Well Anyway, It Is A Song About Old Friends

The year-end Festivusapallooza always lends itself to making retrospective itemized and categorical lists to put The Year That Was into a neat and security-screening travel safe format so that we can make it a convenient carry-on along with us in our travels towards the Year That Will Be. Likewise, it is also a time for accumulating resolutions, gum and magazines to use during the Year That Will Be, for setting out the rough outlines of the sweeping life-altering revolution that inspires a great deal of fervor as champagne continues to pour, but which somehow loses much support amongst the commoners when the hangover has set in and surviving the winter becomes a greater immediate priority.

Sardonic references to year-end lists and new year's resolutions aside, the concept they encompass is a temptation towards which I truthfully offer very little resistance. I seek itemized meaning as much as the next person. I even admit that I have taken to surreptitiously haunting the self help sections of my local bookstores (apparently this is the late twenties/early thirties female precursor to forties phenomenon of botoxing and sperm bank withdrawals and the fifties/sixties lifestyle choice that is buying twelve cats and a shotgun). As such, I think I can be helped by these retrospective and prospective looking lists. However, this year, in my heart of hearts and my steady march towards 30, I do not want them to be simply aspirational. I want them to be reasonable and effective guideposts for actually moving forward.

Revolution is not necessary. Recalibration is acceptable. Forward movement, imperative.

So I decided to attack the lists from a slightly different angle. If there is one thing in my life I have generally been good at it is learning. I have been a school geek for as long as I can remember, and I think the peanut gallery would agree that, but for my occasional bouts with lawyering-onset dementia, I am still generally happiest when I am geeking out about something I learned or am learning from someone else. So, without further ado, my lists - what I learned in 2006, and what I strive to learn in 2007:

What I learned in 2006
Note to reader(s?): I know the audacious title of this section of my post simply begs the question, or perhaps the rhetorical sigh of exasperation "She learned something in 2006?" Maybe it is revisionist wishful thinking, but even amongst my moaning and groaning, I think I managed to stop, look and listen long enough to pick up a couple of things.

* I am Captain Jack Sparrow. I am quirky, I am odd, and, at times, I may uncannily be appearing to channel Keith Richards while wearing too much eye liner. But I am also, when given the opportunity, actually able to act as captain to a crew, and to steer the ship in a sensible direction. That is not to say that there are not challenges along the way - mutiny is always a possibility when you tend to be a soft-touch who is, when all is said and done, also concerned with people liking you - but generally, I found, much to my surprise, that when given the authority I can be decision maker and I can generally be an effective leader of people - simply by listening and treating them with respect. This seems intuitive, but I also learned (the hard way) that this is not the way many people lead (read: scream, demand, rant). Which leads me to the corollary lesson here - you become whom you are surrounded by. I started my job working under people who were flawed, to be sure, but who genuinely cared about both the quality of my work and my welfare as a person. I carry this lesson by example with me as I go, and it is gift. Others do not have such positive images to emulate, and though they are good people, they lead with flashes of tyranny which has become situationally acquired habit.

* I am not a very open person. I have always considered myself to be forthright with details of myself nearly to the point of near transparency, and likely well beyond the realm of TMI. However, this concept must be added, along with "I am a great mentor" and "I am very sensitive to other people's needs", to my list of things that cannot be true if you have to say them about yourself. True, I do offer forth voluntarily and without trepidation many of the facts of my life, as I know them be. On the other hand, what I never recognized, at least not consciously, until now, is that there is a hard-stop to my revelations. Facts and events and occurrences and even, for the most part, opinions, are offered forth without second thought. But anything that implicates my feelings or my inability to control them is feverishly squirreled away, to be hidden from sight of anyone who might see, judge, be disgusted. That is not to say that these feeling-related thoughts/actions are not ever seen by others. Inevitably, they make their appearances known. The crying jag. The hyperventilating phone call. The ADD-like pacing. The absolute worst poker-face in the world that I always accessorize every outfit with. They all continually leak my secret life of imperfection. And so I live under the very odd (and irreconcilable) impression that everyone knows everything about me and that I can (and must) prove to them I am perfect (though I am not).

Weird.

But it isn't being open, when you aren't voluntarily sharing it, in the same way that paying your taxes (part of which eventually pay for social programs etc.) is not the same as being philanthropic, let alone truly altruistic. What emotions do leak out from me, are enough to let others (especially romantic partner others) know that there is more beneath the surface, but that is it. A sense of contempt radiates from the opacity that are my secreted-away feelings. The contempt is clearly (to me) aimed at myself. But to someone on the other side, it is easy to confuse the contempt as being aimed at them, because if you are involved - truly involved - you will share, or try to share, all of yourself.

I guess I have never thought it appropriate to offer parts of me that I thought were lesser and lacking to someone I wanted to impress, whom I wanted to love me. But it is hard to have a lasting relationship without naked feelings being involved. It is, in fact, impossible. I guess that that is what all the people (including several fairly self righteous and sanctimonious ex'es - though I guess begrudgingly I must accept they were right... about this) have been telling me all these years - that in order to find love, I must learn to love myself first. Well, maybe love isn't necessary, as much as simple acceptance of those parts I see as "lesser" and "lacking."

Having feelings does not make me horrible. Seemingly intuitive, but a concept which took me nearly 30 years to recognize. Wow, I am quick on the uptake.

* I love them. I am addicted to them. I will never give them up. But in the end, they are just Words, Words, Words. As this year draws to a close, I realize that the great bulk of my emotional energy is no longer spent on grand concepts, but rather on people, and though the feelings are oftentimes difficult and otherwise uncomfortable, I am pleased because it seems like a much more worthwhile expenditure of resources. Or, to be less wordy, I am no longer lonely, I just miss specific people. Some because they are now far away, some because I am always too far away, others because I happened, if only mistakenly, to have pushed them away. I do not just want to be involved and/or married for the sake of being involved and/or marries, I want to be involved with someone who is right for me, so being single does not gall me the way it once did. No one I have chosen up to this point in my life has ever been close to right for me. Two have been close - at least I think so - but one is now married and the other may or may not be speaking to me.

* The Weight of Water. Blood is an amazingly strong bond, and it allows one to surmount so many seemingly insurmountable offenses, from insanity, eccentricity to outright cruelty - but the closest family is that which you choose for yourself - not simply because you like them and so you choose them as part of the population of the landscape of your life - but because you must keep on choosing them. Neither genetics nor legal concepts bind you to the family you choose, rather it is the strength of love and affection alone which hold you fast during the trials and tribulations and travesties and train wrecks that life may present. It is tested in different ways, changes in population and geography and circumstance and temperament, but because it is true, it endures. My urban family is bigger and more bountiful, and more spread out now. But while the boundaries of our little circle have expanded to accommodate circumstance and the passage of time, the inner sanctum remains a warm refuge from the storms of life, a place characterized by its infinite supply of love - for everyone - from those members of the circle who are infants to those who act like they are. A metaphysical place of safety and total acceptance. Though miles and circumstance may separate us, our hearts remain conspicuously connected.

* I know more and I see less than I think I do. If I trusted my heart to lead me, I would have seen that I have been in love with him for years. And I would have put the plates, the drinks, and all of the third party preconceived notions down, and picked the phone up, stayed that morning, flown that summer, or just crossed that room and gone for broke. But I really didn't see. I really didn't see.


What I strive to learn in 2007
* How to knit
* How to share a bed with someone.
* How to use my digital camera
* How to hang pictures
* How to effectively keep a calendar
* How to start and conversation without complaining and how to end it without saying that I am sorry.
* How to do yoga
* How to count to 60 without automatically dividing by 6.
* How to tie a tie
* How to throw a dinner party
* How to follow through on good advice
* How to listen
* How to Write
* How to speak seventeen-year old
* How to breathe
* How to stack plates