This afternoon I was at a stoplight behind a guy in a truck with this bumper sticker on the back: “Miss me yet? [picture of W] How is that hope and change working out?”

I was hoping that he might change directions and end up in the same parking lot as me so I could respond to the question:

Great, thanks! My spouse’s livelihood and most of mine depend on people having disposable income. His business has been very good; in fact, he just got a big promotion. My business has been chugging along just fine. Thanks for asking!

I guess it’s all a matter of perspective.

To my surprise, I was out of there in fifteen minutes with a thoroughly cute license picture. With the exception of my last one, the cult one, I have been fairly lucky with license pictures over the years. Of course, I did have a non-photo ID for a really long time. Now I have five years ahead of me to enjoy my pretty picture, until this new license expires WHEN I TURN FORTY.

I am one driver’s license away from FORTY. Well, damn if that doesn’t put things in perspective.

FORTY.

You know how thirty-five is one of those ages that real adults are, and I am that age and that doesn’t entirely make sense to me sometimes, what with the underpants and big bronze ass pictures and all? Well, FORTY is even more that. It’s that plus five.

Since the license renewal went quickly -the same way that everything goes quickly and soon I will be FORTY- I decided to give myself an hour off and stop into Ross. This was a good choice. I haven’t had a Misbehaving Tuesday Shoesday in a while, and I was delighted to find the perfect thing: eleven dollar sandals that are colorful, comfortable, and just a little gaudy. Also challenging to capture in a picture.

And, yes, as a matter of fact, that is a trail of flip-flops behind me. This is the last really brutal week of the semester, and my house is a disaster. No, it’s a fucking disaster. Not only are there trails, but there are piles.

I am looking forward to lots of things about wrapping up all of this mayhem, but mostly I am looking forward to a cleaner house. There are trails and piles everywhere, I am in denial about the bathroom floor, and it is making me a little bonkers.

Even in the afterglow of cheap, fun sandals, the usual Tuesday errands had me out of sorts. I was driving home and feeling undone, so I just kept driving, up Falls Road past the McMansions and private schools, looking for a little park where I could turn the music up and sit in the car and just cry my guts out for a few minutes. I couldn’t find a park, so I hung a right when I saw Shawan Road, figuring if I couldn’t find a park, than a parking lot would have to do. As it was, the last time I had a big drive and sob it was on my not-so-fun thirty-fourth birthday, when I ended up in the parking lot of the Wegmans at Hunt Valley Town Center, eating a pint of ice cream (technically, Rice Dream, but the same idea) and calming myself down in the most stereotypically female fashion I could manage.

Today I went to the far edge of one of the back parking lots, turned the music up as loud as it would go, and waited for the release. It didn’t happen. So I sat for a bit in hormone hell, staring out at the trees. I considered ice cream, but talked myself out of it, and realized that if I was able to talk myself out of ice cream it wasn’t really hormone hell. More like hormone heck. I chose noise, surrender, and trees. There is something about the trees around Hunt Valley that look exactly right to me, and it helps. It’s how I knew I would end up living around here, even when we were looking at houses in the city. After twenty minutes or so, I headed home.

I thought about making cookies, but got down to homework instead. All things pass. One last brutal week, then more yoga, lots more yoga, and a little less chaos on the inside and the outside.

2. Today I was on Cold Spring Lane, waiting to get on 83, when I looked in my rearview mirror and saw in the vehicle behind me a big, burly looking bearded guy who was holding a chihuahua in a sweater, and thoroughly enjoying a round of dog smooches. Made me melt.

That would be just about 19 inches, and this was after a few inches had already melted away.

From the sound of things on Friday, our region was to be struck by one to two feet of apocalypse, but it turned out we got one to two feet of snow, instead. My classes were tiny on Friday and the traffic was ridiculous as people scrambled to buy their (everybody, now) bread, milk, and toilet paper. What is wrong with people? God forbid anyone should go twenty-four hours without everything they want immediately available. And, if you don’t have more than a two day supply of toilet paper in your house, you are one unwashed hand in the holiday party crudite away from disaster.

On that note, I was confused by the crazy long lines at the gas stations. If we get that big of a storm, you’re not going anywhere, people. Settle down.

The other side of the car was covered halfway up the doors. Catch my drift?

So, it snowed. I used to love snow, but then, I also used to have a garage. My great accomplishment during this storm, other than wasting an entire day laying in bed surfing the web and maybe moping, was remembering to get my ice scraper out of the car BEFORE the storm, thus avoiding an avalanche into the front seat this morning. It has taken me only 8-10 garage free winters to figure this out.

Solstice in T-minus fifteen hours.

Accessories!

And, fortunately for me, when I was a teenager I was freaky, and freaky is ageless. Dressing like a freak is entirely more fun as an adult because a) I am old enough at this point to be considered eccentric, which is way cooler, and b) as with the shoe thing, I am not compensating anymore. I never would have admitted it when I was younger, but as naturally odd as I was, somewhere tucked into my combat boots was the knowledge that even if I tried, I couldn’t hit the teen beauty standard.

Anyway, all of this got me thinking about what sixteen year old me would think of now me – just the surface stuff of life. I started having the conversation in my head, and was thinking about writing out the whole thing here, but then decided that in the spirit of sixteen year old me, this is something that should involve notebook paper, list making and doodles. I also recognize completely that this is probably entertaining only to people who knew me and thought I was funny when I was sixteen, so that would be… me. And maybe my mom. But mostly me. Because I have always found myself hilarious. (Click on the image for the full-size jibbajab.)

Things are happening.

I woke up this morning feeling really soft and squishy about the world. As I was driving to midtown, I suddenly got it, in a very visceral way, that the only way to experience the world is with complete vulnerability, totally open, totally willing to have my heart broken every moment, otherwise, what is the point? I could no more see things completely with my eyes half-closed than I could really experience anything with my heart half shadowed. I was on Falls Road and there was mist, and leaves, and sun, and branches, and it was so beautiful that I thought I was going to fall apart.

This has been happening a lot lately. I get very emotional about minor things – the pattern of rust on a gas cap, trees, etc. It is not in a bad, bipolar kind of way, it is more of a softening. Every day is a swim in the ocean, and I am getting pushed down into the sand and sticks and shells over and over, getting scraped up, skin stinging, and it feels so damn good. I am a spiny little shell being broken down into sand, moving toward entropy, chaos, dissolving into uniformity, part of the whole. The world has opened in a way that I could not have expected.

I think this may be why I’ve been into the crazy ridiculous power classes lately, or maybe this is partly the result of them. Right now I need the practice to beat me up a little, I need to practice surrender, and I need to finally let go.

I never thought I would lose my edge and be happy about it. It is not even so much that I’m happy about it, it is that it just doesn’t matter, because what is happening in place of the edge is so much better. (“Sell your cleverness. Purchase wonder.” -Rumi) I still have my moments, but mostly I just want to let go and let life happen.

Tonight my car was towed while I was in class at Midtown, and the experience of tracking down my car, waiting for Scott to pick me up, and bailing out my car was completely different from what it would have been even a few months ago. I did not realize it until I got home, but there was no running commentary in my head about how much it sucked, no narrative about supporting the local economy with my inability to read a street sign, none of it. Maybe it was because I had just come out of a class (and it was one of those weird, clumsy ones, too. I fell a bunch of times.), but when I was waiting outside of Midtown I was just waiting outside of Midtown, and the only issue I had through the whole process was that I was kind of hungry. Even when we got to the lot, the only thought that I had about the whole thing was that it must suck to work there and deal with angry people all day. There was even a sign on the window that said something like, “We are not the ones who towed your car. Please do not yell at us.” It was very zen, and now I’m sitting here, out $262.00, and I really don’t care. I know I need to do some work to make back that money (it was the Christmas money), but I would have to try pretty hard to get wrapped up in a story about it.

On and on I go, but as always, Rumi says it much better.

Chickpea to Cook
Rumi

A chickpea leaps almost over the rim of the pot
where it is being boiled.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

The cook knocks him down with the ladle.

“Don’t you try to jump out.
You think I’m torturing you.
I’m giving you flavor
so you can mix with spices and rice
and be the lovely vitality of a human being.

Remember when you drank rain in the garden.
That was for this.”

Grace first. Sexual pleasure,
then a boiling new life begins,
and the Friend has something good to eat.

Eventually the chickpea
will say to the cook,
“Boil me some more.
Hit me with the skimming spoon.
I can’t do this by myself.

I’m like an elephant that dreams of gardens
back in Hindustan and doesn’t pay attention
to his driver. You’re my cook, my driver,
my way into existence. I love your cooking.”

The cook says,
“I was once like you,
fresh from the ground. Then I boiled in time,
and boiled in the body, two fierce boilings.

My animal soul grew powerful.
I controlled it with practices,
and boiled some more, and boiled
once beyond that,
and became your teacher.”

I think the car that hit the deer kept moving. I couldn’t tell. As soon as I passed the deer and the traffic was back to normal, I fell apart. I was barely able to drive, and there was nowhere for me to pull over until I got to my own driveway. I noticed that the moon was full. I held myself together long enough to get inside without my neighbor seeing the state I was in, then sobbed my guts out all over Scott for another twenty minutes.

Just when I thought I was so tough and centered – I can handle mortality, telling the world my secrets, my dog eating a rabbit, and all the complications in my life – I was totally undone by this. It was one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever seen.

Coincidentally, for the past few days I’ve been thinking about a story a friend told me in college, about driving down a dark road with his friends one night, and hitting a deer. The deer was suffering, but not dead, when they stopped, so one of them broke the deer’s neck to kill it. It gave me a chill when he told me (I was always a little afraid of him), and I can’t remember if it was my friend who killed the deer, or any of the other details. I tried to use it in a short story at some point, but it never quite worked out, and now I can’t remember which parts of the story actually happened, and which details I added when I tried to write it.

Anyway, when I calmed down, sat on the couch, and opened my laptop, the first story in my news feed was something about accordions and Mexican funerals, and it felt strangely fitting. I came back to all of this mortality that has been around me lately – literally and symbolically. The frivolousness has been fun, but I have been running long enough. Even on the way to teach this morning, I was revisiting the idea that death is the only thing that brings meaning to life. On it goes. It wasn’t the asskicking I expected, but I guess it worked.

I have been thinking recently that it might be time for me to look into getting glasses, and this was confirmed as we drove into Philly and Erin could read a street sign before I could read it. She told me this outright -that if she can see better than anyone it’s a problem-  and as proof went on to describe how even with glasses, she can really only see if she tilts her head a certain way to look through one part of the lens. So, yes, it’s confirmed. Monday morning I’ll be making an appointment with an optometrist. I’ve been avoiding wearing the glasses I have for years, mostly because I didn’t want to get dependent on them, but lately it has been more that I don’t want to admit that any part of me is declining. Still, I have always found glasses wildly sexy, so I guess it’s not so bad. Of course, I have found them wildly sexy on men. Who aren’t me. I suppose I could find a man to wear them for me, but I don’t think glasses work that way.

Dinner was fabulous. After appetizers, Erin had the pacific rim grilled tofu, and I had the grilled seitan. We were having a nice chat about lots of things, among them Harry Potter (she has a Ravenclaws for Obama tshirt!), and I gave my little ardent missive in defense of J.K. Rowling’s ability as a storyteller, and the value of this outside the realm of literary fiction. I finished my dinner before Erin finished hers, and as I was waiting for her to finish, my mind started to wander, and I had the thought that hey, maybe, just maybe I could find a very subtle way to work a Harry Potter reference into my next tattoo. Then I told Erin about the dorkiest thing I have ever thought in my life and we had a nice laugh. Still… maybe Gryffndor colors? Although, I probably would have been a Ravenclaw. Yeah, no doubt about that.

Wait, where was I? Right. Dinner at Horizons, my favorite restaurant in the world. You know how sometimes women get all faux-orgasmic about chocolate, like every piece of chocolate is the most sensual experience ever? Well, I love chocolate tons, but tonight I had an autumn parfait -candied pears, cinnamon (soy) ice cream, figs, and some kind of spice cake- that was absolutely, positively, otherworldly. About halfway through, I realized that I was staring off into space and I hadn’t said anything in a long, long time. It took a moment to identify the exact sensation, but there it was: I felt stoned. Super stoned. That parfait could have been a great big purple bong (hellllooo google analytics) for the way I felt. In a way, it’s like cutting out the middleman – going right from zero to blissed out / turned on / munchies without the actual pot. Quite an accomplishment for a cute little dessert.

The drive back was even worse than the drive there, but I was still all stoned from the autumn parfait, so I didn’t really mind driving home at forty miles per hour in the rain.