Writing like reading

I'm engrossed in a novel lately.

When I'm not in its world, it colors the world I'm in. I see through the characters' eyes. I have their emotional responses to the events of my life. I have to exercise a certain degree of mental discipline to keep all of that emotional freight contained, to keep it from slopping over the sides of its containers into my relationships with the real people in my life.

I never get a long enough span of time to be with this story or these characters. When my life pries me away from them and denies me the kind of quality time with them that I crave, I'm still nearly always thinking about them, on heightened alert for the next opportunity I'll have to sit down with them and extract new insights into what make them tick, and what they'll do next. At least a little bit, being this deep in the world of a story feels like falling in love.

It seems obvious to me now, but it had never occurred to me that writing a satisfying novel would be so akin, in these ways, to reading one.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's a great novel that I'm writing. It's impossible for me to gauge how "satisfying" it would be to anyone else. But I'm having one of my most favorite experiences: total absorption in a story. It's an experience I hope for every time I open the cover of a new book, but this is a story that I am writing, and it is delighting me to no end.

I know what the writer is thinking when the plot takes a turn that I otherwise regret on behalf of a character. I buy it (because I wrote it). And I have the power to turn the plot when I feel it doesn't ring true and/or it doesn't tell the story that most interests me. And even the characters whose roles are to be the flawed, imperfect, sometimes detestable foils, are all so rich and dear to me. I know them so much more intimately than I would ever have known them as a reader -- I think as a result, I am completely in love with even them, as much and sometimes even more than the characters to which I most relate and/or would, as a reader only, be most attached.

In all these years of wondering what it would be like to give myself permission to "really" write, and thus putting off the work of doing it, I now realize that I was missing out on this experience! It's such a Homer Simpson "D-Oh!" kind of realization. My whole life it's been gut-wrenching and nerve-wrangling to care so much (too much?) about writing well -- with absolutely mixed success. But this, the just-finally-doing-it, is so much more fun that I ever imagined it would be.

Vinyl

Skip has a huge collection of old (and new – they're back in vogue lately) LPs. And, he has several friends who also have sizable (some even larger) collections. They get together roughly once-a-month to play vinyl for each other. It's a version of a men's drum circle. And more power to them. In all sincerity, I think it is great.

For the last few years, the wives and/or significant others of these men have given them Amtrak tickets and Amoeba Music gift certificates for a day trip together to mecca (or, Amoeba Records in S.F. and/or Berkeley) as a Christmas present.

This year, in exchange, they got the "Vinyl Widows" a day trip to a spa.

We don’t all know each other equally well – each of us were among virtual strangers as well as close friends. All but one of us is a mother; mostly of very young children. And regardless, crazy busy. It's taken us since January to pull it together.

But yesterday was the day.

And it was a perfectly magical day. Massages, facials, floating in perfectly warm water with a pleasant breeze to tickle exposed skin, great food, and far and wide ranging conversations – from the mundane to the profoundly intimate – some in seclusion from others, most as a shared conversation among all of us – all in the very best tradition of women together. I can't remember the last time I had such a purely pleasurable day.

It could only have been better if I'd been able to join Skip in a hotel room away from the girls last night in order to maximize the bliss of occupying my body so fully and happily. Short of that – wow, manna for the soul.

Thank god for Vinyl.

More on food

I've been looking at OA Twelve Steps stuff recently and considering this first step: We admitted we were powerless over food and that our lives had become unmanageable.

I mentioned this to Skip last night -- who is well aware of my life-long and recent eating struggles -- along with the fact that I'm really struggling with this idea of powerlessness and unmanageability. It's a hurdle. It seems like a huge kind of surrender, of acceptance. And I haven't been able to get there.

And he said, "Well, yeah, of course." And then proceeded to tell me about something he'd just read from a neurological perspective about how one of the curious aspects of the human brain is that we create explanations for our behavior after the fact that we then perceive as our original intention; but that really, most of the time, we have no idea what motivates our behavior. Our brain is so complex, our true motivations are actually deeply hidden from our conscious awareness. Much of our consciousness is this effect: creating an explanation after the fact.

So, I've been thinking, "Yeah, but how can I say I'm powerless when I know that some days I make plans and/or 'choose' to eat the things I know I'm like a crack-addict for?"

BUT, what if when I say, I "plan" to eat that crap some days, that's not necessarily true? What if, really, it's just my way of dealing with my powerlessness? The belief that "I" am choreographing my behavior is much less frightening to me -- even for the wrong behavior -- than accepting that this consciousness I consider "me" is really not in control at all, but just inventing after-the-fact explanations for some deeper, inaccessible, unconscious system of selecting actions or inaction.

Yet, truly, that makes more sense. I'm not a self-hating person usually (except when I can't get me to do the things I know I should or need to do). Generally, I like being me in the world. But if that's so true, then why do I "choose" foods and ways of eating that set me on a course of likely debilitating chronic disease, obesity, and premature death? Because. I'm not choosing.

Maybe my only power here is clinging to, or abandoning, the ego-comfort of believing that I'm choosing. Clinging to it is not helping. Maybe I just have to surrender to this deeper truth: I am powerless over food; and my eating, and its effects on my life, are unmanageable. Hell, really, my whole life is unmanageable. At least by me.

I'm an observer and appreciator (or not) of this particular view on the world that makes me, "me" -- but I'm not, in fact, in charge of my life at all. "I" -- the conscious decision maker -- do not, and apparently, cannot, manage it. Wow.

That's kind of a rough blow on the ol' ego. It doesn't make my mama-self all that comfortable either, even though I absolutely see its truth in that arena, too.

Think I'll reel with that for a bit.