Selvishness

Posted on April 16, 2012 by Eden M. Kennedy

I am reading a Martha Beck book. I didn’t know who she was until recently, but it turns out that half the women I know are super into Martha Beck and her kooky, down-to-earth, life-coaching wisdom. I am digging Martha’s vibe, despite the fact that life coaching is not the kind of work I’ve ever taken seriously. I’ve met one life coach in real life and she was full of shit, and any time I’ve read about life coaches their stories are remarkably similar, i.e., they woke up one morning and realized it was their calling to get other people to pay exorbitant, ongoing sums to wake up and find their callings.

Be that as it may! I’ve loosened up and come to the conclusion that it’s probably like any other profession: some people are great at it and give the profession a good name, and the rest of the people who do it fall somewhere on the spectrum between GIFTED and IF THIS DOESN’T WORK OUT I’M GOING TO GO BACK TO MY BOOTH AT THE CRAFT FAIR. (No disrespect meant to the craft fair booth-dwellers among us; the world would be a sad, sock zombie-less place without you.)

So, in this book, Finding Your Own North Star, Martha Beck talks about the difference between your social self, which knows how to get by politely in the world and make you seem acceptable to the general public, and your essential self, which may or may not want to dance with wolves, play naked in a jug band, run a marathon backwards, or leave society altogether and live in a windowless yurt in Outer Mongolia, which I’ve heard is the most beautiful place on earth.

Martha’s idea about two selves coincides somewhat (somewhat) with what yoga has taught me, which is that we have five selves nested somewhat like Russian dolls, deeper and deeper within. Your outer doll-layer is your physical body, a.k.a. the food body (or the annamaya kosha), but beneath this is your energetic body (the pranamaya kosha) which is illuminated by the breath. Then comes your mental/emotional body (the manomaya kosha) which is what makes you feel like a distinct person from all the rest of us, and then within that you have the body of knowing (the vijnanamaya kosha) which is composed of your intellect and your five senses. Lastly and most subtly at the center of it all is the body of bliss (the anandamaya kosha) a.k.a. the causal body, or the soul, “the place of joy, peace, understanding, and union—the Seer itself.”

Ideally, yoga can heal them all, but Martha seems to be focusing pretty much exclusively on the leap to bliss. I’m not sure how she’s going to help me achieve it, but she has some great quizzes in the book! And I’m only on chapter three, so I figure if I go for a two-pronged approach (one Martha Beck book + yoga three or four times a week) I’ll crack through the illusions caused by the poisonous seed of conditioned existence and start an online life coaching course by the end of the year.

No, but seriously. I have no idea what to do with all this information.

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I’m tricky like that

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Eden M. Kennedy

This post is sponsored by Chronicle Books. I like books, and people who read are the kind of people I want to know.

I’ve taken somewhat of a break from posting because I was tired of having opinions on the Internet. There are millions of other people telling you what they think on an hourly basis, and I suddenly felt pretty stupid trying to pretend that my opinions had any more value than anyone else’s. I certainly wasn’t enjoying trying to be heard above the din; I all but abandoned my gig at Babble and last Friday I finally worked up the nerve to quit The Stir. I just wanted to work, go to yoga, sit in the sun, and check my e-mail once a day. So for three weeks, that’s what I did. It was heaven.

The rest of my recovery program was given over to trying to organize our new house (read: wandering around Bed Bath & Beyond with an armful of skirt hangers) and reading books. I read The Hunger Games (not much character development but quite a page-turner); Just My Type (a brisk, anecdotal history of typography); I finished the Mindy Kaling book (which read like a chatty, friendly, and sometimes point-free series of blog posts); I started and then abandoned the first Nancy Drew book (but I mean to check it out again later because it was AWESOME); I read and then became very afraid of The Secret (which may be another post down the road, if I can assure myself that it won’t give me nightmares); and I’ve just started listening to The Glass Castle in my car, which is so absorbing that makes me miss freeway exits.

The other part of my reading-recovery was spent cuddled up with Jackson every night at bedtime. Jackson reads plenty for school, but I’ve always hoped he’d do a little more recreational reading without us turning off the TV and forcing him to. Here’s one of the ways I’ve tricked him into it.

The Worst-Case Scenario Ultimate Adventure Novels are Chronicle’s new series for kids. It’s like playing a video game in story mode: you get to choose how you get to the end. Chronicle Books is not the first to come up with this idea (I think Italo Calvino took a shot at it, and those Dictionary of the Khazars books that came in Male and Female editions), but it’s still a good idea in a nicely-designed package. Jackson immediately snagged the Amazon one and told me he thought I’d like to read Mars. (Here’s a trailer for the Mars book.) If you’d like to win all three books for yourself, leave a comment below telling me what your favorite book was when you were a kid and I’ll use Random.org to choose a winner.

UPDATE: The winner is Steph (who loves Roald Dahl). Thanks, Steph, and everyone who shared their favorite books.

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I invite you to go elsewhere

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Eden M. Kennedy

I have two posts up in other places this week, both of them exciting investigations into the deep, dark subject of celebrities that I think are cute. The one up at The Popcorn Whisperer is entitled, Movie Clips I’d Like to See at the 2013 Oscars. My main goal was to write something that would reveal myself to myself, but then I got lazy and stopped wondering why I have so much affection for a bunch of famous people I’ve never met. How adorable do I find Drew Barrymore? Very. Paul Rudd? Charming as pie. But it’s Laurence Fishburne I’ll always adore no matter how pouchy he gets, because I remember when he was just Larry, a gangly teenager grooving his way upriver in Apocalypse Now, and then the next thing I knew he was goofy Cowboy Curtis wooing Miss Yvonne with all his twangling heart, and then what? Super sexy in Deep Cover (with my other boyfriend, Jeff Goldblum), and then bam! Othello! Which you’d think would be the pinnacle of his career, but no, suddenly he’s wearing a long leather coat and unlocking the secret of time itself for an addled Keanu Reeves. He’s just two heartbeats away from becoming Darth Vader’s cranky grandfather in a chrome helmet, and I’m probably going to start a Tumblr called fuckyeahlaurencefishburne. I’ll let you know if that happens. I’m still kind of busy unpacking.

The other thing I wrote is 5 Ways to Meet Celebrities Without Looking Like a Stalker, which started as an off-the-cuff idea that a couple of editors really responded to, but writing it made me realize how sadly excited I’ve been to run into movie stars throughout my life. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m kind of repressed and these people get to be emotionally vulnerable for a living, and so they appear to be living out parts of my life that I don’t have the guts to inhabit, or what. I’m sure studies have been done. (Oh, look, here’s one: Celebrity Worship Syndrome. I’m going to go ahead and self-diagnose on the not-pathological end of the scale.)

In conclusion, thank you for reading, click on those links and read me elsewhere if it sounds like something you want to do, and let’s all have the nicest weekend possible!

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I love being part of the problem

Posted on March 14, 2012 by Eden M. Kennedy

I’ve lived in California for more than 20 years now and yesterday I was finally able to admit to myself: I don’t ever want to get out of my car.

I was at work yesterday and instead of taking an hour for lunch I arranged to take two 30-minute breaks, one at 12:30 to have lunch, and one at 3:15 to pick up Jackson from school. I didn’t bring a lunch so I decided to go over to the sandwich shop because they’re close, they’re cheap, and they’re fast as hell. They’re cheap and fast because they don’t bother with vegetables. You get meat, bread, cheese, something to make it all stick together, and that’s it. The first time I went in there and asked for lettuce and tomato on my sandwich, the girl at the counter pointed at the menu taped to the side of the meat counter and said, “No.” She didn’t say, I’m so sorry for the inconvenience but we only make sandwiches out of things that don’t bruise when you drop them. She just pointed to a list of meats, breads, and cheeses and said, “No.” NEXT.

The actual point of this story, however, is the fact that the sandwich shop is about 350 feet away from where I work, and I drove to get my lunch. I got in my car, pulled out of the library driveway, turned onto the main road, took my foot off the gas and coasted 40 feet, turned into the sandwich shop driveway, and parked in a spot that had a wonderful view of the bench I would normally sit on while eating my lunch, and you know what? Fuck that bench. Yesterday it was windy and cold and that bench is made out of cement. Did I want to shove my napkin under my leg to keep it from blowing away? No, I did not. Nor did I want a bug to fall into my coke, grizzled pedestrians to veer inappropriately close, or my skirt to blow up and expose my pink thigh-highs to the people staring at me from the warmth of their cars while they ate their sandwiches and wondered what the hell was my problem.

Instead, I bought my Fritos, my Diet Pepsi, and my turkey-on-wheat-with-mayo and then brought it all back to my nice, warm aging-Volvo privacy bubble. I put my soda in my cup holder, balanced the Eastside Branch Library’s copy of Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (and Other Concerns) on the steering wheel, and didn’t talk to, look at, or think about any of the strangers on the other side of my tinted windows for 25 glorious minutes. I was so delighted and relieved to finally be vulnerable enough with myself to admit that this was the most relaxing lunch I’d had in years that I don’t think revelation is too strong a word to describe my feelings. For so long I’d felt guilty about cutting myself off from the energy of nature or whatever it is hippies say to convince you to get out of your car, take off your shoes, and let the wind blow ecstatically through your hair. Hippies of the world: I love shoes and I don’t have that much hair, and the energy of nature is unpredictable. As a matter of fact, it smells like jasmine mixed with B.O.

So, sorry all you city planners who spend your lives sweating over designs for usable, friendly, safe public spaces! Tomorrow I might take my car to the beach parking lot for lunch, and then maybe we’ll hit a drive-in this weekend. We can double date with my husband’s truck.

The view from the bench, which I could see just as well through my windshield, frankly.

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The Chair

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Eden M. Kennedy

Yesterday, I got my teeth cleaned. It was a last-minute appointment so I got a hygienist I’d never met before. Let’s call her Mira.

Mira was pleasant but it seemed more important to her to be professional than spend any time getting to know me. That’s unusual for this dentist’s office, since the dentist himself is such a goofy, chatty guy; normally I get a good chunk of life story from whoever’s poking me in the gums, and they at least get the basics from me. But nothing is fine, too, Mira. Poke away in silence! I will meditate upon these ceiling tiles and form my plan for world domination. Bwa ha.

So after a few minutes of poking and scraping, Mira sits back as says, “Do you have trouble with acid reflux?” I say, No, why? “There’s some wear on the back of your front teeth consistent with what we see in patients with acid reflux.” Now, the other type of people who get that kind of wear is bulimics, but she can’t ask me if I throw up to stay skinny, she has to start with something that sounds less accusatory. I get that.

“What’s another way you’d get that kind of wear on your teeth?” I ask, because I want to see if she says “barfing up your guts all the time” or “losing your lunch due to body dysmorphia” or what.

“Purging,” she says. “Or sometimes our pregnant patients get it, if they have extreme morning sickness or acid reflux from the baby –” She mimed having a baby bump so large it pushed her breasts toward her throat. My god! A gorgon baby! You’d never stop throwing up!

She poked around a little more until she found something else to be suspicious about, with her dental forensics mind. I have a lot of crowns due to terrible dental hygiene as a child (and by child I mean the first 27 years of my life), and a typical place for cavities to hide is at the place where the crown and tooth meet. I know what happens when they find a cavity in your tooth: the little probe they poke into it sticks. Cavities are grabby.

Mira stuck her probe in the suspicious spot over and over and over again, but it wouldn’t stick. I knew she was waiting for it to stick, or maybe thinking that if she approached it from a different angle it would stick, but it wouldn’t stick. No doubt she was mentally urging my tooth to crumble in her hands. “Be a cavity, you son of a bitch! STICK, GODDAMNIT!”

She finally called the dentist in to see if he could make it stick.

“Hellooooo!” he said, walking in and shaking my hand. “You look great! Have you lost weight?”

Mira looked at me knowingly. I felt like I was in some sort of Kafkaesque situation where people project their own fears and fantasies onto other people and think they’re real. Oh, wait, that’s called Life.

“I am not bulimic!” I wanted to shout. Instead, I said, “I cut my hair.”

“It looks fantastic!” he yelled, putting on gloves so he could poke my tooth, too.

It turns out I do not have a cavity, but we’re going to put some sealant on the spot as a preventative measure. It also turns out that Mira read my X-rays wrong and insisted for a full minute that I had a crown on a tooth that did not actually have a crown. She also doesn’t like it when people use Glide floss, even if they double it up to make it thicker, like I do. No, don’t do that! It’s bad! Use this other floss that is stretchy and weird that Mira approves of! And not because Mira is in the pocket of Big Floss!

“Mira recommends that I stop using Glide floss,” I said to my dentist when he was done poking my tooth.

“Mira has a different flossosophy!” he shouted.

I scheduled another cleaning in six months, and I hope I don’t get Mira again, but a part of me hopes I do. What other dental crimes will she subtly accuse me of? Vampirism? Circus Geekism? Should I show up with small feathers in my teeth, my breath smelling of roadkill? I mean, I have better things to do than bait an otherwise perfectly normal dental hygienist, but when you’re staring at ceiling tiles having your gums poked, the mind does tend to wander.

UPDATE: So this just happened — I went to CVS to buy floss with Jackson, and as we were standing in the floss aisle and I was explaining to him that my dental hygienist told me not to buy Glide, a woman standing there turns around and says to me, “I’m a hygienist. I hate Glide, too. It doesn’t work.” And then she told me that if my teeth were close together and regular floss always frayed and broke, I should buy satin floss. SATIN FLOSS, FOLKS. Oral-B makes a thing called Satin Tape and I bought it! The end.

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Moved

Posted on March 3, 2012 by Eden M. Kennedy

We are here in our new house and I have a stress cold. I’d show you some photos but all you’d see would be hardwood floors covered in garbage bags full of socks and underwear, because when you move from a place with tons of built-in storage to a place with no built-in storage, furniture doesn’t just magically appear like I somehow thought it would. I may have subconsciously hoped that I’d open up the garage and find the old wooden dresser I bought for $40 from the girl who was moving out of my room on Dean Street in 1988. (If that does happen, you’ll be the first ones invited to join Mrs. Kennedy’s Church of the Miraculous Furniture Manifestation.) Nor do bluebirds fly in to fold your laundry and re-hem that skirt you bought from H&M that seems to be made out of wrinkle-insistent material. I just made that up! Wrinkle-insistent! That’s the kind of thing I can do when only one of my nostrils is functioning. Since our health insurance was canceled on March 1st, my Furniture Church plans are on hold so that I can temporarily become a Christian Scientist. I’ve managed to pray away a full-blown sinus infection, and Jack fixed the knife gash in his hand with Super glue. So far, so good!

When we first got here Peewee wouldn’t go out to the backyard to pee by himself. He’d spent his whole little four-and-a-half-years-long life in a condo where he had to be escorted outdoors on a leash every day, so when we got here and shoved him out the back door, naked as the day he was born, he’d just stand there uncertainly, waiting for someone to yell, “NO! STAY!” and loop a rope around his neck. But when that didn’t happen, he just waited with his little bursting bowels until one of us walked him out to the grass and stood next to him while he did his thing. It was kind of funny until the night I stepped in something that made my shoes sad. It was a lesson in timely lawn-maintenance for us all.

I have a lot more to say but I’ve discovered a pile of bills that was due three weeks ago, and my checkbook just resurfaced, and I feel as though these two simultaneous occurrences have some deeper meaning that will all become clear if I can figure out how to manifest a roll of first-class stamps.

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Moving

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Eden M. Kennedy

Posting will be light this week, as we’ll taking all of this . . .

over here . . .

. . . tomorrow.

I’ve just finished shredding five years’ worth of bank statements and I’m about to sort through a drawer full of cords that belong to electronics we haven’t used since the last Bush administration. I’m hoping to weed so relentlessly that all we’ll have to move will be our beds and a bag full of shoes. I’d start a Pinterest board about my new interest in possession-free lifestyles but I’m afraid it would be nothing more than an ode to freshly refinished wood floors, aesthetically challenging floor lamps, and Fluevogs. Actually, that sounds pretty good, I might do that anyway.

All of which is to say: posting will resume next week from our new location!

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So much fun

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Eden M. Kennedy

The action-figure commentary on Downton Abbey will be over soon, I promise. I know it’s a gimmick, but it’s a gimmick I love so much. Here’s the latest with Edward Cullen, Mr. Sulu, Darth Vader, Nicolas Cage, and perennial favorite Robert Downey, Jr.

Why does the Hulk delight me so?

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Belatedly

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Eden M. Kennedy

In March of 1995 I was sitting at the bar of Jimmy’s Oriental Gardens reading James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss when in walked Jack.

I had just broken up with a guy and was telling myself I wanted to be alone for at least two years before I even thought about dating again.

Michael Jordan had just had a 55-point game against the Knicks, and there were two commercials I liked at the time: one had Louis Armstrong singing “A Kiss to Build a Dream On,” and the other was a Jaguar spot that used Etta James singing “At Last.”

“I like that song,” I said one day a few weeks later, sitting on my couch watching a Lakers game with Jack. The next night he came into the bookstore where I worked and handed me a CD.

“See ya ’round campus,” he said, and walked off.

The bookstore had a café attached, and in the afternoons Jack would come there with his friend Dave after they got off work. They were building a house on Bath Street and would sit at a table on the sidewalk, their t-shirts and shorts and boots covered in sawdust, drinking Heineken.

My manager, Leslee, and I peeked out the front window at him. “Nice legs,” she said.

A few weeks later Jack and I slow danced to “A Sunday Kind of Love” at Jimmy’s while Willy closed up the bar and Dave sat slumped in a booth watching us. “I need a girlfriend,” he sighed.

Dave has a wife and three kids now.

Happy the Day After Valentine’s Day, when all hidden meanings are revealed.

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All I did was ask him to tuck in his shirt

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Eden M. Kennedy

Yesterday we looked at a couple of rentals near one of the nicest parks in Santa Barbara, and then we went for a little walk to see the ducks. Unbeknownst to me, it was Show Your Ass To the World Day!

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