Illiterations: Laughing At My Own Expense

My recent visit to see Alice, my lifelong childhood friend, afforded us a number of opportunities to reminisce. Predictably, the conversation eventually meandered to our memories of the summer day a few years back, when the El Dorado County sheriff raided my property in full riot gear, with dogs and assault weapons at the ready. Alice, her husband William, and Jeff and I were all in shorts and even possibly underwear (having never gotten dressed on a hot September weekday when I was working in my home office and they were newly arrived guests who’d just driven ‘round the US on a late summer vacation to get here). I was in my separate office, a building I’d crafted with love as my sole and separate space where I could work undisturbed. My wonderful, barn-like office building was flooded with filtered light and views of my beach and the American River beyond. I detected movement on the hillside looking away from the beach, and the motion was moving in the direction of the vacant seco...

Sometimes, just these recent years, I feel as though I’m hiding in plain sight.  My world is compartments.  I have the real estate compartment.  The dog-mom compartment.  The “I do CrossFit” compartment.  The “good friend to my girlies” compartment.... And, there’re the little spaces I really don’t want to admit.  I don’t want them to be seen.  They are the compartments filled with my short-comings; my failures; my weaknesses.  In there lie monsters. I’m writing this because I can’t keep it to myself anymore, yet I am fearful of sharing with friends.  I’ve tried to explain this to my loved ones; my mom; my sister; friends.  I’ve been disbelieved, shamed, abandoned, even lied about, but rarely have I been supported or believed.  So I lay my truths here in this tomb of digitalization, knowing I’ve finally spoken it somewhere, even if only to electrons and silent technology. I think that my community doesn’t believe me because,...

My path in life has never been typical.  Being, among many other things, an engineer, I view my life's trajectory in a flow chart manner; I look back and see that everything was a series of either/or junctures.  In this way, I can see, (I fantasize), how my life would have looked if those roads less taken had been the road taken, instead. And, sometimes, I have to admit, that some roads were not taken just because I came face to face with a decision I had been working up to, and then it just seemed too..... scary.  I hate that there are certain things I’ve gotten close to doing or goals I’ve gotten close to realizing, I have veered always from at the last minute because the pressure of getting that close was so intimidating. I know that I can’t list a LOT of “near misses” in my lifetime.  Perhaps I can choose to view that as its own sort of success.  I mean, veering is human, right?  I don’t spend a lot of time reflecting on things I wish I’d done....

I’ve been gone.  I went dark on my blog.  Truth is, I didn’t want to keep writing about my wounds and keep dragging whomever is reading my blog entries through my muck and mire. So much has happened since I shared an entry.  My last one was a bit of commentary on living in the dark during the power-downs last fall.  Not for the first time, I reflect on the irony of those couple of months—we felt has though that  was isolation!  Another responsive reflection though is that it gave my little town of Auburn a chance to practice coming together as a community to make sure everybody had what they needed. So, when March 13th rolled around, and sheltering in place and social distancing and self-isolating became a real thing, I think we were better prepared for having been through the power shut downs.  Yay us! In between all of that, life was really feeling as though I’d found an equilibrium I’ve sought and not had for some time.  My health and ...

We’re in the beginning stages of round two of the PG&E power outages for the Northern California area. While I fully and whole-heartedly believe the planned outages are a bullying move by a conglomerate grown too large and bloated, I also believe that I live in a community that can take the strong-arming and come out the victors, because we band together. I’m lying here in our bedroom, on the second “first night” of outages...meaning the second round and the first night of the second round.  I think that PG&E wants to see us on our knees; they want to see us begging not to make this our “business as usual.”  If this were our usual, I’d be ok.  We would be ok.  But the fact that it comes from a big fat conglomerate that wants to shove it down our throats makes it FAR LESS PALATABLE, I want to say FUCK YOU, PG&E!  I mean, I can’t.  This is what we are all coping with together.  And, THAT is what PG&E didn’t get.  A community su...

We're in a funny place in this world these days where people (including myself, sometimes) share very personal feelings and experiences on social media.  My point of view about this is that different people have different reasons for sharing, but for many, the social sphere feels a lot like a personal support system. For me--in writing this blog--it's a personal challenge to be authentic, but also more raw and real and vulnerable than I feel should be on, say, Facebook.  Even more, its always been intended to be a challenge to write more than I otherwise would, and to risk my allowing public access to my writing. Not that a whole ton of people read my stuff, but it's authentically there, regardless. All of that aside, a friend did just this morning tell me she reads some of these posts.  And, in the course of telling me that she reads my blog, she claimed I had made public a personal email from a third person.  In fact, I referenced a comment from that third ...

Nico and Joy 2008 Although my lifelong love of dogs drew me to this week here at Cesar's, I also recognize that I am living in less than perfect harmony with my current pack.  I am certain that the sadness I personally feel around of the imbalance and lack of harmony in my own pack most certainly fueled my unwavering choice to go as soon as I could. Along with an amazing amount of physical activity and an abundance of information to fill my hungry mind, each day after lunch we are lead through a meditation.  And each day, a different style of meditation is offered for us to experience.  Guided meditation and singing bowl meditation have been offered, and today it was meditation to chanting.  I used to meditate regularly.  I have not been following that practice for many years.  I feel a dawning recognition that I will return to the habit. Today's meditation was difficult to ease into.  I don't really know why, but then without noticing, I was ...

Seems like a simple, clear, and easy-to-follow directive, right? Here in this group of forty or so enthusiastic people whose lives and loves revolve around dogs, there is a hum of excitement, and, like the canines we love, everybody is sniffing noses and making friends all around. As I check into the hotel this afternoon, just after 1 pm, a woman walks around the corner and sees that I have Sunny and Sonja with me.  She asks if I am with the Cesar Millan group.  I answer that I am.  "So am I," she adds, and instantly we are introducing ourselves, she is meeting the dogs, and they are getting a bit over-excited.  So much for no touch and no talk.  It isn't her fault, we're both happy enough to meet that we--that I-- relax the requirements I normally have for my dogs on meeting a new person. Robin, as I now know her, had just flown in from Colorado.  We have several hours to wait for our first meeting of the Fundamentals class to begin, and we cross...

 A young girl learns juggling.  Photo from Circo de Los Ninos. Some months ago, I did a multi-part post about the trip I took a few years ago to Cuba with Jeff.  I hadn’t really made time to write down my memories and the myriad emotions that visiting Cuba evoked.  Perhaps that post ran too long—or, too many “parts.” I find myself moved to write again about a little town I visited two days ago.  It’s here in the state of Nayarit, Mexico, and it is fondly refferred to as San Pancho by the locals.  It’s true name, as a few Mexican nationals have reminded me, is San Francisco (I felt they were super traditional, and wanted to make sure I knew “Pancho” wasn’t the real name).  It’s a funny thing, my first serious boyfriend was a direct descendant of Pancho Villa, and somehow, I never internalized that it was the Mexican nickname for Francisco, in spite of the fact that he loved to tell people that he was a Pancho Villa grandson. ...

Are you one of the many, many people in the world who earn their living in alternate work styles?  I've been watching the phenomenon over the past 25 years as the earliest "dot com" employees  began creating workplace environments and work schedules and even workplaces which simply didn't look anything like the IBM-blue, cubicles and offices, of yore. I contemplate this often.  I adore my own work-lifestyle, as demanding as it is.  I think most people would agree that there is almost immeasurable value in a life where a person can simply decide, for example, "Monday, I am going to my daughter's cheer tryouts," and not have to make a request to her employer for the time off.   Self-employed people have, to some degree, been doing this for a while, although many I've met are the least willing to absent themselves from their business for fear of missing a business opportunity.  But, I see many of them becoming more free to escape and to se...