To do when I grow up?

I had the wildest idea a few days ago.  You know I've always felt that I don't really find a lot of meaning in my career, though it pays the bills.  You know I haven't known what to do instead.  You know I want to travel, and it would be nice if I could see that I was doing some good.

So a few days ago I suddenly had the idea ... maybe after the boys are out of college and my financial obligations are over with, I might quit my job and join the Peace Corps.  I checked their website, and there is no upper age limit for volunteers, so long as you can pass a medical exam.

I'd never considered it before, but now I find myself mulling it over and over.

Never say "never"

So it looks like I'll be seeing Debbie again in a few weeks.  Not in a romantic way, not in a sexual way ... but it also means that "Goodbye" may not turn out to really have meant "Goodbye".

Next month, the UU Sangha that I attend ... the one that Debbie founded ... will be celebrating its tenth anniversary as a group.  Debbie is planning to come to town for the event.  So a while ago she e-mailed me to check if this is going to be OK for me, having her show up like that.  Am I at peace with where we've ended up?

Yes, sure.  I'm at peace with it.  

She said she is too, though she added that "I won't be surprised if I experience strong feelings when I see you."

Interestingly, I don't expect to.  I had the strong feelings right enough, back when she broke up with me.  But I don't feel them now.  I'm grateful to be on my own, and I don't want another romance.  So while I still love Debbie -- at some level I will always love her -- I think it will be a much calmer, cooler love than it was eighteen months ago.

In some ways ... OK, in many ways ... it's good that we ended it when and how we did.  There were indeed little seeds in the relationship that would have spoiled it if they had ripened, but we didn't let them ripen.  It is so much better this way than it was with Wife or with D; because with both of them, the connection didn't end until I was righteously sick of them.  I wanted nothing more to do with either.  And so it's been tough dealing with Wife as we work through all the stuff we have to disentangle; while with D it's been easy because I've had nearly no contact with her at all.  

With Debbie, because we broke it off so soon, I am relaxed and at ease.  I can still love her in a way, at some level, and it's not a problem.

Makes me pretty sure it would be a bad idea to fall in love with somebody else, though.  I wonder how long this will last?  Am I going to want to stay single from here on out, until I die?  I don't know ....
 

What is hunger?

Another post based on a note from a couple of weeks ago ....

I'm trying to understand what hunger is all about?  OK, that sounds crazy or pretentious, so let me explain what I mean.

A couple weeks ago I had to get some blood drawn for my routine physical, and that meant a 12-hour fast the night before.  I did it, and found that it wasn't terribly arduous.  So then I thought ... well hey, maybe I can do this more often.  If I skip one meal a day -- dinner, for instance -- then maybe I'll stop steadily getting fatter the way I've been doing lately.  The next night I tried that and succeeded, more or less fine.  But I couldn't sustain it longer than that.  The next night I had to have something to eat in the evening.

What is so interesting to me is that I didn't exactly feel hungry, not in the sense of my stomach feeling empty or hurting or growling.  Nothing like that at all.  As far as physical discomfort was concerned, I could have skipped dinner all week long.  It's just that I felt ... strange.  I don't know how else to put it.  Something felt wrong about not sitting down to some food in the evening.

I still don't really understand why.  

All in your head

This is based on a note to myself from a couple of weeks ago.  I was at the UU Sangha I attend, and the Dharma lesson for the evening included an exercise: first, cultivate a generalized feeling of loving-kindness in yourself; then, picture the face of someone you have trouble with and try to feel the same loving-kindness towards him or her.

One of the other members said that while she was able to call up a generalized sense of loving-kindness, as soon as she pictured the face of That Person she could feel herself constricting and closing in.  What's more, she went on, she could feel a sense of active resistance or even hostility emanating from That Person towards her.  I agreed with her that it was very easy for me to feel the exact same thing, but then asked a question: Isn't it interesting that you -- or I, or anybody -- can feel active resistance from That Person when in reality That Person isn't even there?  He's just a picture in our minds, that we deliberately imagined for the sake of the exercise!

What does this mean?  Clearly what it has to mean is that any resistance we are feeling from That Person is something we are imagining along with imagining his face.  It's all in our heads.  And that idea, naturally, raises the question: how much of the resistance or negativity that we feel from someone else in real life is also just all in our heads?

I don't have a clear answer.
__________

For whatever it is worth, I find I still have a lot of arguments in my head the way I used to; only now they are no longer arguments with Wife, but with my father.  Maybe there aren't quite as many, actually. 

The last couple of days...

All of the recent posts -- everything from October 2 to this one -- were written in rapid succession the evening of Wednesday the 8th.  I was meaning to post them earlier, but just didn't get to it.  Or something like that.

I'm typing this in a hotel room in Faraway City ... yeah, I didn't think I'd get back here for a while either.  It's been a long time.  Strictly speaking I'm in a different suburb from before, but it's the same basic place.  I'm here nearly all week -- Tuesday through Friday.  Then I'm back home for a week, and then I've got a trip to Sticksville.  And I've just been asked to visit several other sites before the end of the year, though I haven't figured out if I can fit all that into my calendar yet.  Oh, did I mention that a couple of weeks ago our division cancelled all travel for the rest of the year, as a cost-savings measure, unless you can get the approval of the regional president?  Maybe I forgot that part.  But somehow that's not how it's working out for me.

Meanwhile I've written a couple other long pieces, but haven't posted them here.  One was a lengthy description of the Durmstrang Parents' Weekend, which I had promised to write for Wife.  You're probably not interested in hearing that.  Another ... well, while I was at Durmstrang I talked to Son 2's English teacher.  She had asked the students to write essays about their heritage.  Apparently his first draft was a bit lackluster, but she was really impressed by his final draft.  He skipped past all the usual meanings of the word heritage and wrote instead about how his past has made him who he is: that is to say, he wrote about how he has known his whole life that his mother has a disease which is going to kill her one day, and which left her sick and unable to do things with him for most of his childhood.  He went on to explain that this knowledge had the consequence of making him way more compassionate than he would have been otherwise, but also a lot angrier.  And then he talked about ways he has learned to deal with the anger.  (He goes out into Nature and lets its immensity -- and his comparative insignificance -- restore his calm and sense of perspective. I think in fact he has discovered a form of meditation, even though he always teases me about "sitting and doing nothing" whenever I meditate.)

I asked Son 2 if I could read this paper.  I hope I wasn't too pushy, because I know I would hate to show something like that about me to my father!  But he did e-mail me a copy.  So last night I wrote him a reply, and that too took me a while because I wanted to be brief and not fulsome, but also to do it justice.  What I tried to say, in the shortest possible way, was:

• Yes, you are amazingly compassionate. You say nobody sees it, but I see it.
• I totally get everything you say about how to deal with anger.
• The description you give of yourself is both true and admirable.
• Most sixteen-year-olds don't see themselves nearly so clearly. I know I didn't.

I hope I hit the right note.  I really do.

It's late.  I need to turn in.  I don't feel tired yet, but I'll regret it tomorrow if I don't.

Wife leaves the hospital

They sent her home on Sunday, October 5.  She sent me a lot of long texts that day, ... saying that the pathology reports showed conclusively there is no cancer (but didn't say what the cause was instead), that all her friends and church had been just wonderful for her, that she was grateful for everything.  A changed woman.  In other words, a lot of her bitchiness was probably just fear.

She added that she was (at that point) too weak to go home, so she was going to stay with Alvin for a day or so until she got better. 

Another note from Wife's surgery

Later on, Wife texted me that she had been moved to a new room:

Wife:  I'm now in room 3273.  I was a bad girl and voiced that the staff should do what they say they will.  Also, my Mexican roommate got mad because I said "damn".  Since I don't know what she said to the 35 Mexican friends who visited her, I don't much mind moving.  She speaks perfectly fine English.

And I just thought something like "I see you're back to your shining, Dale-Carnegie self ...."
  

Notes from Wife's surgery

[It's Wednesday October 8 as I write this, but I'm going to back date this to something more like when the dialog took place. Nobody's reading the blog, so it's not like you'll notice.]

Wife started texting me some more today.  With abbreviations, the conversation went something like this.

Hosea:  How are you doing?

Wife:  Not so well.  The intestine that came out didn't look healthy.  Usually telescoping intestines like this have a tumor or a mass in them.  He got all he could.

Hosea:  Tumor?

Wife:  Possibly, yes.  At the pathologist's lab now.  Almost too late.  It may be cancer.  He didn't SEE a cancer, but that IS what usually causes these.  I'm scared.

Hosea:  I know you're scared.  And who knows what the results will be?  I have to add that you've already in this life faced down more life-threatening situations than any other five people I know.  And at least you have the comfort of being reasonably sure of reincarnation.  :-)  But none of that stops it from being scary.

Wife:  I don't really know about reincarnation.  It's just my best guess.  And this is scarier than anything else.  With you gone?  How can I do this alone?

Hosea:  Scarier than the risk of your gall-bladder exploding any given day with absolutely NO WARNING?  [That was back thirty years ago, when we were first married.]  Scarier than going to a high school where the other kids might or might not kill you that day?  [That came from her stories about high school ... I don't know if they were true, but she believes them.]  Scarier than your mother throwing a hot frying pan at your head?  [That's what I hear....]  No, no, and no.  It just seems that way because those others are all in the past.  At the time they were pretty bad, and you got through two of those three (never mind any others) without me.  I'm just a convenience, nothing more.  You've done it before and you can do it again.  The thing with cancer is -- even if you have it you'll KNOW and you can PLAN.  That's ALWAYS better than the lurking unknown threat.

Then she tried to argue that each of my three examples wasn't really as bad as I made it out just now.  I explained that the first one was -- I know because I was there.  And then I went on: ...

Hosea:  Anyway my point isn't to haggle.  It's to remind you that you've come through a lot over the years, and much of it without me.

Wife:  And that therefore I can handle cancer without you.  Yeah, I get it.  I'm on my own here.  So much for landing on my feet.  I should know better than to get hopeful by now.

Hosea:  What are you saying?  I checked in on you yesterday and will continue to check in from time to time.  I'm still paying all the bills.  Did you think I was going to propose moving back in together?  If not, what were you hoping for that constitutes "with me" that you are now bitter about not getting?

She was silent a long time and then replied.

Wife:  I don't know, Hosea.  I just don't want to do this alone.  I'm scared.  Can you please tell Son 2 that I won't see him Saturday [when Durmstrang had a big parents' event planned] and why I'm in the hospital?  Son 1 too.  But not about the cancer until we know.

Hosea:  Of course.  Already done.  Yes on all counts.

Wife:  Thanks again.

  

Wife had surgery today

Gosh, what a day.  Just like old times.

 

Not exactly, of course, but close.  I had to get to work early this morning.  About the time I got there, I got a text message from Wife that she was in the local hospital for an emergency "bowel re-section."  As best I could piece together the story, she had been in town yesterday to see her therapist and to visit her friend Alvin.  (Haven't I pegged him as Boyfriend 8?)  She suddenly got a terrible pain in her gut, the kind that left her sweating and shaking and unable to drive.  So Alvin took her to the nearest Urgent Care, figuring they would give her some Gas-X and send her on her way.  Instead they admitted her to the hospital and scheduled her for surgery this morning, when they took out a stretch of intestine.

 

I was busy at work all day, and in any event once she's at the hospital there's not a lot I could do … oh, and also we're separating and I keep telling her she has to get more independent.  So I waited till after work, and then I swung by the hospital to visit for an hour.  She was in her room, hooked up to lots of tubes and irritated at a hundred little things.  She wanted a shower.  She wanted a Diet Coke.  She wanted some fresh underwear, and to get up and walk around, and not to be hooked up to all these damned tubes.  And actually, all this is a really, really good sign.  If she were placid and accepting, it would mean she was too sick to notice all these little irritants, or that she had just been pulled back from the brink of death and was grateful even to be here.  The fact that she is noticing these little irritants, and that she has the energy to grouse about them, means she has bounced back quickly and is well on the mend.  I told her I thought she was doing really well.  She smiled and asked, "Why? Because I'm being such a bitch?"  Yeah, basically that's about it ….

 

So we still don't know what the end will look like.  She doesn't know how long she'll be there, and she hasn't found anybody to feed the kitty cats in her absence.  Theoretically I suppose I could do it, but it's an hour's drive each way and she really shouldn't depend on me.  If in the end I do finally do it, it will have been for the cats and not for her.  But we'll see.  She must have some friends in her town … right?