Reject me, Baby!

I recently submitted a story to the Journal of Universal Rejection (motto: "reprobatio certa hora incerta" (for which my translator gives "false contest hour uncertain", but that can't be right).

I was expecting a rejection, you know. I mean, their guidelines say they will reject anything you send, and point out the advantages of knowing in advance what the outcome will be: reduced stress, no need to spend hours on your cover letter (which, you know, I do), and not least of all the satisfaction of knowing that you were rejected from one the most exclusive journals in the -- any -- industry.

Wow!  With all those advantages, I just had to submit. So I sent in a short I have called "Done" -- something of an experiment because it is comprised entirely of dialog (yes, I am that good) -- and waited (breathlessly) for my rejection letter, which I assumed would be arriving nearly immediately.

For the first time in my life, a rejection to my story was not only assured but eagerly awaited.  This time -- for sure -- I'd get exactly what I'd hoped for.

Yes?

No:

Thank you for your interest in the Journal of Universal Rejection.
Due to the high volume of correspondence we have received of late, it
may be some time until yours is properly answered.  If you have
included a submission, rest assured that it has been filed and is
under review.  We will get back to you as soon as possible.

-- Caleb Emmons, PhD Editor-in-Chief Journal of Universal Rejection

The Moment Between Okay and Not Really

You know the moment - it's the one between between slicing your hand and the gush of blood, slamming the door and realizing you've left a finger behind, the mis-step and the fall.  It's the moment when things are still okay, but not for long.

We were prepping for a short bike ride. I'd hit the garage door button, dashing out from under the closing door, stepping carefully over the beam of light that stops the process when he said "oh, I left my helmet inside."

No problem, I thought, waving my foot across the beam. The door kept closing. No problem, I thought, thinking of the way elevators won't shut on your hand and will bounce back from the least resistance. So I put my shoe under the descending door.

Which descended anyway. Without bounce.  Without give. A powered heavy metal door coming down on my shoe, my toes, which was now clearly a really bad idea. I tried to pull my foot out. No way. I realized that not only was I stuck, but my toes were feeling quite a bit of pressure.

It's a special moment. It's when you realize that things might not be okay, and very soon.

I jammed my fingers under the door, pulled up with all my strength. Nothing moved. Then the pain began.

My friend had the presence of mind to run into the house and around to the garage and pull the quick release on the garage door -- a red handle, which makes so much sense now. The door released, came up.

I took another moment to survey the damage. It was my lucky day: the toes were insulted but not broken, annoyed but not crushed. Now, hours later, they are mumbling about my lack of good sense, but are ready to consider forgiving me.

Even so, the moment is limned in my memory, framed with all the intensity that an active, alert, and not-quite-panicking mind can create.

Such moments can change us, if we let them. They remind us that we are one slip, one poor decision, one moment's bad luck away from being mangled or killed.  Or, in my case, bruised, embarrassed, and feeling lucky.

And in more practical terms: garage doors are unforgiving masses of driving metal completely unlike sensitive elevator doors. Soft toes will not stop them.

Fractured Vision

Another hit and run. Yep, someone came too close to my car again and scraped off the side mirror. No note, just a broken, shattered mirror.

Did I mention that my car was parked?

This is my third hit-and-run in the last two years, all of which happened while the car was legally and to all appearances safely parked.

Not to belabor the point, friends, but my car wasn't even moving.

Until I can get it fixed, what's behind me shows in a cracked mirror.  I don't worry too much about what's behind me, though. The car only seems to get hit when it's not moving.  This has only happened to me in this city.   Hmm.

Grapefruit, Granted

The problem with trying not to take things for granted is it implies taking them for not-granted, and what is that?  Imagining not having them? Imagining them being hard to come by?  A bathtub of guilt for having them, maybe. So get in and bathe. Make you clean, it will, if you use enough of it.

No. The point isn't to feel guilty about what you have, or what's easy to come by.

I chopped up this grapefruit, and it was Oh So Good. All full of grapefruity yumminess. The essence of grapefruit, for the taking. My taking. Mine to slice, mine to greedily consume, messy and juicy and mine.

To take something for granted is to take it for nothing. To take it for itself, whatever it is, now in this moment -- that's not nothing. That's something.  That's the fullness of grapefruit, and it has something to do with living.

Granted.

Punctuation Fail

I found this sign found at Swedish Hospital, a major medical center with significant funding, in a bathroom that is well-appointed with motion-activated lights and no-touch sanitary fixtures for soap, water and towels.

But apparently the hospital can't afford signs with correct punctuation.  Or grammar. Maybe after all the other expenses, they had to cut back.  Maybe these were on sale.

A Pink Club, Maybe?

 
Is there, do you suppose, a club for people who actually like the taste of pepto bismo?




I wonder if we're also the kids who nibbled on play dough.

But -- be honest -- isn't it pretty?

Write Some Letters

Winter makes me think about death.  Or Death, if you prefer the anthropomorphic personification.

If you will indulge me for a moment, imagine that you are, quite suddenly, quite dead.  Consider those people you hang around the most, those who will be most wrenched by the sudden loss of you.

Now, don't you wish you'd written a final letter, or made a video saying goodbye?  A final message, saying farewell as only you can?

It's not that hard. Just write down the things you want them to know, the things you wished you would have said (only now you can!) while you were alive. You can give advice. You can tell them to go on without you. You can remind them to floss.

You can say "I love you."

To me this sounded like a New Year's resolution that could actually make a difference. So I did it.

Have you? If not, why not?  It doesn't take long.  It's easy to do.  Yes, it can be a bit emotional, but think about it: do you really want to leave without having the final word?  I bet you don't.

Everything Cat

Felis catus, caught here between light and shadow, posing in the fading sun of this last day of an arbitrary calendar year.

Momentarily content and mindlessly watchful, she is, gorgeously, everything cat.

Rain On!

I got a *very* cool present this holiday season: an "unbreakable" umbrella.

For those of us with various weapons training, anything we happen to have in hand we think of as a weapon, at least under the right circumstances. Umbrellas -- kind of obvious that way. Except, of course, that most of them are kind flimsy. To quote one reviewer, "Whacking someone with a regular cheap umbrella will leave a welt and a very angry opponent, and the umbrella will be destroyed."

Not so this one. Heck, you can stand on it. In this video a fellow does just that before cutting in half a watermelon.

Because, you know, sometimes you don't have a knife handy. Ha ha.

No, seriously, this is tres cool. A quality umbrella -- that solid *thup* sound it makes when opening -- which, should you need to whack a watermelon (or punching bag) really hard can stand up to the task.

Lifetime warranty, of course.

My lifetime. Natch.

The Christ Story

I need some help here with the Christ thing. Maybe one of you can explain to me how this works.

I have a casual understanding of the Christ story, an understanding that comes from talking to Christian friends and reading the bible, so there is a lot I don't get.

It being the season I've lately been listening to a lot of Christmas carols, and in the course of paying attention to the lyrics, I keep coming back to a few things that I don't quite understand.

The star thing. Did everyone really know this baby was the special lord guy when he was born? Or did the star-means-Christ-is-born knowledge arrive after the fact in a revisionist sort of way?  Because if everyone knew that Christ was this powerful guy in baby form then it would seem to me that not only his birth but his whole upbringing would have been fraught with all kinds of danger and close calls and we'd hear lots of stories about how he barely escaped death some ten or twenty times a day, and I don't hear about that.

Also, I seem to recall from some story somewhere that Jesus' parents had other children. If his parents knew he was this special from the start, wouldn't he know, too? Surely his siblings would have figured it out, too and wouldn't that have put some strain on the family dynamics? "Your brother's special, sweetie, and while we love you all, we love him -- differently. By the way, don't drink that water after he's handled it and for sure no eating those crackers he's touched."

Again, I'm sure there's plenty I don't understand.  Anyone want to help me make sense of this?

Kate

I became a Kate Bornstein fan this week.  I didn't mean to. I wasn't planning to. There was just this talk at Babeland, which if you live in Seattle and you're a babe you have to visit, so I was in the neighborhood...

She was fabulous, just fabulous.  In the ballgame of public speaking she hit it into the next ballpark. (Sorry.  Never was that good at sports metaphors.)

People laughed, cried, and wanted more.

Her basic message: life is worth living, and you can make it better, and here's how.  And one more thing to anyone who wants it: a get out of Hell free card. Just don't be mean.

Nicely done, Kate.

Want a taste?  Try this.

"Mutt"

I'm still immature enough that when someone makes my point for me I jump up and down and say hey, cool, I was making that point years ago!

Decades, actually.  When I was a snotty young brat, I considered the common demographic question of "race" and thoughtfully and stubbornly started answering "mutt".

Because, like most people, I'm a bit of a mix. Besides what the parents say, there are always the Family Secrets. Statistically speaking, we are unlikely to be strictly the descendants of those who claim us.

Life just ain't as tidy as the forms would have us believe. And it mattered to me, way back when, despite the raised eyebrows, to make that point.  Mutt.

Turns out gender isn't always tidy, either. When I read this here discussion of the ambiguities of gender, which also mentions race, I got all happy and started jumping up and down. That's my point! Yeah!

Woof!

Ooo, Snow!

I love the way my mind works. Put me in a warm, toasty room and show me a snowstorm outside through the window and my puppy-like mind says "Ooo, snow, fun! Walk! Walk!"

Wait, I say. You know it's cold out there? I mean, really really cold?

"Ooo, snow! Walk, walk!" The puppy-mind whines eagerly.

Look, I say, see how the snow's not falling gently, but cutting sideways with the wind?

"Walk-walk-walk!"

I know where this will end. It won't shut up about how much fun it will be outside. Or would be if I would just let us go out-out-out. Out where it's not merely below freezing but the wind is enthusiastically cutting delicate skin with knifetips of ice.

It's snowing, slippery, and the wind is biting. Sensible people are inside, toasting themselves in the bliss of modern heaters.

Those without puppies in their heads, anyway.

I know I'll lose this fight, so I wrap up as best I can, pull on boots and out we go, my puppy-mind and me. Outside, it's dark. The cold quickly sucks away illusions of warm-and-safe. We walk down a quiet, icy cityscape that suddenly seems odd and wild.

"Ooo, snow!" says my puppy-brain.

Then, a few minutes later: "Ooo, cold!"

And then: "Can we go back now?"

Yeah, that's what I thought. But at least the whining will stop for a while.

The Myth of Self-Defense

I'm pissed again. This is why I don't attend martial arts classes any more, why my answer to "what martial arts have you done?" is "oh, this and that."

Because most martial arts talk is posturing and pretense and ego, not much to do with effective self-defense. Which I do care about.

I'm not going off on a rant how most martial arts practices have little or nothing to do with self-defense, or how most MA teachers haven't a clue how little they know about what they think they're teaching. Heck, I'm barely going to touch on how much worse than useless most "women's self-defense" training is. All that would take a book. This one is a good start.


But I will say this: if someone you care about really needs self-defense, give them a few critical basics:

1. No matter how much experience they say they have, your teacher can be oh-so wrong. They don't know what you know about your body, your mind, or your self defense situation. And gosh, if they aren't listening to you, they know even less.

2. Anyone who won't talk to you about why they teach specific moves, who can't answer "but why not just walk away?", does not know what they are doing.

3. Belts don't matter. Martial arts lineages don't matter. The name of the school doesn't matter. All those weapons on the wall? The big, lovely Japanese kanji? Irrelevant. Absolutely irrelevant.

4. You don't need lots of fancy moves. More techniques isn't the answer. You need one move -- just one -- that works. Okay, maybe two. Listen: if it's hard to do when you're calm, on flat ground, in a well-lit room, how hard will it be to do in the rain, on slippery pavement in the dark? Those moves should be simple.

If you want a good teacher, find someone who doesn't need to convince you that they're a good teacher. Find someone who teaches out of their garage. Find someone who, when you learn a bunch of moves, won't give you a belt.

And to the guy who tried to teach me women's self-defense tonight, who is probably nearly as annoyed as I am by the experience, who thinks pain and damage are the same thing, who told me that if I raise my arm over my head I'll be taller than my attacker:

I hope you find out how how little you know before you teach this stuff to any other woman who might actually need to use it. But I bet you won't.

We don't really live in a very violent place or time. Most of the women who learn these "self-defense" practices will never need them. I console myself with that.

And yet, somehow, I'm still pissed.

Making Relationships Last

Do everything else first. Just kidding.

I have an answer to the age-old question of making relationships last. It's really quite simple. Two guidelines:

1. Hear what you want to hear.

2. Anything else is small stuff. Ignore it.

You have to get past the idea of right and wrong. Communication in relationships is not about right and wrong and it sure isn't about peace, love and understanding. As Mr. Shaw says, "The problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred."

We don't communicate. We think we have, and that's all very well and good, but mostly we haven't. Since we're hallucinating about communicating anyway, let's hallucinate in a way that makes things work better. Makes sense, right?

A bit more detail:

Hear what you want to hear. This is easier than it sounds, since most people use lots of words when they talk and. You're smart -- just pick out the words that work best for you. Once you practice this a bit, it becomes surprisingly easy.

Ignore the small stuff. People get into fights because they think something matters a lot, but the fight is almost never about the subject in front of you. No, it's about some deeper principle or universal injustice. Sure, fight for fun if you want to, but don't fight the wrong battle. And when it comes to relationships, it's almost always the wrong battle. The actual thing in front of you? Small. Inconsequential. Ignore it.

There you have it. Go on, try these two guidelines. If in 20 years you're not still together with whoever, well. I'll give you your money back. Heck, I might even admit I was wrong.