answer: porcelain

two sacrificial virgins at the pedestal of the toilet gods, originally uploaded by McBeth.

question:
around what did I cling to from the hours of 4am - 9am this morning?


I haven't had a migraine headache like that for a long, long time.
I'm on the mend though, with chicken noodle soup and Aleve and warm blankets and a 15 minute burst of fresh air when I made myself go outside, and specifically for that.

This is the year I resolve to become a superhuman who doesn't have to deal with hassles like headaches.

fraud

alright already, originally uploaded by McBeth.

The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat oneself.

-- Philip James Bailey

I most need you to love me when I least deserve it

night ice, originally uploaded by McBeth.

Goodbye 2007, Hello 2008

zinnia's party hat, originally uploaded by McBeth.

Steppin' out with my baby
Can't go wrong 'cause I'm in right
It's for sure, not for maybe
That I'm all dressed up tonight

Steppin' out with my honey
Can't be bad to feel so good
Never felt quite so sunny
And I keep on knockin' wood

-- Israel Isidore Baline

purpose

I have a purpose. You do too. Don't believe me if I try to tell you that I've known what mine has been all along because anyone who says that is either a big fat liar or she's a tightly bound deterministic sort who hasn't had a wide enough band of existence to discern purpose from not-purpose and wouldn't know purpose if it walked up to her and slapped her upside the head. But yes, I believe we all come into the world messy and gooey, and though what it will be might not seem clear from the gate, we are each born with purpose. We do some awfully strange thing to either confirm or deny our purposes but, like it or not they're there. Purpose exists. And while it is kind of funny in that morbid sort of off-color hilarity, I am fairly sure that some people's purpose really is to serve as a clearly bad example for the rest of us.

I've shaped myself around the inkling I have about what my purpose might be, but there's really no way of telling whether my guess is accurate or not because that sum total doesn't come until after I'm gone and while I hope by then we'll have worked out some inter-reality communication device, my guess is that we probably won't be sitting down to tea to discuss it.

I know I've had several unsatisfying attempts at narrowing down my purpose. I'm pretty sure it has to do with helping people. The results so far have been mixed. When I was a kid I thought I could help people by being a funeral director, but given my inability to keep my emotions in check I decided I'd make a terrible funeral home director if it meant the people coming to me for my professional help instead had to console me. Then I thought I'd help people by doing whatever they wanted. I ended up being taken advantage of a little too often. Many people have remarked on my apparently remarkable patience, so I worked with slightly more tender populations- kids, disabled, elderly. Burnout can come quickly though, and I didn't especially enjoy doing something for which patience is some big whoop-dee-doo deal. (it's really not. work on it, and you'll see too) Then I hear a few things about how calming my voice is - practically a magical potion for customer service jobs, so I wonder if my purpose could be to work as a financial customer service pod person for a major corporation. That particular quest started off all right, but somehow my purpose began to include handling oozing molding dripping unsalable products which, I gotta say, scrapes some of the dazzle right off the dream. I slowly wondered 'hunh, I have no particular accounting proficiencies, so why am I such a whiz at this 10-key again?' I'm confident that I stuck with that job as long as I was able to because, as a single mother, a job with health insurance and benefits make an incredible difference and I sorely needed them, right up until the trade-off started to make me sick. I didn't go back.

Someone also told me that I did nice work with computers, so I thought I could help people by making things look pretty on a monitor. But once I started taking programming classes I quickly realized that I'd rather have shredded paper stapled to the surfaces of my eyeballs than write computer code. Yes, I try to keep as up as I can tolerate on computerish happenings, but I've meet a few geeks in the ensuing years and, ladies and gentlemen, I'm here to say I am no geek. I wish it were not so, but 'tis true.

The way I'm coming to look at the situation, it makes good sense to keep getting up each day if there's one thing I want to keep coming back for. So maybe I can make that one thing, whatever it might be, the thing I'll think of as my personal write-in candidate for the position of My Purpose.

And if I keep getting up every day, and if I keep returning to this thing I've elected, I believe I'll either discover that the thing I thought would propel me into bliss isn't working out so well, or I can realize hey, this seems to be doing it for me, and I can keep exploring the edges of that thing.

If I was an umbrella stand, (well first, I'd be mind-numbingly bored, but stay with me here...) I would be constructed with reinforcements at all the right umbrella stand places. My knob would be strong and tight. I'd be sturdy. I'd be heavy. I'd be built and ready to hold umbrellas under the harshest sun and against the strongest winds and even under substantial spring rainstorms.

But at the end of summer when colder weather starts to roll in, I'd probably get my feelings downright hurt for no longer being that fabulous wonderful umbrella stand that everyone knew and appreciated during the mild months to somehow suddenly becoming this toe-stubbing heavy-ass frozen-to-the-deck troublemaker. Fair weather friends, I'm telling you ... how d'ya think we umbrellas came to use that colloquialism anyway, duh?

So if I was an umbrella stand frozen to an icy landing out there alone and feeling washed-up, I would hope that the falling snow would either submerge me until leaves start budding or that it would say soft snowy things to help me feel less uselessly alone. One snowflake might blow prismatic kisses toward me. Or a little snowflake children's choir would sing me tender lullabies. Or a usually snobby group of early adolescent snowflakes who'd normally skrinkle their noses at me would have an empathic moment in relating to my emptiness to crack barely-perceptable snow smiles. Old snowflakes who've been around for weeks might smell weird, but I'll bet they'd be the most compassionate companions. They'd circle their sun spotted flake arms around me, telling me soothing stories about how sometimes we think we've lost both our worth and our way. Those times can be trying. They can be untenable. But eventually -and there's always an eventually if you wait long enough- then (if you're a snowflake) kids come out to play, or (if you're an umbrella stand) winter eventually passes and then everyone will be so glad to have your sturdiness back around again, or ("like people", as the snowflakes tell my umbrella stand knob because they don't have their glasses on and they don't realize it's a knob and not an eye) you realize that this thing you've been questioning and doubting, the thing you've agreed to get out of bed and get dressed for, this thing you have been practicing is, quite possibly, exactly what you were meant to be.

If I was that directionless hope-challenged frozen umbrella stand, old snowflakes saying that kind of thing to me would probably be just the perfect sort of murmuring. It might even be just enough encouragement to make me stick around to see what would happen come the end of winter.

strength

strength, originally uploaded by McBeth.

We each are stronger than we can imagine.

Frail, too. Breakable in the simplest of ways.

But oh, how strong we can be when strength is needed.

third chakra

Anahata, under further exam, originally uploaded by McBeth.

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.

-- Neil Gaiman

we deserve no praise for doing what we ought

winter shoreline, originally uploaded by McBeth.

light

yep, my new flashlight works, originally uploaded by McBeth.

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can't quite name.

-- François de la Rochefoucauld

bah humbug

warm head, cold heart?, originally uploaded by McBeth.

Linus: You're so crabby all the time you've forgotten how to smile!
Lucy: Who's forgotten how to smile?
Linus: You have! Let's see you smile. I'll bet you can't!

Lucy tries to smile

There! See? A smile goes up, not down! You've forgotten how to smile! See?

Linus leaves

Lucy: How humiliating!

paths

winter card, originally uploaded by McBeth.

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.

-- Henry David Thoreau

what is left

coat tree, originally uploaded by McBeth.

Art is what's left over after you've defined everything else.

-- Michael Vitale

cordial

cordially yours,, originally uploaded by McBeth.

Tea! thou soft, sober, sage and venerable liquid; thou female tongue-running, smile-smoothing, heart-opening, wink-tippling cordial, to whose glorious insipidity I owe the happiest moment of my life, let me fall prostrate...

--Colley Cibber

the wheel

old and slow, originally uploaded by McBeth.

Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.

-- Dave Barry

childhood

snaggle, originally uploaded by McBeth.

All the time a person is a child he is both a child and learning to be a parent. After he becomes a parent he becomes predominantly a parent reliving childhood.

-- Benjamin Spock

lunar landing

lunar landing, originally uploaded by McBeth.

Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.

-- Buddha

winter crafts

I ventured out earlier today for a few groceries and supplies, then spent the last few hours curled up in the ridiculously poufy blue recliner. With a cozy blanket tossed across my lap, I've been poking holes into an orange using a medium-sized picture hanging nail. Then into each of those holes I've insert one whole clove. The trick is to get a good sense of the clove stem size and get those cloves as close to the surrounding inserted cloves so eventually, when the entire surface of the orange has been poked and cloved, you won't be able to see orange skin between the clove heads.

I started out in something of a seasonal funk, frustrated at my desperately low income, wondering how or if I'll be able to buy nice things for my loved ones, resentful of the television commercial people who are shopping and decorating and gifting and making wish-fulfilling memories with their pretend families whose outfits all complement one another. Something about the changes taking place in my own family have me examining others' families; watching them more closely for clues to reveal how these organizations are supposed to work when life gets complicated.

I suppose it was in that process of de-funking that I began thinking wistfully about what a lovely thing my family could be when I was a small child. Both my parents helped make the majority of the gifts they gave to other people, and if we were either good enough or whined enough to drive my parents up a wall, my older sister and I would be allowed to help. The years my dad put together the complicated ornament kits, I'd get to take one of the straight pins and painstakingly sort all the microscopic silver pearl beads from the rest of the pile. And then I'd sort all the white beads, and then the purple disks and on and on, whatever else required sorting, until each color and shape was fully contained in its own individual cereal bowl. Then we'd sit and watch our father thread two gold pearls, three red bugle beads, and three white pearl beads onto a straight pin which he'd then stick into a Styrofoam ball. And then another, and then hundreds more, until the Styrofoam was replaced with a fancy snowflake-looking creation that would be finished off with a velvet ribbon that would later enable the ornament to hang from the recipient's Christmas tree. I loved those gift-making times. I loved hanging out with my dad. We didn't even have to talk a lot; just sitting there, being allowed to hang quietly at his elbow and study the details of my father's hands - it was wildly rewarding enough.

There were the ornaments, there was impossibly intricate string art, there were handmade candles, there were glass containers filled with layers of colorful beans , there were the beading loom-made bracelets and choker-style necklaces, and there were cloved oranges.

The cloved oranges were my mother's specialty, though occasional my dad would lend a hand with ice pick duty. My parents' expectations of us were clear when I was young, and it was understood that we girls would be granted permission to use the pinprick sharp ice picks after a quick safety briefing, but if we were dumb enough to entertain ideas of poking holes in ourselves with them we'd have to deal with the stupidity fallout on our own, too. Fair enough. Soon enough we'd all laugh at our collectively sticky hands, and when the last orange was clove covered, Dad would macramé long slender braided rope hangers for the oranges to hang in. Our fingernails would carry the crisp scent of cloves for days after these present-making sessions.

Those memories, those connections, - that experience - is what I have decided I want to practice this year. I don't want to elbow strangers in malls, I don't want to have to swim in excess, I don't want to get so worried about giving gifts that are "good enough". I will give goodness. The things I will share with those I love will be things I have created with my own sticky clove-scented fingers.

* * * * * * * *

update: wouldn't it just figure, the first orange I'd been cloving turned mushy in one or two spots, including a rather large circumference around the top. While I worked on poking holes, etc. I had to be more and more careful about those mushy spots, but by the time I got to covering the remaining peek-a-boo areas of orange skin on its bottom, the top split open. Now my orange looks like an afro-covered Pac Man. I was crushed last night (orange crush? ha!) but it's not tragic enough to make me stop trying. Orange #2: I Mean It This Time will begin today.

children

scarlett b&w, originally uploaded by McBeth.

Even when freshly washed and relieved of all obvious confections, children tend to be sticky.

-- Fran Lebowitz

wishing star

purple star, originally uploaded by McBeth.

Star Light, Star Bright
First star I see tonight.
I wish I may, I wish I might
Have the wish I wish tonight.

faces

dry head, originally uploaded by McBeth.

Strangers are exciting,
their mystery never ends.
But, there's nothing like looking at your own history
in the faces of your friends.

-- Ani Difranco