Across the Universe....

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

Everything's Gonna Change My World

A colleague started my day, discussing his favorite subject, The Beatles. Only Irving Berlin was more prolific and of the same caliber, he said.

"God Bless America" and "Imagine."

Oy, I need to wake up at 5 a.m., so that I can swim. Bed-time!

Just a Dream

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

What Happened When I Got a Full Night's Sleep

Last night, I had a full night's sleep...and a crazy dream.

Most nights, I didn't get more than six and a half hours because more often than I'd have liked, I rode out the day till, say, 11 pm, but still needed to get up at 5:30 am for work, or 5 or 5:15 on the days I swam. Most nights, I felt like I hadn't had time to dream, at least not any memorable ones.

The Dream

A woman, who is not Pat, and who is not the girlfriend I lived with in Chicago 20 years ago, is luring me to be with her. She is blond and a stranger -- no one I've ever met...and then she morphs into the classically-beautiful cello player I dated, among many other women, pre-Pat.

(The cello player was gorgeous, and lovely, but ultimately, we lacked enough in common and it ended within a few months. For example, I couldn't even play a musical instrument at an amateur level and preferred disco to classical music.

At our peak, she invited me home to her mom's in Des Moines for a weekend. She took me to the Jewish cemetery there, and to the synagogue, and we snapped pictures, but for her, it was just a tour; we were equally exotic to each other, and exoticism didn't make for staying power.)

Back to the Dream

In the dream, I am still with my former girlfriend of 20 years ago, and I am concerned that she cannot find out about my emotional, if not yet physical, adultery. I must hide the gorgeous garment that the blond cello player has bought me. The gift of the Indian outfit has made me feel prized and seems, in parallel, a sexy and romantic gesture; at all costs, my girlfriend cannot find out that the cello player has given me the gift.

In the next scene, my girlfriend and I reunite in a hotel room, or an apartment, or wherever we are -- I don't recognize it -- and she morphs into Pat, and I'm panicked.

And then she morphs back into herself (because I cannot imagine Pat betraying me this way) and holds up a shopping bag. She pulls out a gorgeous outfit, saying that another woman (to whom I know she is attracted) has bought it for her.

She has no compunctions about the presumed betrayal while I'm torn up by my actions. I wake up; it is unresolved.

Desire These Days

Last night, before going to sleep, I told Pat that I needed some new clothes for work.

"Let's just go to Richards ," she said.

"OK, maybe during our vacation [in May, since this one's local]."

Prior to this pre-sleep conversation, we had been at Shabbat services, and there was a profusion of attractive women there, including our ever-lovely assistant rabbi and rabbinical intern...and maybe, I also had a touch of spring fever.

Funny how, 20 years after feeling like a Proto-Shane, my sleep-fantasies focused on a gift of clothing as the height of racy behavior. It was true that I did develop a bit of a fetish for nice clothes over the years, as I earned more money, and yet, felt a bit wistful that it had come to this.

At services last night, the openly-gay, Israeli deputy ambassador to Poland, Yossi Avni-Levy, spoke. I was inspired because in addition to being a diplomat, he wrote award-winning stories and novels drawn from his life. If he could write so openly while serving in a governmental leadership position, then certainly, I wanted to believe that I had license to keep writing this blog as openly as I did.

As I looked for clues on how I dreamt the dream I did last night -- beyond all the press lately for our area politicians' behavior -- I thought about Richards, the women at synagogue and then finally the last image I had after kiddush: Ambassador Avni-Levy was swarmed by male congregants. He was talking to the first one in the line, standing close to him and gesticulating, practically touching the guy's broad chest with every gesture, and standing with one leg extended in front of the other, toward the guy.

"Sexual orientation is fascinating," I said aloud to Pat, softly and jealously, looking in their direction. The guys' active sexuality was so visible...at least that of the ones, who were in line, waiting their turn to talk to the handsome, fit diplomat.

When I read the interview he gave to the Polish journalist, linked to from the first occurrence of his name above, I lost my jealousy and recovered my empathy. He spoke of being lonely, of wanting to love and be loved, of wanting to feel like he had a real home, rather than loved ones "...in every port."

For me these days, desire -- more often than not -- is about:

• Wanting Pat to live forever, and always to prize me
  
• Hoping for recognition that I'm making a positive difference at work and in school
  
• Wishing for enough money to be more generous philanthropically and to add more art and further luxuries to our lives
  
• Leaving a lasting, positive legacy
  
• Being moved by beautiful women I see, but no longer so continuously...if I'm truthful.
  

The last item made me a bit sad to admit, but actually, it was a relief not to battle that sort of desire as constantly as I did in my twenties....Well, I didn't battle it then; I fell to it nearly every time...but it got exhausting after awhile and made me lonelier.

Nowadays, it was more fun to write about that sort of desire than to act on it.

Spring Treats

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

A Dog and Lawn Hygiene...Unrelated

On Monday evening before class, I met a French bulldog named Digby. A cute, young woman was walking him on 119th toward Amsterdam. He was butterscotch-tan and wonderfully friendly. Fortunately, his walker, and he, let me pet him. He put me in a sweet mood for a number of hours.

And then the landscaping guys were doing spring cleaning of our property yesterday and today. All of the dead leaves (that look like salamanders in the dark, after a long enough day at work) are gone and the emerging flower stalks look longer, since they're fully visible now.

First Daffodils and Hearing Hot Dogs

In December, long before flower-stalks and first-spring landscaping, I posted disconsolately about my hearing. Today, I had a three-month checkup; typically, since the fall of 2004, I've gone back every six months, but because of some poor results during my last visit, the doctor scheduled another checkup for today. Thank you, God. It was an anomaly and did not repeat itself today.

"Do I have good hearing for an adult with otosclerosis, or good hearing for an adult period?"

The doctor and the audiologist both said, "You have good hearing for an adult altogether." And the audiologist added, "Most adults' range is around 13,000 or 14,000 and yours is nearly 15,000 [something-hertz]."

On my way to the doctor, on 2nd Avenue and 59th if I remember correctly, I saw my first daffodils of spring. Ours are budding, but not yet blooming. These were clustered around a small tree, outside a boutique.

I'm feeling extra-alive today.

My Pride

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

...Took a Risk

Last week, I opted to nominate this blog for a grassroots award and today, I learned that it failed to make it to the top five nominees. The criterion for being among the top five was the number of people who tagged it. I sent a note to the award originator, asking why my blog wasn't included in the voting list and he had to explain the criterion to me, which he did gently.

A good sport was what I needed to be, and so I wrote back, "Maybe next year! Meanwhile, I'll be sure to vote. Thanks for organizing this. It's fun." And then honorably/heroically/heart-brokenly, I voted.

Do I feel ashamed that the blog didn't make it to the Top 5? Yes. Did I want to win, let alone be among the Top 5? Yes. Was it a realistic wish? Not necessarily.

A great quote from the Bhagavad Gita soothes me slightly...if only I could heed it: "On action alone be thy interest, never on its fruits."

Too Big for...

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

...a Twitter Update, Too Small for One of My Typical Blog Entries

Change is good, though...but no promises that any future entries will also be this spare:

Last night, I had the weirdest experience; I was leaving my office at the IBM Learning Center after dark -- chose to work very late, since Pat had her sign language class -- and it was freezing cold out. A dead oak leaf blew across my path.

At a quick glance, I thought it was a salamander, scurrying past, like the ones that ran up the sides of our home in Bangalore, or sometimes across the kitchen floor before we turned on the light. And then I realized that it couldn't be a salamander because it was too cold out...but for a second, I was in Bangalore and Armonk at the same time!

Treadmillers No More

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

The End of an Era

When I glance at the tagline of this blog, I wonder if I ought to write this entry....Since it made me re-live other experiences that do qualify as worth re-living through writing about them, I'll go ahead....

First thing this morning, Pat and I did what we have been planning to do for a couple of years:

We, ourselves, lifted our sickly heavy treadmill out of our music-room, through the patio door across a bit of the backyard and up the side-yard, out to the edge of the curb for bulky-waste pickup on Monday. I kept looking at it out of the upstairs window, where I was working, and now, am blogging.

"Pat, if we tried lifting it any later than this year, probably, we'd not have had the physical strength to do it," I said upon our return from our walk up to Valley Road. Ironically, Valley Road is up two huge hills from where we live; Montclair is in the foothills of the Watchung Mountains.

Pat agreed. A couple of years ago, when we stopped using it, I wasn't allowed to lift anything heavy for a long time; I had wrecked my neck during a business trip in China and needed physical therapy for months as a result. At physical therapy, Amelia told me that the pounding I did by running, and even walking, on the treadmill was no good for my neck. I switched to swimming.

We felt liberated by having opened up the space of that room. We actually hosted family Passover seders in that room twice, placing the table in front of the immovable treadmill; ha! it wasn't immovable once we were ready to move it out of the house.

One Great Deal and One Bad One at the Chanukah Auction

Probably eight years ago (it was the 925 model -- no longer even featured on the web site), Pat and I went to our synagogue's Chanukah auction. We were the highest bidders on the treadmill. Another couple of women had had it in their Manhattan apartment and had decided it was too big for where they lived, and so they donated it to the shul.

Living in the suburbs, it fit less dominantly into one of the rooms of our house. Still, in the past year and a half, it became no more than the rack, where we dried our towels after swimming, before throwing them in the laundry. That was our dilemma now -- where to dry the towels.

At the same auction, Pat bid on an item that proved her love for me definitively. One of the congregants at the time was a well-known literary agent. The agent donated an offer to read a manuscript of any kind, of up to 300 pages, and to provide feedback on it. Pat out-bid everyone and won it for me.

The agent did not keep the commitment. Even our rabbi contacted the agent ultimately, to no avail. The agent agreed when the rabbi called and then ignored it further. I had just finished a coming-of-age memoir and was excited to have it read by the agent, but God had other plans.

What I Really Meant to Write

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

Now, No One Can Suggest That I'm Not Authentic

My entire previous entry, it seemed, was encouragement for the re-posting I'm about to do, of two entries that I posted in the course of a few days, at work, on the discussion database, which is dedicated to IBM's gay, lesbian, bi and trans community and our colleagues; I've been really upset about my mom's recent car accident and how it is affecting my routine, and it felt like a huge version of the many times our roles were reversed, growing up, where she needed parenting, and I gave it to her:

Posted on March 18, 2008

Last night, my 82-year-old mom was sitting in her wheelchair in the nursing/rehab facility, falling asleep; on March 3rd, she had a bad car accident that involved only her car, a tree and her, and she broke several bones, including ribs and her lateral tibia plateau (if I remember the term correctly) -- her knee:

Me: "I could sing you 'Shlof mayn kind,' but you're not 'mayn kind' ['my child]." ["Shlof mayn kind" is a Yiddish lullaby that my father used to sing to my sisters and me when we were kids],

My mom: "The roles are reversed."

Me: "Well, it's not the first time."

My mom: Silence and pretending to be, or genuinely, asleep.

I'm full of resentment, anger, adoration, grief, melancholy, devastation, love, regret, guilt, self-preservation sense....

If anyone else has had an aging parent, who has needed extra attention suddenly, please respond to the following questions here or send e-mail to me, so that maybe all of us can feel less alone in it:

1. Have you had to broach the subject of their selling their home and moving either into assisted living or a nursing home?
   
2. If so, how did it go, and what tips for success in such a discussion can you offer?
   
3. If you chose to have them live with you, how did you manage it? (I am not likely to go this route and I imagine how culturally alien/heartless that might seem to a number of this community.)
   
4. If you were appointed durable power of attorney, how involved and complicated was the responsibility?
   
5. How did you compartmentalize, so you could get your work done with minimal distraction?
   
6. How did you show love without being selfless?
   
7. How did you take care of your other loved ones and yourself while you had to pay extra attention to your parent?
   

Thanks for providing answers to any of these questions, and for answering any others that didn't occur to me.

Posted on March 21, 2008

My colleague and friend, John, posted first:

Since we've been talking about aging parents, the winner in the Short Film category is a 6.25-minute video about a girl dealing with her mother's onset of Alzheimer's. It's quite (that's quite in the American sense of the word) poignant.

It's here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiRHyzjb5SI

The page showing all of the nominees is here: http://www.youtube.com/ytawards07

I watched the winner twice and responded:

Yeah, it was sad.

Once, when I was seven, my mother and father left me at a gas station on the Merritt Parkway, after the three of us stopped to go to the bathroom. They were many miles north before they realized I wasn't under the sleeping bag in the back of the station wagon.

The gas station attendant bought me hot chocolate from the vending machine and sat with me till the Connecticut state troopers came and took me up the parkway to reunite with my parents. I was upset that they might be worried when they figured out that I wasn't there.

This is not fiction.

Writing When Inspired

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

...Or Not

My friend Riva, who has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, says she never encourages her students to wait for inspiration. They could be waiting a long time.

In blogging, it has been helpful to me to be liberal with what inspires me. And then there are experiences that are just essentially inspiring; usually, they have to do with dialogue -- either that I've been in, or that I've heard while watching a movie, a play or reading a book. I'm so grateful that my memory has a gift for recalling what people say to one another.

When I was caring for our nine-year-old, twin nephews during part of last week, I realized that it must be genetic: My mother remembers conversations that happened years ago, I do and so do the boys. I was thinking about it while swimming a few days ago: The gift will serve both of them well, if they opt to be writers, and in any case. Everyone appreciates someone, who seems to be a great listener.

While I could never retain facts, I always thought it was because I cared especially about people that I had the facility to remember conversations; a friend, who's a neuropsychologist, suggested that no, it's just a gift I have, just the way my particular memory works, and it's not because I value people as a source of learning more than other sources....I think I've blogged about this before, while in India, after she demystified my memory for me, but can't recall for certain(!)

Spotting, and Being Inspired By, Others' Inspiration

Reading an article by Peggy Orenstein in magazine of "The New York Times" during breakfast, I thought about how memorable the following bit of dialogue was to the journalist, how it strengthened the rest of what she wrote in its vividness:

A few weeks ago, while stuck at the Chicago airport with my 4-year-old daughter, I struck up a conversation with a woman sitting in the gate area. After a time, she looked at my girl — who resembles my Japanese-American husband — commented on her height and asked, “Do you know if her birth parents were tall?”

By contrast, I will not deny the pleasure it gave me, waiting at the stoplight on the corner in Queens with our nephews Sam and Max last week, and thinking, they could pass as my sons, and passers-by might think they are.

A New Anthology Prompted Further Self-reflection

There was another article, in the Book Review, about a book on great blogs of 2005-07. I read it with envy of the highlighted bloggers, and also appreciated the way it began: "Ten years from now, we'll all be inured to blogs....we current adults will no longer concern ourselves with how frisky, naughty, inflammatory, overly confessional or scarily paradigm-threatening these blog things are."

My blog fell into the category of "overly confessional" fairly routinely, I recognized, and that was what made it so delicious for me...that and the sitemeter; I really related to one of the statements from the author's anthology, which was quoted in the review, on what she refers to as "bloggy to the core": "...conversational and reckless, composed on the fly for anonymous intimates...."

And that was why I didn't, as often, maintain a blog behind our firewall at work: The thrill of blogging, for me, was in having a place to come to relax in my writing, and to reflect on any of the humanity-oriented moments of my day, not just the ones that happened at work. My work-blog, "Learning for Fun and Profit," made me feel closer to colleagues, known and as-yet unknown, when I [rarely thus far] posted to it, but it was out here, where I said whatever I wished to say, about any topic.

That was a bit disingenuous: If I admitted it, I did not write whatever I wanted here, as I could not write about IBM projects I was working on, and did not want to write about some topics that even for me, felt too personal for a public blog...and yet, whenever I did write about the extra-personal topics here, those were, most often, the entries that drew comments.

And there is a discussion database hosted by IBM, for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) IBMers and our colleagues that I mentioned here before, from which I pulled selected entries from 1998-2006 and re-posted them here. That database, as recently as last night, contained an entry that I hadn't planned to post here because I felt close to that community, and felt I could afford to post it there....

God, I feel like I'm admitting a double-life, saying that on the one hand, I didn't post much within the firewall and on the other, posted only the most intimate stuff behind our firewall. It was a question of where: Our blog system is populated by technology pundits for the most part, which isn't me, while the GLBT database invited us to build social capital and post on anything within business conduct guidelines, which actually does leave lots of room for freedom of expression.

Earlier this week, a friend kindly thought of me when she saw news on blogging, on how to blog while employed full-time, and it made me feel better, as one of the tips was that bloggers didn't necessarily need to blog daily, but we needed to blog fairly predictably, which I believed I did.

Spring Haiku

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

With Thanks to My Colleague Jay Cagle...

...who inspired a number of us to write them in honor of the vernal equinox:

Again, crushed flowers
canceling our subscription
if his aim fails thrice.

Had a Nice Day!

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

Working, Swimming, Writing, Talking with Two Friends...

I could scarcely hope for more in a single day!

My morning began with an Indian friend and colleague, letting me know that the major projects I had come to India to help launch, and which she took on upon my departure, have now been selected as the way to go for all emerging markets. I had hoped that that would happen, and I felt so connected to her at that moment, and so much more effective about my time in India in hindsight than I think I could even see while I was there. A lot of it was about laying groundwork that people could build on beautifully.

Before leaving India, more than once, I told a couple of peers, whenever I succeeded in gaining buy-in for projects, my experience was that nothing major I had ever launched at IBM had been shut down; rather, it had just grown even bigger upon my moving on from it. I was trying to help them believe that the project I started during my short-term foreign service assignment was poised for success regardless of my day-to-day involvement, was trying to reassure them; in parallel, perhaps it sounded a bit arrogant, but I'm glad that I didn't speak falsely...at least given the news I received today.

It put me in a great, creative mood for the rest of the day.

At day's end, I spoke with a friend of mine, who was confined to a nursing home temporarily due to a stroke she had some months ago that left her temporarily, partially paralyzed. Speaking with her always made me feel better because she was inspirational. She survived breast cancer, a heart attack, stroke...and thank God, just kept going. I always thought of the power of the human spirit whenever we spoke. Oy, I didn't want that to sound patronizing.

And then I sang pop songs in my head while swimming hard, and after my chat with my friend this evening, I saw the nicely edited version of an article I was asked to write for my synagogue's newsletter, on Pat's and my experience in India. Once it's published, perhaps, I'll post it here, too.