I’ve had an epiphany. I’m going back to school for Environmental Studies, and I want to be involved in sustainability planning for communities. Ta da!

Only took me twenty years to figure that out. I’ve never been particularly interested in anything specific as a job, except writing novels. And I certainly don’t give a crap about a career just for the sake of a career. Associate manager to manager to senior manager to associate director to director to senior director – who cares? Do any of those people actually enjoy what they do every day?

People care about the money, of course, and the status. I don’t care about status, in fact in most cases the higher up a person is in a corporation the less I respect them, since I’ve worked in that area long enough to know what it takes to advance that high. And it’s way more important to me to be interested in what I do, and to feel like I’m doing some good or at least no harm to the world, than to just make as much money as I can.

So, what to do?

Finance – vomit. Energy – blech. Manufacturing – do we manufacture anything in this country any more? Medicine, hm. Too much science, too much one-on-one with people. Same with therapy, which I’ve seriously considered. Or teaching – could I get up and perform in front of people every day? I don’t think so.

I would love to help women, children, or animals that have been abused, but emotionally, I couldn’t do it. I cry at the commercials. No help at all.

My most recent chosen profession has been web development. IT is a good field to go into if you hate computers and people. Even if you went into IT because you love dinking around with hardware or you have a passion for programming, you’ll end up in management. And as anyone who’s ever worked for other people knows, rare is the manager who actually likes people and knows how to inspire them. It’s certainly not a job requirement.

I suspect it’s like that in most fields. You go into the industry because you like working with whatever it is – clothing, books, education, numbers, design, programming, etc. – and you end up in management, because if you’re not moving up the ladder, you’re a loser. And once you’re in management, you’re no longer working with whatever it was you liked in the first place. Nonprofits are no different from corporations in this respect, though I suppose if you’re passionate enough about the issue or the industry, it doesn’t matter to you.

I’ve never been that passionate about anything, unless I’m too passionate. I could never work in publishing, for example. I love books so much, but working in publishing would be something like a person who loves steak getting a job at a slaughterhouse. No thanks.

Academia is similar, to me. I can see how it’s a lot of fun to dissect other people’s literary work down to subatomic levels, but does it do good for the world in general? Plus, academia is just as competitive as the corporate sector, if not more so. And there’s the teaching thing, too. Not for me.

Before my career got derailed, I was moving toward usability. To help the web become easier to navigate for everyone, that’s a good job.

Unfortunately my “career,” such as it was, got derailed by 9/11. I’d just moved to NYC days earlier, got laid off a few months later, with no contacts and no experience in the city, which was now in a deep recession. My field was way over-saturated, outsourced, unstable, yet still demanded that its players relearn everything, every couple of years. I could never get enough work to keep up my skills or pay for classes, so every year I’ve fallen further behind. If I were enough of a graphic designer or a programmer to be a strong competitor, I would be okay, but I’m not. And, sadly, I’ve become less interested in usability, too. In what’s starting to look like a permanent recession, no one’s hiring anyone simply to make their web site easy to use, yet a lot of education is needed to learn to do it well.

And it doesn’t do enough good in the world to inspire me.

But I can’t just work at a bookstore, my other job. Talk about a dead end. It’s been killing my body and my soul for the last couple of years, but my mind has just been churning in circles.I don’t want to be a manager, or work in the head offices. What should I do? Leave the city? Take some programming classes? I’m sick of freelancing, too, and that’s what most programmers are nowadays. Go back to school? I haven’t wanted to go back to school. I feel like I’ve done that, and I need to move forward. Of course, I would do anything if I could only pick a goal. But what goal? What should I do? What should I do?

My thinking has become kind of frantic this past year.

I just kept going on, doing my best, when I can, to figure out why I’m alive and what I’m doing here. Watching the depression grow again. Ugh.

Trying to do the thing, I did NaNoWriMo again this past November, and wrote the first draft of an apocalyptic novel that’s been in my head for at least twenty years. It was so much fun, and turned out well enough that I decided to keep working at it. I’ve thrown myself into researching climate change, epidemiology, water issues, large scale environmental disaster, and have surprised myself by getting more interested, instead of burning out.

I even considered becoming a disaster relief worker, but I don’t think that’s a full time job. Also, I think that kind of work is physically demanding and requires a person to be away from home for weeks at a time. Hm.

I kept getting a vision of myself installing solar panels. So I started to look into that. I thought it would probably be handy to know a little bit about how electricity works, should the apocalypse come along, and I thought my classmates would be interesting – would I be the only woman, the only person my age? I wouldn’t care.

As I looked through the programs at each college in New York state, I kept seeing programs in environmental studies. And I found a great program at CUNY Hunter College. You can focus either on the science-y bits or on policy and management, which sounds boring but actually means “planning sustainable communities,” which is what, I realized, I want to do. Yay!

And as soon as I started talking about it, I found all kinds of advice and connections all around me – people who know people in the field who are willing to talk to me, or who can suggest certifications and so forth to get me started. Contacts, networking, mentoring – it’s all that stuff they tell you about in career advice books and articles, but I can use it now, because I have a goal at last.

What a difference it makes!

What’s interesting to me (and hopefully to others) about this process is the idea that action creates action. Even if you don’t know what to do, you have to keep doing something in order to make something else happen – a new idea, a new opportunity. Otherwise you might as well lie down and die, which tempts me at times, believe me. It’s transforming, to have a purpose. I’m even studying Algebra, in preparation for placement testing, and actually enjoying it.

That’s where I am today. I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say about this whole process. Wherever you are in your life, I wish you luck, and the energy to keep trying!

So S. and I go into the cinema to see if there was anything else playing – the smell of popcorn was that tantalizing – but there’s nothing at the right time, and I’m ready to leave. S. eyes the staircase. “Let’s just go up here for a minute,” she says.

I’d never been to this theater before, but she’d been here lots of times, born and raised in the city. At the top of the stairs is a ticket-taker, so I hesitate. Nearby is another cinema worker, chatting on the phone. “Bathroom?” S. says, and the woman gestures. We walk right in.

Who knew you could do that?

I’m giddy, having snuck into the movies – I feel like a little kid as we’re walking down the main drag, past the popcorn concessions (gotta get some), past theater after theater. I’m trying to figure out what we’re going to see. S. is just heading for the bathroom – she really did have to go.

And suddenly we’re in the doorway of a movie, I can’t tell which one, but I have my suspicions as there are security guards and a guy waving a wand-style metal detector. S. is walking so purposefully, he assumes she belongs there. “You were here before, right?” he says, and waves her in. I ride her wake, trying not to screech with joy.

We’re in. And The Book of Eli is just starting.

We had to stand, but it’s just under 2 hours and we both work on our feet all day at the bookstore, so no sweat (my feet are much better these days).

Later she told me how she and a friend happened to walk past a theater downtown showing a premier of some big movie, and all the stars were there. She and her friend just walked right in. Saw the movie, saw the stars.

New York!

I flew to the Midwest last Sunday, not wanting to go but unable to get out of it, and as it turns out I’m glad I did. In grief, a person will say things they wouldn’t say at any other time. We don’t really talk about anything in my family – at least, we never have before.

My sister had her own family emergency that I won’t go into, but one result was that she dropped me at our father’s house on the day of the funeral and had to take off immediately, which meant that I spent about three hours on my own with him that afternoon. Pretty much exactly the situation I had always dreaded.

We looked at some photo albums, and he teared up and admitted it was hard to look at the pictures of my stepmother. I did my best to comfort him, and teared up myself, on his behalf. She was never a monster; she always seemed like a perfectly nice person, but even at eleven I could tell that she didn’t want to be raising any more children, especially someone else’s. Her kids were grown, with children of their own. My problem was that I always needed more than that, and was disappointed over and over by her coldness. After my mother had died, my father didn’t seem to want us around, either. He and my stepmother both always did the conventionally correct things, especially materially, so we had regular meals, and vacations and Christmas presents and birthday parties, and clothing, and I got braces, and in spite of the upheaval of my mother’s death and my father’s eventual remarriage, we had stability. Lots of people don’t have that, growing up, and I’ve always been grateful.

But it still hurt that there was no love there. My father was always harshly critical of us kids, contemptuous, really, and incapable of controlling his temper. My mother could mellow him out, and to a lesser degree my stepmother did the same, but there were those years between his marriages, when we lived in constant fear of his wrath. We laugh now about the time we were coming back from Disney World, and had stopped at a McDonald’s for lunch. My sister wouldn’t eat her hamburger because they put onion on it – she was always the stubborn one, the one most like my father – and my father was furious and yelled at her. And then we got back to the car to discover that we had a flat tire. This meant that my father had to unload all the camping gear out of the back of the station wagon to get at the spare. He was beet red and cursing the whole time, and the three of us stood frozen on the sidewalk, staying out of his way and trying to ignore the stares of happier families. It’s not a particularly funny story at all, but I’m glad we can laugh.

Not at all funny were the times when my brother got into trouble, which was often back then, and my father took him into his bedroom and beat the crap out of him. My sister and I would stay in the living room, out of the way but hearing it all, trying to act like everything was okay. My brother was the oldest, and probably the most affected of us three kids by our mother’s death. What he was doing is now called “acting out,” and if it had been the nineties, his school might have recognized it and convinced my father to get him some help. As it was, in the seventies, though everyone in our tiny town knew what was going on, nobody could really do anything. The beatings stopped when my brother ran away at 13 and was brought back by the police. My father stuck to just yelling after that, which was bad but not the worst. He and my brother never reconciled their troubled relationship, and even now, when my brother has been dead for seven years, my father despises and blames him for causing all that trouble.

Not funny, either, were the constant insults I endured from my father. I didn’t just have a messy room; I was a pig, I was disgusting. I didn’t just get a bad grade; I was stupid and lazy, a disgrace. He always expected the worst from me, and accused me of lying when I hadn’t done anything bad.

One Saturday afternoon I came home after spending the night at a friend’s house. We’d gone sledding that morning, running up a big hill and sliding, screaming with laughter, down again, over and over. We’d had such a good time, and when her mom dropped me off, instead of going straight to my room, I went into the kitchen, where my father and stepmother were, to let them know I was home and had had fun. I was reeling with fatigue, not having slept much, of course, and then all that sledding, and my father accused me of being drunk. Drunk? I was twelve. I hardly knew what that meant. I realize lots of kids do start drinking that young or even younger, but I was a good kid. I never got in trouble at school, and certainly had never given him any reason to suspect that I was one of those kids. I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t convince him that I was just tired from staying up late and being a kid. I went up to my room, all my pleasure gone in frustration and hurt.

It’s hard to convey how hurtful all of this was to me as a child. Lots of people experience that kind of parenting, where nothing is ever good enough, and the slightest infraction is blown way out of proportion. As an adult, I can see that the good outweighed the bad, but as a child, all I knew was that my father seemed to hate me, and I became convinced that there was something wrong with me. I entered adulthood with shattered self-esteem, hating myself and constantly expecting other people to hate me, too, crippled by a deep, unconscious dread of other people. Though I knew it was really a fear of my father, that knowledge never took that sick feeling away. I moved far away as soon as I could, going to college at seventeen – another good thing my father did – and rarely going back to his house, moving to San Francisco the day I finished my studies. I’ve seen my father and stepmother five times since then. They never invited me to visit, and I certainly didn’t want to. Relations with the rest of my family suffered as a result, but I had to do it. I had to get away from him and sort of re-raise myself. Find some sense of self-worth, stop getting into relationships with people who treated me like my father did, and learn how to love people.

My father’s contempt extended well beyond his children, and encompassed most of the human race. He was no Archie Bunker; he was aware that you’re not supposed to talk like that, and seldom did, but his racism was clear to me when I was very young. He would drop remarks about Blacks, Jews, Arabs, Asians, everybody – even Italians. The Irish got it, too, though his children were half Irish. I’m grateful that he doesn’t hold women in the same contempt, or I would be an even bigger mess than I already am.

He did teach me, inadvertently, to separate a person from his faults and not to dismiss a person for having one or two bad qualities, and also not to disdain an entire race because of the actions of a few; because that’s what he did, and I could see that it was wrong. But I always thought that, underneath all of that, he was a good person and would be there for me if I really needed him.

And this is the ultimate issue I have with my father: that he proved me wrong. After I was raped – by a black man – he and my stepmother both treated me badly. My father blew up at me at the hospital, and the nurse had to step in, mercifully, and take me away. My stepmother treated me even more coldly than usual, and at home my father lectured me at great length about how you simply can’t trust a black person, they were just violent, natural criminals. Then he ordered me not to tell anyone what had happened, and that was the end of it. Not a single word of kindness; they never even asked me if I was okay.

This betrayal was a far more serious trauma than the rape itself.

The ironic thing is that I trusted that guy, the rapist, and agreed to give him a ride (“just down the road”), because he’d paid me a compliment and, during the few minutes that we talked, asked me about myself and appeared to be interested in what I said. I was sixteen, and that had almost never happened to me. And when I hesitated to let him get in my car, he said, “What’s the matter, you don’t trust a brother?” and I thought, That’s my father’s voice in my head, telling me not to trust him because he’s black. I didn’t want to be that way. I still don’t. I’d rather trust the wrong person some of the time, than trust no one, ever.

My father’s racism was more important to him than his daughter. I’ve tried so hard to forgive my father for this, understanding that forgiveness is something you have to do over and over, but I never could conquer the rage I felt whenever I thought of him.

That the fight we finally had, my father and I, was about politics, is hilarious to me. We’ve never agreed about politics. My earliest political memory is the presidential race in 1976, when I looked at the two candidates on TV and said, of Carter, “I want him to win.” He had a kind face, and his name was Jimmy. My father said, “No, we want the other guy to win,” and I thought, No, I don’t. But of course I couldn’t say that aloud. I was already afraid to contradict him.

So we were in the car, last Monday, going to get some information from a cemetery/mausoleum where my father was considering placing my stepmother’s ashes. I guess I started it. My father is one of those people who forward those hideous, racist, hateful, lie-filled emails that the more rabid form of conservatives send around. I do not exaggerate, if you’ve never seen one of these. They don’t just say that Obama is the wrong man for the job; they say he’s a terrorist. A few of them even say directly that a black man should never be president, and go on in terms that could have come directly from the KKK. I’d surprised myself by hitting “reply” on a few and refuting them, calmly and rationally, trying to reach my father as an intelligent person, to no avail. Even though they were just emails, hitting “send” was terrifying to me. Anyway, in the car that day, I noticed that Rush Limbaugh was on the radio, and said something light about how I could see where he got his ideas from. My father unleashed the most hateful tirade I have ever heard.

And I spoke up. After all these years, I finally wasn’t afraid of him anymore.

I have learned, from the internet, how to argue with someone without resorting to ad hominem attack. Calling someone names in an attempt to cow them is ineffective and degrading; my father has never learned this, being unaccustomed to having people disagree with him. I let him talk, but whenever I started to say something, he just shouted over me. And when he called me an idiot, I said “Don’t call me an idiot. You disagree with me, but I’m not an idiot.” I asked him how he knew he was right if he never listened to differing opinions, and he said he didn’t need to hear another point of view. He said such awful things, about how anyone who didn’t have health care was lazy and deserved to die, that everyone in Guantanamo was a terrorist and should be killed, in fact all Arabs should be in prison, and I asked him a question I’ve wanted to ask him for decades: “How can you call yourself a Christian? Your god is supposed to be the god of love. How can you say those things?” He had no answer for that, just snorted.

I let the argument go after that, for the most part. I mean, his wife had just died. I was surprised it had gone as far as it had, and even more surprised at how calm I felt. I had kept my temper, held my own with my father, and spoken the truth, and the world hadn’t come to an end. We arrived at the cemetery and everything just went back to normal. If he was at all disturbed by what had happened, he certainly didn’t show it. Another good thing about my father is that while he can dish it out, he can also take it. He referred to our argument over the next few days, but didn’t seem to feel bad about it. He also didn’t try to make me feel bad about it. Not that he would have succeeded.

He even told me and my sister over dinner that he felt awful about not being able to keep his temper with us when we were kids. And he told us that our stepmother, when her first husband died, had promised herself that she wouldn’t marry a man with kids, that she didn’t want to do that. We refrained from letting him know that we could tell. These admissions were huge for him, and I appreciated them. But I’m even more thankful for all the work I’ve been doing, these last twenty-five years. I like who I am. I’ve slain the dragon at last.

I told my father several times that I loved him. He even said it back, grudgingly and not terribly sincerely, like always, but it doesn’t matter. At some point I would like to talk to him about what happened after the rape, but even that is no longer such a barrier between us, for me anyhow. I’m even looking forward to visiting more often, seeing my cousins who also live in the area, and my sister and niece and nephew, whom I love so much.

I don’t believe my father is capable of loving his children like he loved both of his wives, and I’m more sure than ever that he genuinely, deeply loved my mother. He can’t decide where to put my stepmother’s ashes because he’s conflicted about where his own remains should go. The space next to my mother in the cemetery in New York belongs to him, and he feels he should rest there, beside her. But thirty years with my stepmother mean a lot to him, too. That’s a good quality for a man to have. I can love him for that.

I am four years old. My mother and my aunt are in the kitchen, talking grownup talk. I am playing with my younger cousin, John, who is still in diapers. He is throwing a ball down the basement stairs, and I am running down and fetching it, like a dog, over and over.

It’s fun. I’m out of breath. Our basement is scary, but safe because the stairs lead off of the kitchen, where my mother and my aunt are talking, and I can hear their voices. I’m thumping all the way down, thumping all the way back up. The carpet on the stairs is thin, like felt, over the wooden steps. We all had bruises on our shins, all the time we lived in that house, from those stairs.

And they’re slippery. My cousin laughs and throws the ball. I run after it, and halfway down I slip and fall, and bump my head.

I start to cry. I leave the ball and run upstairs, sobbing. My cousin on the landing, wide-eyed. I go straight to my mother with utter faith that she will make it right.

And she does. She turns from her conversation, all her attention on me. She kisses my forehead, clucks in sympathy at the goose egg growing there, consoles me. She gets an ice cube from the freezer and wraps it in a paper towel, to press against it. She holds me until I stop crying.

She died less than seven months later.

Fast forward thirty years. My brother is dead, too, suddenly, tragically, his son the same age my brother was when our mother died. I am in Michigan for the funeral and all that goes along with it. My father is stoic, as ever. My sister and I are in his basement, going through things. He’s pulling stuff out of boxes, old report cards, stuff we left behind, especially me, because I’m almost never there.

And out of one box, he pulls a small packet of letters. Letters our mother wrote to him the summer he was in Japan, for work. The summer before she died. The summer I fell down the stairs. We had no idea these letters existed. What a treasure. My sister and I sit down immediately and read.

There are only four of them. And in one, my mother describes how I fell down the stairs, the goose egg, how she got me an ice cube.

It’s as though she reached out of the past, and kissed me on the forehead.

I didn’t need validation for this memory, but here it is.

I’m sure she wasn’t perfect, since no one is. The letters reveal a woman who is afraid to drive on the highway (born and raised in the city), who hates being alone at night, who teases her husband to buy her gifts and wonders if the geishas are making her look bad. She can’t work the lawn mower. She worries about money. She makes sure to tell my father what we kids are doing, and that we talk about him all the time. She obviously loves her husband and her children very much. And in one letter, she mentions that she’s losing weight and “feeling rotten.” She ascribes it to her nerves, her crazy diet, and missing her “sweetie,” but I’m sure it was the first sign of the leukemia that killed her.

No one ever took her place; no one even tried. If she’d lived, maybe when I got older we would have fought. Maybe she would have told me to wear less makeup, or more, or to put some decent clothes on, or pressured me about my relationships, or told me I was gaining too much weight. I hear all kinds of things about problems between mothers and daughters, but I don’t know anything about that. My mother was still my whole world when she died.

It’s the only time she ever let me down.

I’m still trying to figure out what kind of blog I want this to be. I’ve just spent the better part of the past week reading a friend’s blog, completely unable to stop reading the next entry, and the next entry, and the next… She’s having a very interesting life, is brutally honest, and knows how to tell a story – the best combination in the world. And I got to thinking, I need to tell more of those kinds of stories here.

What am I so shy about? That my friends will read it? Generally, when I’m hanging out with people, I’ll tell any kind of story that pops into my head. I’ve gotten a little more circumspect in recent years, but that’s more because I want to tell new stories, and most of the more titillating stuff happened a long time ago. Also, I don’t want to sound like I’m showing off. I don’t think there’s anything special or better about me, I just like to tell stories and think about life. And anyway, I can introduce you to a dozen people who are way cooler than I’ll ever be.

Part of this is coming up because there’s a book being published in the fall. It’s a collection of essays and art from a magazine that ran for about ten years, called Morbid Curiosity. A friend of mine ran it and was kind enough to publish a couple of my essays in it, and one of those made the cut for the book. I’m excited about it, and happy for her and everyone else, but… this essay, written under my real name, is about me getting off in the torture museum in Amsterdam. In the bathroom. By myself. So, not only am I telling the world that I’m kinky, I’m also advertising a time when I masturbated in public. When I decided to use my real name on the piece, I thought, fuck it. I’m not ashamed of who I am.

And I’m still not. So what’s the fucking problem?

I’ll tell you what the fucking problem is. Along with all the fun stories I want to tell – like the camel trek in Egypt, flying in a helicopter over a glacier in Alaska, having sex next to the dance floor in a London nightclub – there’s a whole lot of fucked up stuff. I don’t know if I’ve told you this before, but I’m kind of fucked up. And I’m still figuring out how to deal with that.

I can’t tell the fun stories without telling the fucked up stories. In fact, a lot of the fun stories turn into the fucked up stories. But if it’s all attached, even obliquely, to my real name – and I’m laughing as I type this – will it prevent me from getting a job someday?

Maybe it’ll get me a job someday. That’s the life I want to be leading.

I’m not too worried about my family. My sister would take it all in stride, and my niece and nephew are both cool and over 18. My father would probably just ignore it, if he ever heard about my blog or any book I’m in, which is unlikely (I’m sure not going to tell him). And the extended family is not really a factor.

The reason I used my real name on that story is because I wanted to commit myself to being who I am, no matter what that means. Now I look back at myself 10 plus years ago with affection and exasperation. Can I really follow through? Can I really be that brave?

I haven’t written anything here that isn’t real. And I still want to talk a lot about this Zen thing. I just don’t see how I can have a really kick-ass blog if I don’t risk letting out too much information. Besides, people love that stuff.

I’m going to take the gloves off. You’ve been warned.

This post is dedicated to Jenn H. I love you!

Every morning I turn on New York One, the NYC news channel, just to make sure the world is still there. I get online and check Facebook, my favorite blogs, icanhascheezburger.com and the major news headlines. So I heard about the outbreak of swine flu in Mexico early last week, and I felt a little tickle in my throat.

The next day I heard there were a few cases in Texas and California. Slight headache.

And on Friday, I turned on the tv to learn that a bunch of high school students in Queens – some of whom had just been to Mexico – had all gone home with the flu. Like, 75 of them.

I sneezed.

You can’t read this blog, or talk to me for long, without perceiving that I spend a lot of time thinking about the apocalypse. I don’t think I’m obsessed to an unhealthy degree, at least no one’s ever hinted as much to me. I think I’m healthily obsessed. If you think a huge disaster can’t happen where you live, you’re in denial.

As soon as I heard that the swine flu had already arrived in New York City, I went out and bought some more canned food and bottled water. They say you should have 2 weeks’ supply of everything, in case you have to hole up in your apartment until the pandemic is over. That includes medication, batteries, anything you might need that you might not be able to get, if you’re quarantined, taking care of someone who’s sick, or if stores are closed. Here is a good page on individual and family readiness from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Get Pandemic Ready is a good collection of advice, too.

On my way home with my supplies, a woman was walking in front of me, carrying her baby, who faced me over her shoulder. And coughed. Wetly.

I stopped dead in my tracks, until whatever bad guys might’ve been in the air had time to settle and dissipate. Sheesh. I felt achey and feverish for the rest of the day.

I must say I’m impressed with how the city is handling this, making sure we all understand what this is and what we can do. Everyone is firmly on the “concerned, not freaking the hell out” page, taking this seriously but not fanning the flames of hysteria, at least not as far as I’ve seen (I don’t watch FOX). I feel for the people of Mexico, who are feeling the worst of this, and I don’t blame them one bit. The most likely origin of this swine flu is the (American-owned) factory farms that have been built all over Mexico in the last few years, where, with fewer regulations to protect them, pigs are raised in confined and unsanitary circumstances, and the human workers don’t have it much better. David Kirby called for CDC and USDA officials to take a close look in this excellent article. I’ve heard that the factory farm near “Patient Zero,” a five year old who’s fine, has tested negative for this strain, but we’ll see what develops.

We’re as well-prepared as we can be at this point. I don’t believe we’re equipped to handle an outbreak on the level of the 1918 pandemic, but I don’t think you can have this many people in the world and be prepared to handle almost all of them getting sick, and a substantial portion of them dying. Whatever happens, we’ll figure it out. Probably, it’s not that bad, and this whole thing will soon be forgotten, until it’s time to do a “this year in the news” feature.

Meanwhile, please take normal precautions:

• Cover your nose and mouth with a tissue when you cough or sneeze. Throw the tissue in the trash after you use it.
• Wash your hands often with soap and water, especially after you cough or sneeze. Alcohol-based hand cleaners are also effective.
• Try to avoid close contact with sick people.
• If you get sick with influenza, CDC recommends that you stay home from work or school and limit contact with others to keep from infecting them. Avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth. Germs spread this way.

Don’t I sound calm? I am. Really. I’ve only sneezed once today.

Take care, everyone.

Like I'm really gonna get out of here alive. (But what if I do?)

Living in New York definitely brings home the idea of the impending apocalypse. Any subway at rush hour reminds me that disaster is just one panic away. We handle ourselves well here when disaster happens, and I’m glad to be in the city, but obviously 8 million people can’t just carry on as usual if there’s no electricity, or an epidemic, or a “dirty” bomb, or catastrophic economic collapse. I probably won’t survive such an eventuality, but in case I do, I want to be ready. I have extra water stored, and some stockpiled food. And I have a “go” bag.

It’s a comfortable backpack, built for a woman’s frame, which, for once, actually fits me. I could carry it for a long time if I had to. I have first aid stuff in there. A flashlight. Warm socks. Every so often, when I’m in a drugstore, I’ll buy something for my “go” bag: antihistamine, bandages , anti-diarrhea medicine. And if I’m ordering something from Amazon, I might include an inexpensive item from my survival list: 100′ of paracord, a firestarter, a basic compass, all for less than $10. On the slightly more costly side, I bought a sleeping bag recently, and I’ve got my eye on a portable solar/self-powered radio, a tent, and a wicked survival knife.

Of course, I can use these things for camping if civilization continues. But if it doesn’t, it’s all in one place so I can grab it and go. I can add some bottled water, food, more clothes if I have time, and then join the crowds of people who will no doubt be streaming out of the city some day.

I can see it so clearly. I don’t know what the disaster will be, and I don’t like to speculate much on specifics. I fervently hope it’s not as bad as I fear it will be.

I’ve considered including some things that will comfort me, like my favorite book. Survival lists often recommend a deck of cards, for people suffering withdrawal from TV and the internet. I’ll probably bring a few of my notebooks. What else would you want to save from your life, if you could only bring what you can carry yourself? Photos? Do you have your photos on a disk, do you know where that disk is, could you grab it while sirens are going off?

Am I bumming you out? Thinking about this stuff makes me feel better, actually. Denying that it could ever happen is foolish. Obviously it can happen. Would you rather be prepared, or unprepared?

What I need now is a “go” bag that will hold my cats. AbsurdBeats and I were discussing this the other night.

I’ve read books about survivalism, like The Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley. One thing disaster and survival experts definitely recommend is to visualize yourself doing something positive. That way your mind has some suggestions to make if it ever does happen.

I hope it doesn’t. But if it does, I want to be ready. What about you? Do you have a “go” bag?

I’m starting a new program this week to try and get back in shape. I want to do yoga, pilates, or some other kind of exercise every day. I’m also doing a raw food cleanse.

I’ve done some yoga or pilates in recent weeks, but going for more than a few days without keeping it up now means that I lose almost everything I’d gained, so it feels like I’m starting over. I guess this is part of what happens when you hit 40. It’s going to take some time to get back to where I was. I don’t know that I’ll be able to improve past that, but I’m going to try.

In pain and feeling crappy, I’ve started with some easy yoga routines. I’ve never been a super-athlete, but I’ve been better than this. It kills me to struggle with a simple forward bend, when I used to be able to stand on my head.

But I remind myself: the point of yoga is to deal with my body where it is in that moment. The point is not to get somewhere; the point is to be where I am. That’s where I start. That’s where I have to start. If I try to start where I  want to end up, I will hurt myself or get frustrated, and simply fail.

The trick is, while knowing that there’s a goal I’m working towards, to forget that and focus on what I’m doing right now. Ease into that forward bend, to the place I can reach today. Feel the sensation and breathe. Come back to the mat tomorrow.

This is true for everything I’ve ever wanted to accomplish.

Meanwhile, here’s a recipe for a delicious, vegan, mostly-raw salad dressing that I think tastes better than Caesar.

This one’s easy. In the following, understand that I’m talking about Buddhism mainly as seen in the US.

There are two basic kinds of Buddhism: Mahayana and Theravada. Mahayana means “Greater Vehicle” and is meant for everybody, including monastic and regular people. Theravada used to be called Hinayana by the Mahayanists, only the Theravadists didn’t like that, because it means “Smaller Vehicle.” I don’t think they meant it as an insult; they only meant that Theravada Buddhism was a practice meant for monks, for people willing to shut themselves away in a monastery and not engage fully in human life, e.g.,  marriage, family, working, etc. And oh yeah, women couldn’t join.

People who like Theravada Buddhism seem to like it for its traditionalism, and claim that it is superior to other forms of Buddhism because it uses Buddha’s “original” teachings. Since the Buddha made it clear that this is an experiential thing, passed mind-to-mind from teacher to student, this doesn’t make sense to me. The argument (and it seems to me that they’re the only ones who care) about whose sutras are more original turns me off. And, while it’s nice that they’ve changed it in the West to include lay people and women, it seems to me that that should invalidate their claim to traditionalism. I get hung up on all this when I think of Theravada.

Vipassana or insight meditation sounded interesting to me, but when I did a little – a very little – reading about it, it just sounded like zazen with a whole lot more language attached to it.

So much for Theravada. In the Mahayana tradition, there are of course many flavors to choose from, but the ones most familiar to us are Tibetan and Zen. I love the Dalai Lama, but every time I look into Tibetan Buddhism, I come smack up against a whole lot of – stuff. Jeweled trees, mandalas, gods, demons, prayer wheels. They’re big into symbolism and images. It’s gorgeous, but I find it all very distracting. I also can’t get behind reincarnation, which is central to Tibetan Buddhism and many other forms. I don’t know everything; reincarnation may be real, but if it is, it’s not something I can afford to focus on in this lifetime.

Overall, among Buddhists, my impression is that all the schools are cool with each other. There are no bitter disagreements, and as far as I know the Dalai Lama doesn’t think Thich Nhat Hahn is going to hell just because they represent different traditions. If I were from Tibet, I would be a Tibetan Buddhist. But I’m an American, so I can choose.

Zen just feels right to me. It always has. It’s simple. The emphasis is on just this. Zen says, basically, sit down and shut up, and see for yourself. No arguments over doctrine. No visualizations. Just this.

Plus, it has lots of stories, and I like stories.

Most cats are Buddhists.

(Part 1 here.)

I went abroad for junior year, so no more meditating with the professor and his group. I tried to do it on my own, with miserable results. I’ve dealt with major depression all of my life (my mother’s death, mostly). Sitting down alone and focusing on my breath while suffering from untreated depression was A Big Mistake. ‘Nuff said.

After I finished up at university, I moved to San Francisco. The famous San Francisco Zen Center was founded by Shunryu Suzuki in 1962, and was one of the first Zen temples  located outside of Japan. Suzuki-roshi gave the talks that became the classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. But there was something wrong there. My impression of that place and the people who went there was subtly tainted somehow, and I never went inside, though I often passed the lovely brick building on Page street. (Recently I read the book Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center by Michael Downing, which explains or at least describes what had happened there just a few years earlier; I’m amazed that I picked up on it.)

But I kept thinking about Zen, and the things I had read.

I deliberately chose not to read a whole lot about it, though. I understood that it wasn’t something I could get from a book, but that reading a lot of books about it might give me that impression. I would become an expert, a know-it-all, and never learn anything. The notion of beginner’s mind was about all I had understood from Suzuki-roshi’s book, apart from the concept of mindfulness, of being present in the moment. That’s another idea that I instinctively understood was true and important. I often practiced just being present in the moment, doing whatever I was doing, not thinking about the future or the past or daydreaming or whatever. There were other Zen places I could have tried in San Francisco, but I was still fighting the idea of labeling myself or joining any kind of organization, particularly a (semi-) religious one. And I was also doing other things.

Eventually the depression got so bad, I turned to my old books from that now-long-ago philosophy class, looking for something, anything, that would help. Zen masters are proverbially serene, and I wanted some of that. Buddhism’s insistence that there is no self confused and angered me: if there’s no “me,” then why am “I” hurting so much? Yet, when I finally tried just letting the depression be, something happened. It didn’t banish the depression overnight, but I believe I would never have come out of that episode if I hadn’t had this insight.

It took a few more years, and a move to another coast, for me to go to a zendo and begin a practice. As I still couldn’t do zazen by myself, I had to find a group to join, as uncomfortable as that made me. Resisting the pull of something I felt was true because it had an “ism” attached to the end of it was absurd, though, and eventually I realized that. And anyway, this is one “ism” that understands that what’s important is not some doctrine you believe in, but what you do. It still troubled me to join up, but I thought, it’s the price I have to pay for what I believe I can learn here.

And maybe being uncomfortable with a group is something I can work on.

I tried a couple of places before I settled on the one where I go now. It has a stronger Japanese flavor than most American places have. In fact, the Abbot himself is Japanese, so, while definitely modified for American culture, it is still very traditional. This intimidated me at first, and I liked the challenge of it. Having more cultural differences keeps me from getting used to it. After two and a half years, it still feels strange to me. It helps me keep my beginner’s mind.

And from the first time that I heard the Abbot speak, I knew I was in the right place. He’s not perfect, either, but I can tell he gets it. I definitely have a lot to learn, and this guy seems to know something, so okay.

It’s been hard. Sitting meditation at home still doesn’t work for me, so I have to go and do it with these people. Sitting with a group makes it possible for me to sit for long periods of time. And sitting for long periods of time makes it possible for… well, that’s another topic. Let me just tell you, it’s worth it.

It takes time and it takes discipline. I knew I would be more disciplined if I took a vow, so I went ahead and committed myself to it. I took the precepts and officially became a Buddhist about a year and a half ago. It does help me be disciplined. And I have learned a lot.

And being part of a group still chafes. But now I know, it’s the places with the most sensation that need the most work.