Category: Life

Here We Go Again

~ riggledo ~ 3 Comments

Last Monday marked my final day of Personal Training for a little while.  I’m disappointed for sure.  I liked having the help, and the accountability is more helpful than you can imagine.  With someone waiting for you at a set time and day at the gym, it’s a lot harder to blow it off.  With someone telling you how many of which exercises you’re supposed to do, and not feeling sorry for you when you whine and whimper, it’s harder to slack off once you’re there.

Of course, there were some draw backs as well.  Tawaiin’s measure of my success was my weight and measurements.  There’s a whole elaborate set of measurements that they take every three weeks to track your progress.  I suppose that makes sense from a tracking standpoint, but it didn’t matter to me, weight loss wasn’t my primary reason to be there, and toward the end, I found that I was dreading going on the days that he would take my measurements.  My goal was to get stronger, have more endurance.  I’m not sure about the endurance, just yet, but I definitely got stronger, even just working with him one day a week.

Of course, I see a difference in how I look.  My waist is slimmer, my chest is less “moob”-like (that’s man boobs for anyone who doesn’t know.)  There is the slightest of diagonal lines running from my collar bones to my armpits and slightly less slight diagonal bulges running around the outside of my upper arms.  This is good.  I wouldn’t dare say I’m looking buff, far from it.  But this is good.  Imagine what I could have accomplished with twice a week sessions… or, you know, working out any other day of the week.

I couldn’t afford to see Tawaiin twice a week, and sadly, I never really learned how to work out on my own.  For the last month or so, I only went to the gym on Monday’s.  Not getting my money’s worth and not getting the maximum impact.  Nonetheless, I lost twenty-eight pounds; I don’t know how many inches; and four or five percentage points in “BMI”.  When I started, I was fully entrenched in the ”NOT HEALTHY” section of their chart.  On the last night, he took measurements and I was .01% below the “NOT HEALTHY” section in the “Acceptable” category.  I would have to lose another ten percent to fit into the “Fit” category.  I don’t know if that will ever happen.  I did build some strength and endurance, and for that I am grateful.

A few years ago, I signed up for a program through Men’s Health Magazine called The Abs Diet.  I really liked it because it took all the guesswork out of everything.  Computer generated, but fully customizable, weekly meal plans, daily work-out routines ready and waiting, progress tracking all right there on the website.  It was great.  It is for a fee, but it’s a pretty reasonable fee for what you get (about $15.00 a month.)

One of the new features since I last signed up for the program is a support section, a community of users in a forum and a personal journal which can be kept private or made public… Kinda like a blog.

Anyway, I wrote this, this morning and frankly, I don’t think I can sum things up any better than I did:

Yesterday was my first day of my second go round with this diet.  I did the Abs Diet for several months a few years ago.  I liked it and did fairly well with it without going crazy with every little detail.

I really enjoyed having the meal plan laid out for me without having to put much thought into it.  Each week, I printed out a detailed list of meals and a grocery list to accommodate those meals and, bam!, my thinking was done for me.  The part I struggled with was the exercise.  I never really knew what I was doing and my resources were limited.  I lived in an apartment complex with a gym, (now I live in a duplex) but it was a somewhat limited space and in the evenings it was too crowded to be able to make use of it.  I tried to make it in the mornings, and I did for awhile, but it was tough – I’m not a morning person.

(Full disclosure – I was also drinking pretty heavily and it was tough to make that fit into the plan and get up early enough in the mornings to work out.  Now I don’t drink at all, but I’m still not much of a morning person.)

I went on a two week vacation to visit extended family and didn’t work out a single day while I was away and I just never managed to get back on that horse when I came home.

I started that go round at nearly 290 pounds.  The lowest weight I remember seeing on the scale before I gave up was 254.  My weight climbed slowly – or rather, I thought it was slowly – and I was distressed but never motivated to do anything about it.  For the next three years my weighted fluctuated back and forth always climbing a little higher before coming down again and at my worst I was up to 309 pounds.

Through paying closer attention to what I was eating, eliminating Alcohol from my life and trying to be more active in general, in my daily life, that number came back down to about 288 pounds.

Last year, I decided I wanted to consider a career change and become an Emergency Medical Technician.  The field fascinates me and I’ve got some work experience that lends itself in that direction.  I looked at what they have to do, and I looked at my own condition and knew that physically, I can not do it.  I can’t lift the amount of weight an EMT has to lift and I don’t have the stamina to do a physical job all day long.

In October, I joined 24 hour fitness.  In November, I signed up with a personal trainer.  I worked out with him once a week.  I would have liked to do more, and he wanted me to do more, but it was simply too expensive to do more than once a week.  I’ve gotten own to 265 pounds.  Last week was my final session before the funding ran out.  I couldn’t afford to go back again.  I want to go back as soon as I’m able but it’s insanely expensive and I really don’t know where I’m going to find the funding to pay for it.  And then I remembered the Abs Diet.  I remembered the step by step outlines of what exercises to do and what food to eat and everything.  So I signed up again.

Yesterday was the first day.  I printed out my meal plan and my work out plan and set about making it work.  It was a little tough. I’m a big brother and I spend Sunday afternoons with my Little.  We went to a miniature golf/go kart/arcade/etc center.  Fortunately, food never entered the equation yesterday, but it was five hours out of the middle of my day and I didn’t manage to fit my afternoon “snack #2” into the day.  I went to the gym in the morning, later than I had wanted to.  I thought if I could get there early enough, the weight room wouldn’t be terribly packed and I could figure it out.  I realized, only after I got there and started reviewing the paperwork, that I really didn’t have a clue what I was doing.  The machines all look like medieval torture devices and there are limited, if any, instructions.  I ended up faking most of the exercises using the Nautilus type equipment at the other end of the gym that no one wants to use.

I know that I was better off using that equipment than not doing anything at all.  I also know that a leg press is not the same as a squat and that I won’t get the same results by doing different exercises than what the program prescribes.

I like today’s prescription.  Walk for 45 minutes?  I can do that.  That was always my favorite part from the last go round too…  I’m hoping that tomorrow, I can get into the gym super-early before work and fumble around like an idiot with some of the torture devices– er, weight machines and figure out what the hell I’m doing.

I walked in there yesterday telling myself not to worry about the other people and what they might think looking at me as I screwed everything up, but apparently, I didn’t listen.  I know that if I can just acclimate myself to how it all works, I’ll be fine.  It’s just the acclimating that’s proving to be difficult.  Here’s hoping for a better outcome tomorrow.

Earth Day, Shmearth Day

~ riggledo ~ 2 Comments

Today is Earth Day.  To be honest, I couldn’t care less, but it is.  I am, by no means, a rabid environmentalist.  I don’t care that much about recycling.  I do it because I’m “supposed to” and it has been made fairly easy to do.  Also, I drink enough Diet Pepsi, and pay enough California Redemption Value (basically a bottle deposit only on plastic and aluminum as well as glass, for those of you non-Californians) to make it worthwhile to collect it all up and take it to the recycling center once in a while.  Plus it keeps it out of the hands of the little old lady who wants to come by and dig in my recycle bins at 6:00 in the freaking morning on a Sunday! Do you have any idea how much noise all that aluminum and/or glass makes?

I’m not a conservationist.  I drive a hybrid, but I don’t do it because of the environment, though it does happen to be a “partial zero emissions” exhaust, whatever that means.  Seems to me like it’s either zero emissions or it’s some emissions, in which case it’s not zero.  Seems like an either is or is not kind of situation to me, but what do I know?  No, I drive my hybrid because I was paying close to $60.00 for a tank of gas that only lasted me 8-10 days in my SUV and now I pay about $25.00 for a tank of gas that lasts me nearly, if not more than, three weeks.  I drive nearly twice as far, on half as much.  To me that’s a no brainer.

Today is Earth Day and I could care less.  All the funny people on Twitter (and most of the not so funny ones) are talking about it.   Sarah and Vinnie talked about it on the radio this morning too, although actually, they talked less about it than they have in the past, for which I am exceedingly grateful.  The problem is they talked about it.   They are the first people to talk to me each day and they start talking to me before I’m really even awake.  From the moment they mentioned that today was Earth Day, I’ve had the Earth Day song stuck in my head, and I never even heard it this year.  Only I don’t know the correct lyrics, let alone the tune and so what keeps going through my head goes like this:

Earth Day

Earth Day

It’s Mother Earth’s Birthday

Earth Day

Earth Day

Let’s go have a beeeeeeer…

Since the song is sung by a chorus of children I’m pretty sure that’s not right, and I was actually quite surprised to find that when I searched for “The Earth Day Song” on Google, so I could find the correct lyrics and maybe even a link to the song for those of you sadistic enough to subject yourselves to it, there were dozens upon hundreds of different results, all of which were legitimate results and none of which were the song I was looking for.  You’ll just have to take my word that those are not the correct lyrics.

I celebrated Earth Day by printing about a ream worth of paper.  I decided that I wanted to have hard copies of all my writing, rather than depending on the blog sites (I’ve had a blog before this one) to retain my stuff.  I didn’t even finish.  Who knew I had written so much.  But I figure I made a nice enough dent in the rain forest for one day (plus my boss came back early from his “all day” meeting so I figured I should stop… for now.)

I came to work late today, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to do anything for the first hour anyway.  The furniture guys came back to replace the stand on my height adjustable desk.  A few weeks ago, I got a new desk that can be adjusted so I can stand up while I work.  I’ve actually found my self to be far more productive when I’m standing, but far more importantly – to me – my hamstrings will hopefully loosen up now that I’m not sitting down all day every day.  Also standing burns more calories than sitting in general.  The problem is the base that they delivered didn’t crank up high enough.  I was making due with it temporarily, but it needed to go up about five more inches than it did.  The sales guy says that they were shipped the wrong item from the manufacturer, but I can’t help but question that, since what they replaced it with is an electric base ($500 more expensive than what we requested.)  With the other base I had to turn a crank to adjust the height of the table, now I only have to push a button.  In actuality, this is better because when I do sit down (even though it’s a stool) the table is too high from when I was standing.  Now I can adjust the table height depending on whether I’m sitting or standing and it’s easy and quick.  But it is electric.  More electric, means more carbon emissions and all that good stuff.  Happy Birthday Mother Earth!

Speaking of carbon emissions and electricity, I’ve had my fan on all day because I’m hot.  I’m hot because my head is covered.  This past Sunday, while I was showering and preparing for my outing with Lil’B, after two and a half mishap-less years of cabeza shaving, I carved an inch long section of flesh right off the top of my head… literally.  Scalped myself.  I was able to extract the removed flesh from the blades of my razor and it looked rather like the end result of a bar tender extracting twists from the rind of a lemon; about a quarter inch wide and an inch long.  Fortunately, I shave in the shower because it bled and bled and bled.

I’ve been walking around for the last five days with a band aid on my scalp and I don’t feel like showing it off to the world – or fielding the questions – so instead I’ve been channeling my inner douche bag and rocking the backwards Kangol Hat, even indoors.  I figure I’ve got a couple more days before the wound is sufficiently healed enough not to need a band aid and then I’ll decide if the gash in my dome is too obvious to let people see or if I can leave the hats for outdoor attire.

Answers? Maybe.

~ riggledo ~ 5 Comments

Things I’ve learned in the last 48 hours:

  1. All but two of you people can not follow instructions (and one of those two kind of cheats.)
  2. More people feel similarly to how I feel than I realized.
  3. Those questions were deeper and more stirring than I imagined them to be.

I read my last two blog posts to my therapist yesterday.  Part of what prompted me writing them was thinking about how I feel about my life at this point and what may or may not be the point of continuing to go to therapy.  I felt like, at least in part, those posts answered some of the questions that I’ve been considering and that I imagine Deb might be considering, as well.

When I read her the questions her eyes got really big and she said, “Wow!  Those are some big questions.  Have you gotten any responses?”

“Yes,” I told her, “One person responded right before I left to come here.  Which is disappointing because at this point, I know the post has been read ten times.”

The truth is I thought, however naively, that those questions would be easy for people to answer.  I thought most of the people who read that post would be able to whip out a few sentences and explain the meaning of their lives to me.  I don’t honestly know if I thought everyone would have a wonderful, beautiful, meaningful story to tell that would confirm my suspicion that my life doesn’t mean anything, or if I thought everyone would have a story similar to mine that would help me find some sort of comfort in this meaningless, day to day grind.  Whatever I thought, I expected to have my comments section filled up with replies to my questions and my pleas for assistance.

The truth is Jody, my first respondent, nearly took the words out of my mouth.  Jody says:

“I get up because I have to. I get up because I am awake. I have nothing that makes me bound from my bed in happiness or joy or fear or desire. I get up because that is what we do.”

“You know these questions make me feel like I have nothing going for me.”

“Hell, I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like a waste of space. That I will be one of those people when gone no one misses.”

Terri’s answers leaned a little more in the other direction, relating that what gets her out of bed in the morning is a job she enjoys, with people she likes and feeling valued in her work.  I envy that for sure.

Terri cheated a little.  I specifically asked that you not answer with “my kids” and that’s what she did, but after reading her answer, I understand why:

“I don’t know yet. I really don’t know. The easy answer is my kids. My kids are the focus right now. Raise them. Help them be successful. Help them take flight and hopefully help them not to make the same mistakes I made. What scares the hell out of me is who I am and what is my purpose when they’re grown and on their own. I was barely old enough to start wondering about my purpose before they came along, so I had to put those thoughts off for the past 21 years. A couple more years and I’ll have to face that question for real.”

I’m surprised really that only two people responded to my little “interview” and even more surprised that I didn’t get even one uber-peppy, my-life-is-all-rainbows-and-butterflies-wonderful responses.

My answers, which I did not want to share in that post, are far more doom and gloom:

What gets you out of bed in the morning?

Fear.  I get out of bed because I’m afraid not to.  I’m afraid to lose my job and not have a pay check.  I’m afraid to lose my income and not be able to pay my rent and my car payment and my bills and have my life be turned upside down to suck even more than it already does because I’m homeless and broke.  I don’t get out of bed because I can’t wait to get to work.  I don’t get out of bed because there are such great things and wonderful people waiting for me outside my front door that I can hardly wait to get going.  I get out of bed – late – because if I don’t, things are going to go from bad to worse.  And that’s a really sucky reason.

What do you believe is your purpose in life?  What is your reason for living?

I haven’t got the slightest inkling what my purpose is.  There really isn’t even anything more to say about that.  I have no idea what may be my reason for living.

What do you live for?  What keeps you going?

My answer is the same.  It isn’t for any kind of fulfillment or personal satisfaction.  I don’t have any of that.  I don’t get any satisfaction, whatsoever, from my job.  Aside from the paycheck every other week, which never seems to go far enough, my job gives me nothing.  I don’t like the people I work with; I don’t like the customers I serve; I don’t even like the field I’m in and yet, I have no inkling of what I could do instead that would provide any of that satisfaction.

I don’t have children, nor do I want them.  I really thought, though, that being a Big Brother would be something that would give me some of that sense of accomplishment or fulfillment; I thought it would give me some satisfaction.  It doesn’t.  I like Lil’B a lot and for the most part we have fun when we hang out, but if something happened and I couldn’t be his Big Brother any more, I really wouldn’t be bothered by it.  In fact, it would be a bit of a relief.

So while it does seem to be somewhat of a cop-out answer, what keeps me going is the fact that I am alive.  I do wake up every morning, like it or not, and therefore, I have to keep going… like it or not.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this except to say that clearly I’m not the only person in my world who struggles with these questions.  I suppose that’s comforting in a way, although, knowing how very much it sucks, I do feel badly for the other people in the same boat.

While the questions were intended to be for my edification, I can’t help feeling badly for asking them now that I realize how tough they are.  I hope no one was harmed by reading those questions and being forced to consider them.  I don’t know why I didn’t realize how tough they would be.

I don’t really know where to go from here.  I am reaching for a conclusion, both for my state of mind, and for this post.  It seems, however, like the truth is there is no conclusion… yet.

But I Think It’s About Forgiveness

~ riggledo ~ 5 Comments

I thought writing this would be easy.  I listened to the song for hours and hours and when I realized I just wasn’t fully getting the lyrics I looked them up so I could read along and then I listened to it for hours and hours more.  I really felt something while I listened.  I was ready to write about it but I needed (or at least I thought I did) to give some back story first.  So I wrote.  I wrote and wrote and wrote and when I was “finished”, I hadn’t written about my feelings at all, but instead wrote about a concert I didn’t enjoy and an artist I had no interest in and then I copied and pasted the lyrics to a song you’ve probably all heard for yourselves before, and I left you with a promise to get to the real point in another post… soon… because I chose to believe that you really wanted to know.

But time has not been on my side and while I enjoyed listening to the song, how many days can you listen to the same song over and over again without going bat-shit crazy?  I moved on and listened to other music, and did my actual job, and wrote brief, relatively meaningless posts about head and pianos… Or something like that… Now I’m sitting at my computer and I’m ready to write this post and I played the song again and I’ve got the lyrics in front of me and—Nothing!

Wait.  I’ll listen a few more times.

Something is happening…

I thought this was worth writing because the feelings were pretty strong and yet not easy to identify.  Now, two days later, that feeling is starting to come back, but it’s slow.

What follows is bound to be more of a stream of consciousness thing than I had intended and if you’re bored already, I won’t be offended if you stop reading here.  I make no promises about the quality of the rest of this post.  For those of you who are gluttons for punishment…

I listen to the song while doing other things and it seeps into my sub-conscious, but the lyrics aren’t readily thought about, and I notice a bit of a melancholy comes over me.  The music is soothing and the singing voice is almost comforting.  Maybe consoling is a better word.  I can feel the emotion of the song.  I do feel the emotion of the song.  A sort of… mournful hope, painful optimism and to be honest it’s not entirely comfortable to feel.  Maybe it’s the juxtaposition of the spectrum of feelings mashing up against one another or maybe it’s because I don’t know how to handle my feelings in the first place and so feeling anything is at once exciting and horrifying.

As the feeling starts to wash over me I become more aware of the lyrics.  A word here: forgiveness, happiness, self-assurance; a phrase there: “The more I learn, the less I understand and all the things I thought I figured out, I have to learn again”, “gotta put it all behind you, ‘cause life goes on.  You keep carrying that anger, it’ll eat you up inside.”

And then, the song in its entirety:

“I got the call today I didn’t want to hear, but I knew that it would come.  An old true friend of ours was talkin’ on the phone.  She said you found someone.”

I can imagine the heartbreak of that moment.  I’ve experienced the heartbreak of that moment.  I hear that line and I think of the day a mutual friend of my ex-fiancé and mine wandered into the store in the mall where I worked and told me that my ex and her new guy were getting married later on that evening.  I knew she had a new guy and I knew they were engaged so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise and yet, it felt more like a kick to the gut.

Then again, that was a lifetime ago and I’m a completely different person than I was then.  I’m over that hurt.  I can relate to and imagine the heartbreak of that moment, but I don’t feel it now.

“And I thought of all the bad luck and all the struggles we went through; how I lost me and you lost you.  What are all these voices outside love’s open door, make us throw off our contentment and beg for something more?

I’ve been learning to live without you now, but I miss you sometimes. The more I know, the less I understand.  All the things I thought I knew, I’m learning them again.”

The last line strikes a chord these days because I feel exactly that way.  I thought I had made such progress in my life.  I felt like I had learned so much from therapy and experience and time, and now, I feel like everything I thought I knew has been a lie, like I’m back at square one.  The more I know about me, about whom I am and the life I’ve lived, the less I understand… pretty much anything.  I’m not even sure anymore what I’ve learned.

“I’ve been trying to get down to the heart of the matter, but my will gets weak and my thoughts seem to scatter.”

It has been a recurring phenomenon for me, in life and particularly in therapy, that when things get tough, my brain shuts down.  Quite literally, when things become too hard to face, or information becomes too complicated and overwhelming, my brain just stops processing.  It’s difficult to even articulate the experience.  I lose the ability to focus on the task or the issue at hand and it’s almost like the mental imagery breaks apart and scatters in all directions like oil on water.  I’ve always felt like I was the only one who felt that so this lyric of the song, in a way, is comforting.

“But I think it’s about forgiveness.  Forgiveness.  Even if, even if you don’t love me anymore.”

It almost seems like this is goes without saying.  Forgiveness is difficult.  It shouldn’t be.  It should be the easiest thing in the world but it just isn’t.  I can’t speak for other people and I’m sure I’m not really the only person to feel the way I do, but I am the only one I have to worry about and the fact is, very few days have gone by in my life where I wasn’t hurt or degraded or let down in some way, by some one.  I’ve had a considerable amount of hurt in my life and have every reason to expect a considerable amount more.  It’s hard to get over.  It’s tough to put behind you and I think no matter how much you wish you could, you don’t forget the hurts in your life.

For me, and thousands if not millions of people like me, the possibility that someone incredibly important in my life might not love me anymore if they knew everything there was to know, is too great to be ignored.  The part that’s so confusing and difficult about all this is they’re some of the same people who have caused the most pain and sadness in my life.

“These times are so uncertain.  There’s a yearning undefined, and people filled with rage.  We all need a little tenderness.  How can love survive in such a graceless age?”

Uncertainty is such a huge part of life and it sucks.  I’ve lived most of my life feeling like I have little or no control over anything.  And it’s not that I’m a “control freak” exactly, although, really isn’t everyone to some extent?  It’s just that, so much of the time, I feel like circumstances just happen to me.  That sounds like a cop-out, I know, but it’s true.  It makes me sound like a victim, and maybe in some ways I am, but it makes me angry… one might say, “filled with rage.”

And it seems like we live in an age of me-ness.  “Graceless”?  That’s just putting it nicely.  I’ve been so disturbed and frustrated over the last several years by the general attitude of selfishness and self-importance in the world around me.  Once upon a time, you could go to a store and the employees would speak to you.  “Excuse me,” they would say before walking in front of you as you examine the products on the shelf.  “May I help you find anything?” they would ask, simply because you walked near them.  (I worked at a store once that had a “four square” policy.  If a customer walked with-in four floor tiles of you in any direction you were supposed to greet them and offer assistance.)

And what about your fellow man?  There was a time when people paid attention to where they were going, when it wasn’t more important for them to get where they wanted to be, than it was to be courteous enough to wait until you got by when there was no one behind you. Now, people turn their carts out in front of you and make you stop short, or cut you off on the freeway, just to get out from behind the slow guy in front of them, even though they’re going slower than you.  I think this sums it up pretty well.

“And the trust and self-assurance that lead to happiness are the very things we kill, I guess.  Pride and competition cannot fill these empty arms.  And the wall they put between us, you know it doesn’t keep us warm.”

I wouldn’t presume to say that I know what leads to happiness.  Most of the time I think that people are either born happy or they’re not; and while everyone has bummer days, tragic moments that temporarily sour their moods, those of us who weren’t fortunate enough to be born happy, probably never will be.

Trust and self-assurance are things that have very rarely, if ever, served me well so I’m not so sure those lead to happiness.  These last few years have been filled with self-assurance and it has only proved to set me up for a huge fall.  Lead to happiness?  I’m not so sure.  “The very things we kill, I guess”?  It evokes a sense of loss in me.  However artificial that trust and self-assurance I had been experiencing might have been, it was still significant and now it’s gone.

I don’t know about “pride and competition” but the image of empty arms and “doesn’t keep us warm” conjures plenty of feeling.  One I’m all too familiar with.  It’s called loneliness.  I’m used to it; one might even say I’m comfortable with it.  Which is not to say that I like it, but when it’s all you’ve known, it’s pretty easy to settle in for the long haul.

“I’ve been trying to live without you now, but I miss you, baby.  The more I know, the less I understand, and all the things I thought I figured out, I have to learn again.  I’ve been trying to get down to the heart of the matter, but my will gets weak and my heart is so shattered.”

All the things I thought I figured out.  It’s just a change in the wording, but it’s so much more accurate.  Clearly everything I thought I knew turned out to be wrong.  Deceiving myself into believing things would be different when they clearly won’t.  All the hope I allowed myself to feel, all the optimism that proved to be groundless…  My heart is so shattered

“But I think it’s about forgiveness.  Forgiveness.  Even if, even if you don’t love me anymore.”

Now check out the bridge:

“All the people in your life who’ve come and gone, they let you down, you know they hurt your pride.  Gotta put it all behind you ‘cause life goes on.  You keep carryin’ that anger, it’ll eat you up inside.

I wanted happily ever after, and my heart is so shattered and I know it’s about…”

At the end of the day, this, right here, is what I think this song is about for me.  I could make lists.  Lists of people who’ve gone, lists of people who’ve let me down and lists of people who’ve hurt me.  Lists of people who’ve made me angry, made me resentful, made me doubt myself and my life and the world around me.  I try everyday to put it behind me, though I’m generally not very successful.  “Life goes on?”  What life?  I struggle a lot with this one and it’s actually prompted what will probably be tomorrow’s post if I can get it together in time.

“You keep carrying that anger, it’ll eat you up inside.”  This evokes thoughts of my mother and to be honest, it makes me angry.  My whole life when I would get mad about something, she would say, “Oh honey, just be quiet.  Don’t be like that.  You’re not hurting anyone but yourself.”  Maybe it wasn’t her intention, but I think it was.  What I got from that is.  “Don’t feel.  It’s not OK to get angry.  You’re not allowed to have negative emotions.”  It’s kind of ironic if you think about it.  “You keep carrying that anger, it’ll eat you up inside,” is true.  It’s so much better to vent your frustrations, to let it out of your system and yet, the words make me think of my mother telling me not to do just that.

My mother and I had a bit of a falling out several years ago and I’m not going to get into it here, but in that conversation she told me “You’ve obviously been holding some grudges you need to forgive and forget.”  Naturally, that just pissed me off more, but what I told her is, “I’m not holding any grudges.  I suppose I can understand why you would say that, but that’s not the case.  When I gave the examples I gave, it was simply that, giving examples.  I learned a long time ago not to make sweeping generalizations (especially within this family) without supporting data.  As far as ‘forgive and forget’ goes, I don’t even know what that means.  Forgiveness is a choice and I’ve made that choice over and over again with a lot of people in my life for as long as I can remember.  Forgetting on the other hand doesn’t make any sense to me.  One can’t control what they can and can’t (or do and don’t) remember.”

I believed that when I said it.  I believed that forgiveness was a conscious decision you make.  I guess the truth is I still believe that and yet this song struck a chord with me.

Maybe forgiveness is a process.  Maybe forgiveness is a decision and a process.  Maybe forgiveness is a process that takes time and you make the decision over and over until – well, until your done.

I’ve been trying to get down to the heart of the matter, but my will gets weak and my thoughts seem to scatter.  But I think it’s about forgiveness…

Forgiveness.

Moving Melodies: The Heart of the Matter

~ riggledo ~ 2 Comments

I didn’t even like her music particularly, well the one song I had heard. They played it on Alice, my favorite radio station, All. The. Time. Funny that now I can’t remember the song to save my life. Not that I would want to. Well, maybe to save my life. But nothing short of self preservation could make me want to remember that song now.

Every September, Alice hosts a music festival in Golden Gate Park called Now and Zen Fest. Each year there are three to five acts that appear and most years, they aren’t interesting enough, to me, to brave the crowds and the chaos and the extended travel time (two hours to go eight miles by public transit.) Eight years ago, there were a couple of musical acts that were actually appealing to me. The price of the tickets, though, was prohibitive for me to attend.

I listened to the radio station at work everyday and when the DJ said to call in for free passes to the festival, I started dialing, not even listening, hearing or caring what else she had to say about it.

We have what I consider to be an antiquated phone system in my building, but with well over 2500 individual handsets it would cost, literally, half a million dollars to replace so we stick with it until we can’t any more. This phone system has a pause before dialing the number you keyed and I was sure this would prevent me from being the requisite caller and winning the passes so you can imagine my surprise when the phone actually rang.

I’m the tenth caller, I thought. They wanted the ninth. They’ve already gotten the right caller and they’re just letting the rest of the lines ring. It just wasn’t possible that I had won. And then the DJ answered the phone and asked me my name. I couldn’t believe I was the correct caller. I had won two free passes to Alice’s Now and Zen Fest, 2002. And what else? There’s more? Wow. I didn’t expect more. Oh. My guest and I would also get to come back stage to meet none other than India Arie. OK. Whatever. Don’t care!

I took my friend Michelle, because for as long as I’ve lived in California, twelve years and one month, she is the only person I ever do anything with. When it comes to an actual social life, she’s it. Michelle was actually excited to meet India Arie. I couldn’t have cared less.

The concert starts at noon and they don’t open the gates until 11:00 but people start lining up early in the morning. We arrived at the park at about 11:40 having no idea how long it would take to get there, or how long the line would be or what it would look like inside the gates. My free passes afforded me no special treatment, beyond the brief adventure backstage where I would meet a recording artist I didn’t even like. As it turns out, 20,000 people make for a very long line and even though the gates had been open for forty minutes already when we arrived, the line was still quite long. We brought a quilt to sit on, and Michelle pulled a bottle of spray on sun screen out of her purse and proceeded to spray her exposed flesh (she never wears shorts) and rub the concoction in. When she was finished she offered the bottle to me.

I don’t know if this has ever been discussed on this site, but Michelle is a moderately light skin toned black woman. Sun burn is a possibility but not a major concern. I, on the other hand, am of Irish, Scottish, English and German ancestry and I’m certain I’ve made no secret of the fact that you could find me in the middle of a forest at midnight on a cloudy night with no stars or moon and without the aid of a search light because I’d be the one glowing from the collective rays of the sun through the day prior to the presumed maroon-ment (there’s a word I want to use here, but it’s completely escaping me) that had you searching for me in the first place.

Michelle offered me the bottle of sun screen, looking at my bare arms and legs. I declined. “Nah, I’ll be OK. I could use a little sun.” Of my siblings and me, I’m the only one who wasn’t cursed with red hair and while I got a very similar complexion, I actually do retain a minimal amount of tan after my skin heals, when I get a sun burn. A little bit of a sun burn would heal nicely into a barely perceptible (except to me) tan and I was going to take advantage of the opportunity. Michelle looked at me warily and then put the bottle back in her bag.

When we finally got into the park, there was a sea of humanity as far as the eye could see and in every direction. Quite honestly, I was ready to turn around right then and there, but we had come all this way and Michelle actually wanted to meet India Arie, so fine, we continued our trek into the park.

The meet and greet was supposed to be before one of the bands set but Ms. Arie’s transportation was running late so we were told to come back after her set and we could meet her then. Michelle and I headed into the mass of people in search of a patch of ground big enough to spread out our quilt and not get trampled. What we finally found was easily a quarter mile away from the stage out in the middle of a field with no hope of shade of any kind. San Francisco is not known for its warm weather, although September is the warmest month of the year. But even when the ambient temperature in the city is only in the low to mid 70’s, sitting in the middle of a field, with 20,000 of your nearest and dearest and the sun beating straight down on you, it is hot and very quickly became miserable.

We sat through the second act, the first having played the entire time we were searching for a spot, and I was roasting. I was drenched in sweat (not my favorite) and felt as if my skin had been under a broiler for quite some time. I was in denial and convinced myself that the sun wasn’t that bad and I’d heal nicely to a decent if minimal tan.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, India Arie took to the stage. I was happy, because it meant that soon she’d be finished and we would go to meet her and then Michelle and I could go home. Since it was just the two of us, we weren’t going to leave the quilt behind and if we were taking it with us, we were sure to loose our spot. I wasn’t really interested in staying anyway as I was soaking wet and could no longer deny that my skin hurt.

The meet and greet consisted of six or eight people crowding around India Arie and saying “hi” while trying to shake her hand. When the first person tried to take a picture with Ms. Arie, the promotions person from the station told us there wasn’t time for pictures and said that we should all gather together on either side and they’d take one group picture. She promised she’d make sure we all got a copy. As we walked away I thought, she didn’t get e-mail addresses or home address from any of us. I’m never going to see that picture. It didn’t matter to me, but I’m sure there were some to whom it did.

So what is the point of this typically drawn out story? Well, we’re getting there, so just hold your horses. 😉

The first time I ever heard of India Arie was when this song, which I can no longer remember, that I did not like, started playing on my favorite radio station. I wasn’t impressed. I didn’t care for her, particularly, as a performer. I, of course, had nothing against her personally, but was not impressed with her music. Michelle and I left the park after her set and the meet and greet and I never even heard the band that I had really wanted to see. (I think that was Train, but honestly, I don’t even remember anymore.) I had attended the event in a short sleeved t-shirt with shorts and flip flops. At that point I had not yet fallen prey under the spell of the knee length short fashion. I wasn’t wearing short shorts, but when I was sitting on my quilt on the ground they only went about halfway down my thigh. I walked away from the park that day with what turned out to be second degree burns on the front of my legs that hurt for weeks and it took more than three years for the color (which was red and not tan) to completely fade away. For quite some time after that there was a very discernable line across each of my thighs where the color changed from tomato (or some shade) red to pasty, Elmer’s glue white (OK, not quite that white).

The entire event ended up being an unpleasant experience and when you combine that with the music I didn’t enjoy and the meet and greet that was more of a meet and shoo, I guess I have a less than pleasant reaction to the sound of her voice or the mention of her name.

~~~

There’s a song on my iPod that happens to be performed by India Arie that I absolutely love. I was surprised to realize it was her singing as the song came on the soundtrack for the Sex and the City movie. The song is called The Heart of the Matter originally performed by Don Henley, but I have to be honest, I actually like this version better. I like it because it’s a great mix of genres. It’s not too rock and roll but not too R&B. Her voice, in this song at least is smooth and soothing and you can really feel the emotion of the song while she sings.

Take a look at the lyrics:

I got the call today, I didn’t wanna hear
but I knew that it would come
An old true friend of ours was talkin’ on the phone
She said you found someone
And I thought of all the bad luck,
And all the struggles we went through
How I lost me and you lost you
What are all these voices outside love’s open door
Make us throw off our contentment
And beg for something more?

I’ve been learning to live without you now
But I miss you sometimes
The more I know, the less I understand
All the things I thought I knew, I’m learning them again
I’ve been trying to get down to the Heart of the Matter
But my will gets weak
And my thoughts seem to scatter
But I think it’s about forgiveness
Forgiveness
Even if, even if you don’t love me anymore

These times are so uncertain
There’s a yearning undefined
And people filled with rage
We all need a little tenderness
How can love survive in such a graceless age
And the trust and self-assurance that lead to happiness
Are the very things we kill, I guess
Pride and competition cannot fill these empty arms
And the wall they put between us,
You know it doesn’t keep us warm

I’ve been trying to live without you now
But I miss you, baby
The more I know, the less I understand
And all the things I thought I figured out, I have to learn again
I’ve been tryin’ to get down to the Heart of the Matter
But my will gets weak
And my heart is so shattered
But I think it’s about forgiveness
Forgiveness
Even if, even if you don’t love me anymore

All the people in your life who’ve come and gone
They let you down, you know they hurt your pride
Gotta put it all behind you; cause life goes on
You keep carryin’ that anger, it’ll eat you up inside

I wanted happily ever after
And my heart is so shattered
But I know it’s about forgiveness
Forgiveness
Even if, even if you don’t love me

I’ve been trying to get down to the Heart of the Matter
Because the flesh gets weak
And the ashes will scatter
So I’m thinkin’ about forgiveness
Forgiveness
Even if you don’t love me anymore

Even if you don’t love me anymore

It’s clear, both from the lyrics in the first verse and from it’s place in the movie that this song is about moving on from a lost love, but I think it’s true that the lyrics mean so much more than that.

It was actually my intention when starting this post to tell you what’s been going on in my head while listening to this song on repeat (because that’s what I do when there’s an emotional response) but I realize now that this post has gone in a very different direction and to get into that now would just be weird and this post is already too long. So instead, I’m just going to leave you with this somewhat unimpressive memory and the mental picture of my pasty white/tomato red “farmers tan” and perhaps save the mental ravings for another day.

Hope you had fun.