#gratitudeNow:Really Good Noodling

A friend of mine, let's call him the UggaMugger, was lamenting to me this morning about it being the anniversary of his breakup with a Very Bad Ex What Did Gaslight Him Much.

U.M. said it was a bittersweet moment.  That in reading past journal entries, it was plain to him now how very badly he wanted to make things work, and how very much they did not, in fact, work at all.

I shared a thing about my own life that's similar.  I have some big relationships that I used to have, which I don't anymore.  One in particular used to be very painful to me.  This is with a family member who I've had a cataclysmic break with, over their intolerant attitudes, specifically around LGBT folks.

I shared this thing with U.M. about my experience, and theirs, that I want to hang on to, because I'm grateful I understand it.  Hence why I'm sharing it here, with you, dear reader.

There's this scene in the movie The Matrix, where Neo, newly freed from his unwitting imprisonment in the matrix, returns there with Morpheus and Trinity, to visit The Oracle.  As they travel in a car, they pass a noodle place he used to eat at.

Neo scoffs, because he loved the place, they had "really good noodles."  But now laments that none of that was real.

As I told my friend, this is poignant and related to us both.  Why?  

Because your experiences, your past, they’re yours.  They make you, you.  They’re not fake, not false, not to be thrown away.  You build upon them.  You can’t help but do it.

The path to this moment travels through all the moments prior to it.

That's a good thing.  Or it can be.

#gratitudeNow:Key toe

About 7 weeks ago, I started doing keto.  That's short for the ketogenic diet.

It's a high-fat, low-carb diet.  It means you stop eating refined sugar, grains, and starches.  Out with the french fries, candy, pizza, and such, which isn't surprising, and also with most fruit, which did surprise me.

In with meat.  Lots of meat.  And cheese, and eggs, and oh my bacon, so much bacon. And lots of veggies, just they have to be the right kind of veggies.  So broccoli and cauliflower are good, but you gotta not go crazy on the carrots or tomatoes, because they're high in carbs.

I know, I know.  It sounds sort of, well, bat-shit crazy.  

It's not though.  It's no fad either.  The diet's been around for over 30 years, has some good hard science behind it, too.  I've read up on it some.  Basically, you're doing a sort of body hack, that puts your body into ketosis, making it use fat for fuel, instead of carbohydrates.  

It reminds me of this scene from the Woody Allen movie Sleeper where Woody Allen's character, a health food restaurant owner named Miles Monroe, is brought out of suspended animation in the distant future.

Dr. Melik: Well, he's fully recovered, except for a few minor kinks.
Dr. Agon: Has he asked for anything special?
Dr. Melik: Yes, this morning for breakfast. He requested something called wheat germ, organic honey and tiger's milk.
Dr. Agon: [ laughs ] Oh, yes. Those were the charmed substances...That some years ago Were felt to contain life-preserving properties.
Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies? Or hot fudge?
Dr. Agon: Those were thought to be unhealthy, precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.
Dr. Melik: Incredible.
 

While I'm not eating hot fudge and cream pies, I sure do eat a lot of steak.  And it's working.  I'm down somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty pounds so far.

Plus, I'm coming to understand some of the subtleties.  This morning, I kind of made up a recipe, for a strawberry breakfast smoothie. (1/4 cup of heavy cream, 5 whole hulled strawberries, 2 packets truvia, about a half cup of ice, and add in water to reduce thickening.)

It was delightful.  

Some of the nice folks in the various online keto communities I frequent don't call keto a diet,  but refer to it as a Way of Eating.  (With the very unfortunate acronym WOE.)

That's ironic because I mostly am having no woe whatsoever.  

It feels great not just to be losing weight, but to feel like I understand not just what to do, but why and how.

#gratitudeNow: Elephant Algebra

So, I've been keeping this blog for several years now.  Along the way I've blogged daily, skipped it for days, even weeks at a time, sometimes caught it up, sometimes not.

I've gone looking for some one thing to be the "gratitude winner" of the day, holding it on a pedestal until some other thing ousted it from its prize place.  Alternatively, I've let myself be more loose and unstructured.

This morning, while home sick from work (because exhausted), I got into a long talk with my partner Alissa about it, and other things, and realized that I've reached a new plateau in my gratitude journaling practice.

I've reached the place that is no place at all.

The who what now?

Let me explain, by diverting altogether for a few moments.  As an author, and someone who writes code for a living, I'm very well aware of how ephemeral, fleeting, and elusive an idea is.  I'll be in the midst of talking to someone, or doing some other thing, when suddenly that code problem I was having becomes crystal clear, or an idea for an entire novel drops in my head, right there.

And if I don't write it down, or get some traction on it, right away, it just sprouts wings and flies away.

Often when that happens, I'll torture myself, in a vain attempt to get the idea back.  I even have a sort of funny mantra for it, something I tell myself, and often tell others when they find themselves in a similar situation.

"Don't think of a pink elephant."

That is, try hard to not think about a thing you weren't even thinking about in the first place.  It's the mental equivalent of looking for the car keys you dropped in the darkened movie theater, while still watching the movie.  A lot of the time it even works.  Your mental hand slips through the detritus of spilled popcorn and sticky unmentionables, moving in a direction you weren't even considering and VOILA! You stumble across the idea, or a piece of it.

Maybe.

The problem with this sort of thing is that it's still a shenpa, an expectation and attachment.  And whether you're successful or not, you've still been really unkind to yourself about the whatever-it-was that made you have the shenpa in the first place.

Today, just a bit ago while talking with Alissa, I realized that my entire 365 Gratitude practice had a flavor of that to it.

Because I have previously always been aiming at a sort of built construct, an end-goal.  "Hey look, I blogged every day, look how grateful I was!"  

But, and I say this lovingly, gently even, there's no there, there.  It's not just about the words left behind, the record.  Certainly, that part DOES matter, does help others.  But it's also about the practice itself.  

A HUGE part of the practice of gratitude has to do with what Buddhists call maitrī, or loving compassion for the self.  It's one of the three jewels of the Tao, too.  (The first one, 慈, t'zu.  I've written about it before.)

I am often so gentle and kind to others, while being terribly hard on myself.  This is not the first time I've seen this either.

What's different today though, is what I see I can do about it.  I can change my approach to this long exercise I have been doing for many years now.  I can keep the blog, keep writing in it, keep practicing my gratitude, but do so in the manner which also encourages me to pay attention to my self-compassion.  Not because there's some level of mastery to unlock, some achievement to note, but because just like eating, sleeping, and breathing, the practice of being good to myself is vital.  When?  Now.

#365Gratitude Day 108:We're family

I didn't draw this - and it's not the right number of kids, but it's got the general idea right.  My poly family is a family!

This past weekend was a big deal.  My girlfriend Alissa (Squee) and her kids came to visit us for Easter, and to be a part of Missy's confirmation at church.  

There's so much to say about it all, I almost don't know where to begin.  

First off, there was the way even the prospect of the visit swept us all up in excitement and planning, at both our houses.  There were discussions about the best and most viable ways to travel (via a rented car), and schedule (travel all day Thursday and Monday), and time off (Friday for Missy and myself.)

And then the easter-bunnitizing.  Missy, Alissa, and I spent a whole bunch of time talking about ways to celebrate Easter.  We wanted stuff for the kids to enjoy, that wasn't all about getting stuff, but still let them really immerse themselves.  It involved a whole bunch of discussions about things that work well for them, and things that don't.  

Sparkly egg is sparkly

We really made a family project out of it.  Missy and Marybeth shopped for days, looking for the right Easter Basket stuff, and for eggs for the egg hunt.  Me, I'm very-not-obvious about encouraging the kids to co-operate, not compete, so I searched for a way to make the egg hunt into a shared thing.

Here's what I ultimately came up with.  Missy got a bunch of sparkly, shiny empty plastic eggs.  I filled with a series of puzzle messages in a hidden code, based on a cipher key.  I also hid pieces of the cipher in other eggs.  The messages looked kind of like this:

If you really want to figure this out, do a search for the "pigpen cipher", and you'll be able to.

Originally the message-puzzle was going to lead the kids to a hidden stash of pumpkin hand-pies I made for them.  And while I did in fact make them a bunch of those things (which they are all absolutely mad for), I had the better idea of having them search for the presents that were originally going to go in their easter baskets.  (Because scheduling, and food freshness, and the VERY HARD TASK of sneaking around three children to hide things.  You think linear algebra or organic chemistry is hard? It's piffle next to hiding presents from children.)

The special presents that were originally going to go in said easter baskets weren't super expensive things, just thoughtful ones.  Each had meaning to each kid because of inside jokes, games we play together as a family, or special interests they have.

We also looked for a super fun thing to do.  We ended up going to this escape room thing about an hour north of where we live.  It was hilariously awesome.  There was a fair amount of family-wrangling involved in our trying to get there for Friday, and we sort of blew it, because of holiday traffic.  But we made it work for us.  We wandered around the touristy town we were going to go to in the first place, having a great meal out, and just sort of wandering.

The next day, Alissa and the kids and I went back there, while Missy went to a confirmation rehearsal.  We got there totally early which was awesome.  All of the kids (and both grownups) were totally excited to get to do this thing.  Things have a way of working out.  Not only did we solve all the puzzles and escape the room, we did it with eight whole minutes to spare.

That's because we're a smart family.

That whole we-can-solve-puzzles-thing totally came back as an awesome "this is who we are" moment on Sunday morning, when the kids woke up, came downstairs, found their baskets and then the first sparkly egg.  S., the youngest cracked open the egg, saw a coded message and said, "Oh this is just like the escape room.  We can totally do this."  

Then all four grownups watched, delighted as the three kids tore through that egg hunt in short order.  L. the oldest, was sharp-eyed, and saw each egg before either of his sisters, and gently, lovingly, and bluntly-not-obviously gave them verbal clues to help them find them, like "I'm so on the fence about where the next one might be."

He's a great kid.  I love him so much.

Soon they had them all assembled, and put their heads together, and worked out the whole thing in minutes.  It was honestly, utterly and totally badass impressive.  

That sort of family co-operative thing was very much at play all weekend long.  We cooked meals together, set and cleaned the table together.  We supported one another, both when we were all together (like for meal times, or Missy's confirmation), and when we split off into groups.

Part of both that splitting off process and the larger group stuff was bonding.

Missy and Marybeth got girl-time with the girls, braiding hair.

Missy and Alissa spent quiet time together, cuddling and watching Moana.

Alissa and Marybeth got bonding time talking together about shared-life-experience stuff.  

Missy read stories to the kids at night, from The Great Brain books which she loves so much.

The kids and I did that co-op thing big time, playing this awesome silly videogame called Overcooked.

Yang even "helped" some with that.

And there was plenty of alone-time and intimacy, too.  Alissa and I have a big rule that's super important to us, that when we're together, I don't dress or undress myself.  That's for her to do. We kept to it, too.  I goofed it a few times, and got spanked for it, too.  I was in diapers for bed every night, also.  And we made time for the intimacy with one another that we crave so much.

That wasn't weird or shoehorned in, either.  It fit organically into everything we did.  There was always at least one grownup looking out for, and utterly enjoying time with the kids. 

One of the highlights of the whole weekend was playing some of the games we play together across the internet together in our living room.  We played some QuipLash, and some drawful.

At one point, E., the oldest daughter drew this:

"Melodrama"

But I ventured the guess "accidental fart poops", which made pretty much everyone collapse in laughter.  

We all smiled at one another, basking in the warm glow of how very much we all love one another.

Because we're a family.

#365Gratitude Day 98:Adult material

So, this morning Missy and I got up to go meet a woman at a flea market who was giving us a good deal on a dining room table, and chairs.  Afterward, we went for a sensible breakfast, and came home.  Missy had something she had to go do, and I had work to do on my side-business/software prototype, Project Drummond.

I'm in the midst of doing so, up to my elbows in javascript, when a reminder pops up on my computer, to pay some bills.

I dismissed it and kept going, but it kept bugging me.  Which is what it's supposed to do.  Eventually, I gave in, and went to the website for the power company, and paid the bill.  I repeated the same thing for our water bill, and our trash pickup.

I didn't even have to glance at my bank balance to make sure I had enough to pay them all.  I have it.  Lately, I'm on top of things financially to a degree I haven't been in a while.  I regularly save money, I don't buy too much silly bullshit I don't need (although some, because there's some joy in that).  

And when I was done, I turned back to working on my side-business.  That's when the unmistakable truth hit me full-on, right in my face.

I'm a grownup.

This was followed, about a minute later, by a residual tremor.

And I like it.

Feels kind of good.