Divorcing friends

I'm over-socialized.  The drive in me to make lots of friends comes from the childhood years when my family frequently moved from place to place.  (No, we were not military nor running from the law.  The transfers were part of my dad's career as a petroleum engineer.)  I was so terrified of being lonely and alone, I quickly taught myself how to show off, attract attention, put on a real dog-and-pony show, be everyone's friend and the teacher's pet.

So now I have too many friends.  Some of them, a lot of them, are terrific.  But there are some I don't really feel very connected to, and some I like a whole lot but our paths just never seem to cross.  Especially at Christmas, when I'm sending out cards, I find myself wishing I had fewer friends so that I could really nourish the connections with the ones I have, stay in closer touch.

It always feels weird to me when a friendship just sort of fades away, because I'm never sure if I should do something to revive it (keep sending that Christmas card, send a "let's get together" email) or simply ignore it.  The latter feels to me an awful lot like ghosting and I'm just not comfortable with that.  It's too indefinite.  Are we still friends or not?  So every once in a while, I suggest to a friend who has become distant that perhaps we should mutually agree to let each other go, with all blessings and good wishes.  Retire the friendship with open eyes and a fond farewell.

What's funny is that there have been several cases when the person in question will adamantly reject the retirement.  "Oh no, you can't get rid of me that easily.  We're still friends!"  And then I never hear from them again.

Maybe it's this year of COVID lockdown which has made me ever more aware of the fact that I want to live a simpler, less crowded, less hectic life.  I've spend so much energy juggling the balls, spinning the plates of all those connections, and while that has filled my life with wonderful people and adventures and experiences, it has also taken me away from the quieter pursuits I'm now more in love with, such as writing and reading and sitting in the open air listening to trees.

And by the way, if you're reading this, you are not somebody I want to let go of.  In case you were wondering.

No wonder people believe in Heaven

I find it terrifying to know that I'm going to die without knowing when nor how.  But I'm going to.  It's certain.  So what does it all mean, this life, this momentary time?

I didn't have children so am not leaving any of my genetic material to humanity, but even if I had, so what?  I would still die.  Even if a child of mine had created a way to make plastic truly biodegradable and had therefore helped extend the reign of human life on Earth for decades or centuries - so what?  We hairless monkeys would simply continue to have to fix the terrible messes we make and end up extinct anyway.

Does knowing death is inevitable make individual life pointless?  As brief as a mayfly's and as driven by appetites.  Or does it make every moment precious beyond belief?  This rare, exquisite, brief gift of being able to experience the richness of the planet and of each other.

I suppose it has to be both, because neither exists without the other.  Deep joy without the knowledge of loss would be flat and easy to take for granted.  The terror and sense of pointlessness would be unbearable without the occasional experience of deep joy and sensory pleasure.

Without subscribing to it myself, I understand religious belief, the need, the hunger for something to give meaning to life and offer the possibility of eternity.

Weight and Liz Cheney

Weight has always been an issue for me, as it has been and is for every woman (perhaps for every person) in Hollywood.  Perhaps for every American.  Perhaps for everyone in the world.  Even when I was young and lithe and limber and strong, I never felt thin enough.  But I do love me some food.

Three times I have had dramatic weight losses.  What is common to them all is that they happened to me and were not the results of any commitment or resolve on my part.

1) In 1976 I had a bad sore throat for 12 days, couldn't swallow at all.  The weight I lost then stayed off for a long time.

2) In 1991 my thyroid went hyper-active and my metabolism speeded up so drastically that I lost weight no matter how much I ate.  I went down from the size 10 I had been to size 4.  It was several months before I finally went to the correct doctor, got the correct diagnosis and the correct medication.  That weight came back.

3) In 2000 I moved away from Los Angeles, lived on the central California coast, and started a new life.  I exercised more, discovered all sorts of community dances, and fell hyperbolically in love.  Weight simply fell off without me thinking about it.  That weight stayed off until menopause hit me like a hot brick.

I'm not happy with my weight now, and with more reason than I had at any of those other times.  The trouble is that I haven't proved to myself that I can lose weight by choice.

I exercise every day, sometimes two or three times a day.  Clearly my problem isn't activity but food, which I use the same way I use video games and movies - as a way to avoid deep, troubling, sorrowful, conflicted feelings.  So naturally I'm not eager to deny myself one of my avoidance mechanisms, when it will mean experiencing all those feelings: what it's like to live with the tensions, anxiety, and rancor of the COVID era; my outrage at what the Republican party has turned into (I never would have thought that Liz Cheney would become one of my heroes, but she certainly is right now.  Surely some of her Republican colleagues are squirming with shame as she models integrity and courage.  No wonder they want to kill her off.  She's making the rest of them look like the stinking cowards they are.); how much I miss my mom and being near my family; my feelings about my sister-in-law; doubts about whether I have it in me to write a superb play; terror about the inevitable fact that I'm going to die without knowing when and how.

I have to believe in myself right now, tell myself I can instead of that I can't.  "I can't" is a powerful phrase and takes a lot of spine to overcome.  "I can" has a different power, the power of the possible, the power of the unknown, the power of belief over certainty.

So here goes.  I can.  

The Oscars and racism, Part 3

The exchange with my brother continues, and once again, I find I am inspired to examine my own thoughts and opinions in order to understand and express them more clearly.

I had claimed that he and I have no idea what it is to be a POC in this country.  Which isn't completely true.  Certainly we have ideas about what it might be like.  But Bro objects to my saying that we can't truly know what it feels like to move through the world with black skin.  He contrasts my avowed inability to imagine that with my sympathy/empathy for the situations in which Palestinians live.  (This conversation about the Oscars has grown branches and twigs and leaves.)

It's true that I have been to Palestine, or what used to be Palestine.  I have had conversations with Palestinians, visited some of them in their homes and orchards, seen the spent tear gas canisters and rubber bullets lying about, seen the walls and barbed wire and check points, the Israeli solders patrolling the streets with their rifles.  I have read books written by Palestinians, Israelis, Americans, and Brits about life in Israel.

Still, I continue to assert that I don't really know what it is to be Palestinian, what it is to be black, what it is to live the life of the oppressed, because even if I could imagine it fully and deeply and truly, I could also stop that imagining and go back to my safe, un-oppressed life whenever I choose.  I can't possibly know what it is the live an oppressed life and not be able to get away from it.

I used to think about what it would be like when my mom died.  I could easily make myself cry with those imaginings, they were so vivid and emotionally powerful.  But when she did actually die, it wasn't like anything I had imagined, and that was mostly because I could never leave that state of grief, couldn't get away from it, but had to live with it all day every day.  And even this is not a completely analogous situation (the difference between the imagined and the actual), because grief eventually fades. 

The Oscars, Part 2. Also Karma.

After my previous post celebrating the diversity on display during the most recent Oscar telecast, I got an email from my brother discussing his objection to the possibility of the Oscars being given for what seemed to be political reasons, or for any reason other than rewarding exceptional talent and skill.  His comments caught me by surprise, because I had felt that every award this year had been earned and that none had been given simply for the sake of political correctness or forced inclusivity.

Our exchange did get me thinking, though, about what truly was the reason to celebrate this year's diversity.  I was able to express my response only clumsily at first, until I finally saw that what is truly cause for celebration is that more stories are being told, more kinds of stories about more kinds of people; more voices are being heard; different kinds of experiences are being shared.  Oscar voting has always been led by the voters' biases, allegiances, and subjective tastes, never simply by recognition of the most exceptional work.  (The example I used in responding to my brother was the year, 1969, in which "Oliver!" won Best Picture over "The Lion in Winter", which to me felt like a travesty.)  That subjectivity will always be an influence in the rewarding of any works of art.  How splendid that the subjectivity and biases are finally starting to point in more directions than just toward the work of white men.

Sweet Hubby also added to the conversation that it's not just a matter of who gets nominated and who wins the vote.  It's about who even gets the chance to work as a filmmaker, whose vision has a chance to be seen, whose voice is  heard, whose story is told.  This country, this world, is so rich in diversity; how splendid that that diversity is showing up on screen.  That's what I celebrate.

Okay, on to the other part of this entry: Yesterday I visited an elderly friend of mine.  She's a lovely woman, part of a spiritual group I have been with for many years.  She is also responsible for me traveling to Israel and Palestine a few years ago, a journey I had long imagined but might never have made on my own.  So she is certainly a valued friend, who is now living alone in senior housing.  It's a nice enough place, but still, my friend moved there during COVID and because of that has been in virtual isolation for almost a year, just at the time when her mental and physical powers are diminishing and limiting what is possible for her.  I know she both needs and deserved attention from friends, and I was happy to go, but really it would have been easier for me to have stayed home, where I could have given time to the several projects calling for attention.  I sort of didn't really feel like making the effort.  So I was looking at why I had.  I was under no obligation, had made no promise, and she has no particular expectation of attention from me.

I realized that I visited her for the same reason I remove nails from the street.  On some level, I seem to believe that if I save someone else's tire from puncture, then somehow my tires will be saved as well.  If I visit my lonely elderly friend, then when I'm lonely and elderly myself, people will visit me.  I know that this is not scientific nor reality-based thinking.  Plenty of people who do magnificent acts of generosity wind up with cancer or in car crashes.  Moving this nail will not save me from the next one.  I do know that, and I pride myself on not being superstitious.  But my own actions have revealed to me that I seem to be a believer in some kind of karma.  So I'm going to keep removing nails from the the street.  Just in case.