For most of my life, I have been blessed weight-wise. I have been able to eat anything and everything, as much or as little, and I would not suffer from any negative ramifications. Food hasn’t really been a big ‘thing’ in my life-it’s not my friend, I don’t eat when I’m sad or happy, to celebrate or to battle depression. I have plenty of pharmaceuticals that achieve those things. So what I eat and my activity level have not been much of an issue.Until I moved here. As is known, I’m here, living a sort of controlled life in paradise, otherwise known as ‘getting back on my feet.’ Sitting around can really put on the pounds, I’ve found. Still, I’ve stayed thin doing less. I exercise. I don’t eat much. I don’t drink anymore. This should not be happening! Sadly, sitting here, watching the clock mark that my 20’s are becoming and ever more distant dream, seems to have also have brought my metabolism to a screeching halt. By nature, I’m something of a tomboy, so apparently nature thought it would be a funny joke if put all the weight I gained on my body would be just like if I were a guy. You know, the ‘apple’ shaped body, where the first place any ounce goes is right to the gut. Just like a guy. The only difference is a guy can put on a larger pair of pants, button up a bigger shirt, and he’s fine. Better than fine. He’s doing well! Just look at him-he’s not starving. A guy can be quite overweight and look just fine. They’ve got a LOT of leeway here. Women, unfortunately, don’t get off so easy. We don’t have that ‘just buy a bigger button down shirt’ option. The current fashion trends have been baby doll tops for the last several years, and they only exacerbate the problem. And you know what that does to a girl like me? It brings one thing: “THE QUESTION.”“When are you due?” Due? One look in the mirror and all of those extra pounds that makes your boyfriend/fiancé/husband a little pudgy but still cute and perfectly loveable and good looking only seems to do one thing for you. It makes you look pregnant. And for some reason, this seems to be a perfectly acceptable question for ANYONE to ask you. I know of no other question that can ruin your day so quickly. There is no good retort, no good comeback to put that person in his/her place. Really, your only defense is to say “Actually, I’m not pregnant,” and it makes the other person REALLY embarrassed. Still, it doesn’t do a whole lot for your self esteem, the masses of society thinking you’re pregnant, when the real truth is your genetic makeup just decided it liked apples more than pears. It sucks. And I’m not even overweight! I fit in the scales for my height and everything. Goodness, you’d think after the mind they gave me, all filled with who knows what but guaranteed ‘uniqueness,’ you’d think I’d get a break in the body department. I guess I did, for a while, and I’m glad in hindsight of how I looked back then. It would be one of my three genie wishes to look like that again.Oh well. It is what it is. After spending decades hating a perfectly good, useful and lithe body, I’m now here with my baby guy. Karma can be a bitch. I know I can deal with this, though. It’s not that big a deal.But still, for the sake of all apple shaped women everywhere, PLEASE, PLEASE PLEASE do not EVER ask a female when she’s ‘due’ unless she has expressly indicated that she is, in fact, pregnant. We have enough things to deal with; please do not automatically wreck our self-esteem on top of it all. It’s not nice, and, for the most part, it’s not our fault. We’re NOT lying around eating boxes of Krispy Cremes in front of the TV; we’re doing everything we can to rid ourselves of this ‘belly fat.’ We are not exactly thrilled about this situation either; however, please keep the inquisitiveness to yourself. I mean, it is a pretty nosy question to be asking in the first place, don’t you think? I am sure if one is really pregnant, you will be barraged with a discussion of due dates and stuff like that. Unless it really is that situation and we really are pregnant, however, no matter what tone you were trying to convey like ‘I was just trying to be nice,’ or ‘ I was just trying to have a conversation,’ please, just do not use it anymore. You’ll just hurt someone’s feelings and make yourself look like a fool.
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Will You Still Be Here Tomorrow?
04.16
I got into an interesting conversation with a friend recently, he’s very ‘conversive’ when talking about Tibet, a topic of which I know little. I wrote back, talking about the near impossibility of finding any sort of truly objective information, for the simple fact is we are all incluenced in one way or another by our surroundings; hence, no single interpretation of what whatever event is going on can be truly objective.
But then that led me down an interesting lane…
Really, there’s little objectivity in anyone’s life. Every day we are alive, every thing we do in that day-from the most mundane of tasks to important decisions-has an effect, perhaps one ever so slight, on us-who we are, what our beliefs are, how we see and respond to the world around us. The only way another person could even come close to understanding your view for that particular day would be if s/he were around you for that entire time, and even then, your interpretations would be likely to differ.
I think that this is why the number of friends a person has tends to dwindle over time. The people you thought would be with you forever turn out not to be because you (or they) have taken a different trajectory, and when your paths again cross, all you share are those moments from the past. Of course, it’s fun to reminisce about the ‘good ole’ days,’ but realistically, how long is that going to last? A few minutes? An hour?
That’s when I thought about the possibility of being able to test whether or not a friendship is a real and lasting one, or just a passing whim. I have two childhood friends with whom I grew up. One lives in Seattle, and one lives in Hawaii, but in Maui. Last year, we visited my friend in Seattle. I had not seen her in 3 years. Our lives now are completely different, and they have been for about the last 20 years. The experiences that we do we share are only about things that happened when we were little. However, when meeting with this person, it is if 20 years were only 20 minutes ago. Only a little attention is paid to the goofy things we used to do when we were growing up. The rest starts where it does and takes off. It’s always been that way. I know that years may pass before our paths cross again, but when they do, it will seem like nothing. It’s like that with my friend on Maui as well. Our friendship stands time’s testing.
I think about all of the people I’ve met and all the people who I really thought I would be friends with forever and ever, and how much it hurt when they went away and I felt abandoned. Yet in this light, I can understand that was meant to be that way. Though there was a group with whom I spent years of traveling and new them all extremely well, those days are long gone. It would be cool to see them in a reunion type gathering for a day, but really, all we share is a specified amount of time in our past. For a friendship to survive, there has to be more; it can’t be described, it’s a sort of substance of timelessness. Ive realized that though my handfuls of friends have whittled down to one hand (with room), these are the people who will always be there for me. No, though they probably probably don’t understand me, and it’s likely we have very different tastes in everything from food to books, I know that these are the ones who are there for me, and I for them, until the very end. It’s like we share a spiritual bond rather than a superficial one, something that is greater than can be understood, and to know and feel that brings great comfort to me.
Paradise Beyond Lost
02.04
OK, two things happened in January that were just so wrong I was just stunned; they were that far beyond my comprehension.
First, in Kailua, a woman’s boyfriend beats her to death in broad daylight with people watching. The people watching are excused because the guy had a gun and so there was really nothing they could do. I can imagine this scene if I were in it and being all heroic like and running up and kicking the guy in the balls or something, but with gun in his hand, that’s a serious increase of the likelihood of dying in the process. And this is a total stranger. I think if it were a relative or close friend, my confidence wouldn’t wane so quickly at the sight of the gun and the prospect of being killed, and I bet the same for the people who saw this. But the fact that the guy did it in the day? Outside? In public? It’s not as though everyone had their eyes closed so they wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a lineup. By committing this heinous act, he’s sealing his own fate.
And he’s REALLY sealing it. It turns out that the girl he just took the life from is from a big family here. A REALLY big, well known family here. A family who isn’t just going to take the killing of their sister/cousin/aunt lightly. And the boyfriend KNOWS this, hence further sealing his fate. Was this in his head (if I kill this girl, what is the relative likelihood of receiving repercussions from the family?)? Obviously not. I don’t understand how someone can get so mad that they’d be inclined to go kick,hit.strangle, the living hell out of someone to the point of killing them.
Now here’s the second story: A family lives in an apartment. In the apartment, there is an 18 month old boy. The boy’s father is there, and so is the mother’s current boyfriend. Needless to say, people were around. In this complex another guy occupies an apartment. The family has never had trouble with him; in fact, he has even babysat the 18 month old before.
The guy from the other apartment takes the kid (who was playing outside or something), holds on to him, and then throws him from the pedestrian overpass into the freeway traffic below.
No, this is no joke. The highway was closed for 5 hours. This is the one I don’t understand. Even if the guy didn’t particularly like the kid, can’t you see that ’if I throw this toddler over this overpass, he will die?’ I heard in places in CA they had to wire over the pedestrian overpasses because of the number of people who were jumping and opting to end their life that way, and the likelihood is that all of our overpasses will be caged over now too. I can understand people committing suicide this way. I can understand people wanting to throw things over overpasses. I can understand the desire to do some tagging on an overpass. But nonchalantly throwing another human being over? A short time later, the guy even came back to see the effect of what he had done.
This one is entirely beyond my realm of understanding. And even worse, what about the two cars that he landed upon? In a single instant, one person changed the course of many lives. Even though it had nothing to do with those two cars, that ‘what if?’ is going to linger with them for a long time.
But what about the guy? There was talk of his mental instability and whatnot. Regardless, sane or not, what kind of answer can a person expect to receive when asked “Why?” This was cold blooded, but it was also spur of the moment. Reports didn’t indicate he was a serious drug user, perhaps hallucinating that the toddler was Satan and he had to throw him for the sake of all mankind. What’s impossible to understand is also it’s simplicity. Guy gets up, guy gets a hold of a child that’s not his, guy throws child to his ultimate death. What makes this scary is that it seems to lack a motive.
Caroline Myss said that in this new age, many people deny the presence of evil. That there is no duality of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ anymore. She says she disagrees with it. These two occurences put me on her side. While most of the 6 billion or so people inhabiting this planet fall somewhere along the continuum of this duality, there are some, not many, barely half of a drop in the bucket when you think about the overall masses, but yes, there are people who are evil, and yes, they do exist.
Just wanted to let y’all know that everything isn’t always perfect here in ‘paradise.’
Anniversary
09.11
When you think of the term, you think of a length of time spent with another, spent apart, how much time has elapsed since you did or didn’t do something. When it’s a marker of something positive (like my parents recently celebrating having been married for 40 years), it’s wonderful. But what happens when it’s the anniversary of the passing of someone you loved? Then it’s treacherous.
The time had come. Cancer had ridden his body. He had lost a bunch of weight. He had had to have a toe amputated which was cancerous. But here he was,  Rufus Palmer, my golden retriever and most definitely the best friend I’ve ever had, the one who saved me from myself, the one who taught me what love really is, he was the one who was going through all of this suffering. We lived in a farmhouse in Vermont for many years, just the two of us. Every person who met him immediately fell in love with him, including my mother, who did not like animals at all; she ended up loving him almost as much as I had.Â
 Being my dog, I was given two decisions. Do I opt to have him remain here for my own selfish reasons, having him here at a fraction of who he was for a couple more months (which the vet said would be his maximum life expectancy) because I wanted him here at any cost? Or do I somehow find the strength to love him enough to be able to say goodbye forever, at least in this life?Â
All of this happened in the span of one month. In a way, I’m glad, because he didn’t have to endure eons of suffering, but it’s been really difficult to not place some of the blame on this rock of an island. Before we moved here, in Idaho, he was fine and in perfect health. We move here on May 8th, and he’s in this state by September 11th?Â
Dogs are lucky. If you love them enough and you can get your ego and what it wants to shut up for just a second, you can end their suffering, say goodbye, and let them go with dignity. Humans aren’t so lucky, being forced to maintain what most cannot barely consider ‘living’ at any cost.
It all came down to me. My spiritual beliefs are a hodgepodge of different traditions, but I firmly believe that the spirit is eternal and is with us always. If I believed this, really believed this, how in the world could I force the one who loved me so to remain just to allay my own fears? I could not possibly allow another being to suffer so when I knew he would be happy and peaceful in the spirit realm. So it was my decision to say goodbye to him.
 We (my mom, who had grown to love him as much as me, my dad, and my boyfriend) went to the vet. Rufus knew what was up and had grown to hate that place. They put him on a table. They gave him a shot. I sang him a song I’d been singing to him since he was 7 weeks old. And then he was gone.
Then came the hard part. I have never had to experience the death of anyone really close to me, let alone one of the most important people in my world. I bit my lip to keep from crying as I continued going to interviews. Tears came every time a thought of him came up. My boyfriend’s one primary dislike is crying, so this really sucked for him too.
Today marks a year since that all happened. I’ve managed to completely soak a handkerchief while writing this. The notion they tell you that it takes a year to get over someone you’ve lost is just bullshit to this sentimental Cancerian. The pain and the tears may not come as often as this time last year, but they’re still there. They always will be. And today it hurts as much as if this all happened yesterday instead of a year ago.
I always liked the way the Pet Psychic on Animal Planet would put it when talking about losing our fur covered friends. She said “We never ‘get over’ them. We just get used to living without them.” I couldn’t agree more.Â
So as I try to go on with my normal life today, try to keep my mascara from running, my mind lingers on one thing and one thing only: how lucky I was to have been given seven years to be with the most loving, kind, happy furry spirit that was Rufus Palmer. I was very privileged to have been his companion. He showed me a lot about the world. He gave me a reason to live when I couldn’t find one. And he taught me that unconditional love DOES exist, and receiving that gift is one of the most precious things I’ve ever experienced in my life.