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• Mon, 16:34: Josephina's Old Gate in Old Mesilla http://t.co/rFaw5mhw

Bear with me. I’m trying to work out some thoughts. And I’m working them out by putting them on paper. And I’m posting this on the blog because I haven’t posted in ages and that makes me feel like a slug.

But don’t expect this to be coherent.

I’m trying to write the next blog post for Raising Happiness. This one’ll be about Step 9: Rig Their Environment for Happiness.

I know the point I’d like to get at, I’d like to get at the idea that tough love and experiencing hardship equip one to deal with more hardship.

We tell each other:

No pain, no gain.
What doesn’t kill you just makes you stronger
Pressure makes diamonds

And many more that I just can’t think of right now.

When I was writing my senior thesis (three years ago), I was collecting data—“data” meaning real phrases about parenting used by real people. Somehow I ended up on this site that endorsed spanking and authoritarian parenting. It was a freaky experience. Some posters talked about the actual act of spanking—the length of the switch or the age of the kid or frequency, icky stuff like that. But some posters talked about some of the rationales behind spanking and authoritarian parenting. It was this idea that being kind meant being soft (another metaphor). And of course, “being soft” means weakness.

As if strength could only be cultivated through hardship.

Doctors do this. The army does this. As part of their training, residents routinely go for days without sleep because a doctor might have to get up in the middle of the night and work on a patient or something. When really, regular sleep deprivation doesn’t make you more competent when you’re sleep deprived, it actually make you less competent, because, Dude! having enough sleep is really important and not having enough has all kinds of implications for health that I don’t remember know but I’m sure I read it someplace.

So the kicker is that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is actually totally bogus. If it doesn’t kill you (but almost kills you), I’m pretty sure it makes you weaker.

I told you this wouldn’t be coherent.

There’s something about being home that makes a difference.

And it doesn’t even matter that my childhood home, with it’s new tile and hardwood floors scarcely resembles my childhood home. Or that my other childhood home is long sold and gone; its insides in a McMansion where I have never lived, only visited.

But there’s something about home, something about visiting regularly that is building memories. Maybe I’m trying to make up for leaving home so early.

It helps that nothing changes. That’s the same plastic crow piggy bank (it is a crow, right?) on my father’s desk in his office that I played with when I was three. The same 80’s weavings on hula hoops (my dentist has the same ones). The same cushions. The same family photos. And it’s like going back into time and handing my children a taste of my childhood.

At least it happens in El Paso. Where the restaurants we visit are the same ones from ten, twenty years ago. Good solid Mexican ones. No Olive Garden* for us.

I started to write: “nothing against the Olive Garden,” and then I thought, no, actually, I have everything against the Olive Garden. It’s huge portions of crappy food filled with additives, a gimmicky restaurant that looks exactly the same as every other crappy gimmicky restaurant franchise : Appleby’s, TGIF’s, Fuddlemuckers or whatever it’s called. Yuck. One day I will be king and I will blow up all the Olive Gardens.

Cheese that isn’t real cheese. Salad that’s nothing but toxic iceberg lettuce. Olives with no pits?

And I’m not even comparing the Olive Garden to Italian food. I’m comparing Olive Garden to real food—any real food—peanut butter and jelly.

Olive Garden says, “I’m just going through the motions of wanting to eat a good meal.” It’s so bourgeois.

Anyway, I digress. It’s good to be home. No Olive Garden for us.

 I know I’ve said this before, but I have to say it again: Rachmaniov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18: II. Adagio sostenuto. Listen. Do you hear what’s it’s saying? It’s telling you that there’s hope and grief and one does not cancel the other out. That you can grieve and be optimistic at the same time.

OH MY GOD! GARBAGE TRUCK!!! IT PULLING UP RIGHT NOW IN FRONT OF WHERE I’M WRITING TODAY—(Marina’s German Bakery) AND IT’S EMPTYING THE DUMPSTER!

Anyway, where was I? Grief and hope, right? Grief and hope, grief and hope.

OH, MAN! YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN THIS GARBAGE TRUCK! JUST GRABBED THE DUMPSTER AND FLUNG ITS GUTS OVER ITS SHOULDER LIKE SOME MODERN DOUBLE-AXEL DINOSAUR . WOW. SO COOL.

But I digress. I was building up to the scene the other day in the guest room where—

OKAY, OKAY! JUST ONE LAST THING, OKAY? SO THEN? THEN, THEN THE GARBAGE TRUCK BACKED UP—BOOP! BOOP! BOOP! AT LIKE, 10 MPH! LIKE A ROCK STAR.

OKAY, WHAT WERE YOU SAYING?

I was telling a story about Wagner. He woke up from his nap and I was still writing and he climbed up and sat next to me on the bed and read while I worked.

OKAY, BUT DID YOU SEE THAT GARGBAGE TRUCK? IT WAS SO COOL! AND DRIVING SO FAST! DO YOU THINK HE LOOKED BEHIND HIM OR HE WAS JUST GUESSING THAT THE CARS ON TRAWOOD WOULD MOVE OUT OF THE WAY FOR HIM?

I’m sure he at least looked in his review mirror. Anyway—as I was saying...

I DON’T KNOW. HE WAS GOING PRETTY FAST.

Yes, but the two aren’t mutually exclusive. One could go fast in reverse and still look in his rearview mirror. Which kind of brings me back to my story about grief and hope. You see, Wagner was sitting on the bed with me, quietly reading and I said, “Do you want to listen to Rachmaniov’s Piano Concerto #2, the second movement?”

And he said, “Yeah.”

THAT’S IT?

Yes, that’s it. It was a better story until the garbage truck interrupted me.

THAT GARBAGE TRUCK WAS AWESOME. DO YOU THINK HE EVER MISSES?

Excuse me?

DO YOU THINK EVER TRIES TO STAB THE DUMPSTER WITH HIS LITTLE GARBAGE TRUCK ARMS AND MISSES THE LITTLE ARMHOLES?

I don’t think they’re called “armholes.”

ANYWAY, WHEN WE GET HOME, WHO DO YOU THINK HAS THE BETTER STORY? YOU WITH YOUR RACH #2 (AGAIN) OR ME WITH THE GARBAGE TRUCK!

I’m going home.

I miss my Tuesday Sisters.

I just finished reading (for the second time) Meg Waite Clayton’s The Wednesday Sisters, about 5 women in Palo Alto in the 60’s, moms who become writers in their own way. Great book.

I have Tuesday Sisters. We meet every Tuesday morning at my house at 9:30. Mary arrives on time. I usually arrive about 3 minutes before Mary does. Something about getting the kids to daycare on time in Tuesdays that is such a chore. Who knows why?

Sometimes there are five of us, sometimes only three. We spend about a half an hour catching up from last week and then we sit down to write. Two of us are pregnant; that’s the only reason we have food around. I serve tea, but I’m not much of a hostess.

We sit in my living room, toys pushed to the perimeter. I sit behind a cheap, long card table. We all have aluminum Macs. Wait, I think Jill might have a white Mac.

Rachel has the prompts. I keep time. She calls it out. We bury our heads and write. After about 10, 12, 15 minutes, my phone beeps and we stop. In turn we read what we’ve written. No comment is made. We move on to the next prompt. We do this for 90 minutes.

And then we go home.

I don’t know why, but some kind of magic happens on Tuesdays. Maybe it’s because we know that we can say ugly truths and sad truths. We can get right down to the bone of honesty. Sometimes we write what we wouldn’t dare say out loud (and then, of course, we read it out loud). Sometimes we write to each other, “I’m glad Angelisa’s here. I need a good cry today.” It’s like being private and public at the same time. And of course nothing beats a good cry.

I’ve only missed one Tuesday, and yet I feel all out of sorts as if I haven’t written in ages.

That person on Facebook is not my friend.

I don’t know how she got on my friends list. Well, I do know. Because I put her there. And I put her there because I thought she was someone else. I mean, I knew it was she—that face hasn’t changed in twenty years.

She drove a Harley back then. She looked too little, too petite to drive a Harley. But of course, you couldn’t tell her that. She looked sweet but she was mean. And twenty-five isn’t too young to have a six-year old daughter. But it’s close.

Poor kid. Didn’t stand a chance. Always getting dropped off at grandma’s for some undetermined amount of time and then just as suddenly, Reggie Anne would show up and scoop her daughter back into her redneck van and we wouldn’t see Pink for another week. Pink. She named her daughter “Pink.”

Pink was so stubborn she’d hold her breath until she passed out if she didn’t get her way. Was a biter, too. Had quick jaws like a snapper turtle. She never bit me—I read her bedtime stories and got her ready for bed—but she bit everyone else in the house. Even the puppy.

When I moved back to Seattle I told her, “You remember to brush your teeth every night, Pink, ‘kay? Don’t wait for Gram to tell you.”

She promised.

I didn’t keep in touch. I was happy to lose ties with the rednecks who thought there was nothing wrong with terms such as “half breed.” (“Well, that’s what you are, honey,” Pink’s Gram told me. “Ain’t nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, I got a cousin whose high yella and nobody in the family cares no more. Sometimes all the ethnic blood just make you prettier.”)

 And then 20 years later, Reggie Anne shows up on Facebook. Now she’s a Gram. Pink drops her toddlers off (ages 13 months and 23 months) and shows up a week later, sometimes with bruises on her arm, just like Reggie Anne would back in 1992.

I wonder if Reggie Anne reads the boys bedtime stories or if the boys are biters. Her Facebook status won’t tell me. I know she likes her new handgun and she hates Pink’s new tattoo, but I don’t know anything about those boys.

Get a life.

Have a life.

Choose life.

I’m thinking about death a lot these days. Yesterday my cat died. She was just old. My mom was there when she took her last breath. She said the cat let out a big meow and a huge exhale and then she was gone. Then there’s the dog who’s also old and sick.

There’s an inane episode of “Scrubs” on in the background and in it, a patient dies after a lengthy and deep conversation about being afraid of death.

I can tell I’ve got death on the brain because a line from an email caught my eye “after that, I’ll have a life” and my brain assigned a different meaning to the phrase. Kinda like those few days after an earthquake when you’re jumpy just to hear a loud double-axel vehicle lumbering down the street.

Is it Writing Time? Don't feel like writing but have 1:54:07 of your 2-hour designated writing time left?

Here are some things you can do instead.

•       Rename your folders
•       Send email to your writing buddies about scheduling writing time
•   

That’s the crazy thing about the mind. When I sit down to write, my mind is racing with other things I could be doing—checking my Internet connection—just the connection, not email or Facebook or Pintrest (can you believe that 100 people repinned that DIY jetpack backpack?) But then when I sit down to write a list of distractions, I can only think of three things. Ah, here are some more:

•       Clean your glasses
•       Clean your screen
•       Drink your tea

My “office” is a cafe not far from my house. It’s where I get my best writing done—no kids, no wifi, no laundry begging to be folded. This morning I’m at my “desk,” a two-top in the corner, when a woman comes up to me and motions to my copy of Raising Happiness.

            “I have that book. I really liked it.”

            I stand up a little straighter, my ears brightening and I get ready to launch into a lengthy discussion, wondering if I can nonchalantly plug my guest blog posts. Just as I open my mouth to rave about the book, the woman confesses, “I just flipped through it. It’s with a stack of parenting books on my night table this high. But with kids...who has time to read?”

            “Start with chapter 7,” I tell her and manage to slip in the fact that I’m writing a summary of chapter 7 (Teach Self Discipline). “So many other parenting books just say ‘you’re doing it wrong!’ But this is about how you can tap into those positive behaviors that spawn other positive behaviors.”

            The woman nods slowly. “Yeah, I remember really liking the theme of the book: nothing is hopeless, kids are resilient, you can do better.”

            Now we’re both nodding. Her name is called; her coffee is ready. We say good-bye and I go back to work.