Some undoubtedly caused happiness or laughter. Others? Probably confusion. I tried to do random acts of kindness (and many not so random). I can see a couple from the landing outside my apartment, one of them ridiculous. I can’t believe no one noticed or asked me, “How?”
I’m not sure what the message of this is supposed to be. And that’s okay. Not all sharing can be tied up with a bow.
Maybe you learned something about me. I learned something about myself. Not all of it is good. Anxiety is a real issue, and if you suffer from it, sleeplessness, or depression, or just want to feel better in life, there is help. All of it starts from within, in an attempt to be who you’re supposed to be. If you have a day or thirty years ahead of you, you might as well try to live in the best way you can. All of it centers on being honest and being surrounded by people who light you up.
Go find your fire. Start with an ember if you must. Just start.
Love, X
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