Many happy returns!
My birthday was last Saturday, and it was a beautiful day. I turned 38. There were no parades, no one walked in front of me strewing my path with rose-petals. I got turned around driving to pick up breakfast for the other volunteers at the radio station in the morning, on my way to help with the pledge drive. No one chiseled a statue of me or hired a sky-writer to inscribe HAPPY BIRTHDAY JEN in puffy cloud-letters overhead. I drove in the city in the sunshine. I walked to Penn Station to see a beautiful mural. Small flocks of birds did not drape me in bunting or sing magical songs overhead. I ate a meal I enjoyed, took a nap, and went to a bar with some dear friends, where we talked and laughed and drank beer and ate cake. What more could I ask for?
When I was small, birthdays really were kind of magical. Cake, presents, parties! Streamers, hats, music! A day off from homework! A slumber party, a seance! Somewhere along the way it became routine: magical routine. I came to expect it. I would get so excited about my next birthday that in the months leading up to it I would be so focused on the age I was about to turn that if someone asked me how old I was it was a struggle to say the correct age, not to give myself that one-year nudge forward a little early. To be completely honest with you, I still do this a little. The other month someone asked how old I was and the first thing I thought was, āAlmost 38!ā āThanks for asking, Iām thirty-seven and three quarters!ā
Birthdays are worth celebrating. We go through a lot in a year, and we gain so many things along the way. Sometimes they are things we want to gain, like new friendships or renewed focus or fresh perspective on a troublesome old problem. Sometimes we gain things we donāt want, like the persistent and pervasive sadness of grief. Wanting or expecting magic is selling yourself short, distracting yourself listening for imaginary symphonies written to you while ignoring the very real and true person you are becoming, more every day. Everything we gain, even loss, leaves its mark. The more I think about it, the more I think itās foolish to try to cover those marks. Bring me the beauty of life that comes from pain as well as joy, let me have the reward of walking still with an eye towards what will come as well as what has passed.
I can ask for nothing more. Bring on another year with all it has for me, for all of us. After all, Iām thirty-eight and three days old. And Iāve still got some leftover cake!
March 9, 2010
Tags: birthday, self Posted in: Uncategorized 
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Use your words
Last Wednesday I went out to lunch with two friends from the office, because we were all fired up to talk about the previous nightās episode of Lost. While in the restaurant we got into a convoluted, labyrinthine conversation that also sucked in our Lost-watching waiter, because thatās how you talk about that show. Itās designed to make you go in mental circles. At some point, gesticulating possibly too violently with a fork, I came up with the following gem: āI figured it out! The island is essentially a microcosmic isolated evolutionary environment, like the Galapagos Islands…but for the human spirit!ā*
Yesterday evening I hosted our monthly book club. We discussed Cuisines of the Axis of Evil by Chris Fair, which disappointed me because I wanted a discussion of cultural and historical differences between peoples as relates to the native cuisines, and instead I got overwrought snark followed by dinner-party recipes. What bothered me most was the authorās overuse of big words. It was a very self-conscious use of big words, very much part of the tongue-in-cheek tone, but overall it irritated the crap out of me.
Of course in thinking about the above two examples for even a few moments I realize how hypocritical Iām being. I love big words. Mainly because I just love words, and I know a lot of them, because I read a lot and I started talking more or less in the womb. It comes easily to me to toss them out there as in my deathless evaluation of Lost in paragraph one. Not for no reason did a friend give me a pair of sweatpants with āLOQUACIOUSā written across the butt for my birthday last year.
Over the weekend I walked into Target and happened to overhear a mother talking to her very young daughter, who was writhing and crying in her motherās arms. āTell me whatās wrong,ā said the mother, ācome on, use your words.ā
Maybe my mother told me that one too many times? Maybe I took it too much to heart? So help me, I really do try to write to communicate ideas, and itās never my intention to hide them behind a wall of pretension so steep that other people just walk away and say, āWhatever, dude.ā From the depths of my sesquipedalian heart I implore you: if I ever start writing like I did at the beginning of this sentence too much? Call me out. Smack me down. I can take it. Still learning to use my words, here.
* I mean, duh.
February 23, 2010
Tags: thinking, words, writing Posted in: Uncategorized 8 Comments
Love at home.
The past two years on Valentineās Day, Iāve taken a look at love outside of romantic love. You can take a look at 2008ās and 2009ās musings, if youād like. When I sat down to think about love this year, the first thing to come to mind was family.
Itās not surprising. It was a difficult year for all of us, but we are still close, still strong as a family through all of it. My family is small and sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have tons of aunts, uncles, and cousins. During the past year, though, I was given many opportunities to be thankful for my small, peaceful family. Too many times I have heard horror stories about families arguing about what type of treatment to pursue when a family member is sick, or of one family member alienating the others due to harmful words spoken at a time of stress.
When my father was laid up at home, then the hospital, then the convalescent center, we could all fit in the room together. My father, surrounded by me and my mother and my brother and my sister-in-law and my nephews. My father didnāt want other visitors other than a few clergy who were also close friends, and his wishes were respected. My aunt, my fatherās younger sister, was also there with us sometimes on the phone since she and her husband do not live close by. We still knew we could always count on them for support.
With everything, the stress and the pain and the not-knowing and then the knowing when there was nothing good to know, the bond of love was still strong. I can speak only for myself, but it was an anchor, something to cling to through everything. I know that we all said āI love youā to each other more often during the course of this year. Maybe itās a shame that it took a crisis to get us to that point but mainly Iām proud that we got there, together.
Without the support and love and understanding of my family, my life would be far bitterer, smaller, and decidedly less vibrant. The person I am would not be possible without love from all of them, and I can only hope to grow and continue in their love, andĀ in turn to give them as much love and support as I can.
While youāre out grabbing that box of chocolates or those flowers (and at this late hour you might be better served with something more thoughtful and less perfunctory, anyway!), spare a thought for your family, and the love that is harbored there. The earliest love in our lives helps make us able to love throughout them, and there is no better gift.
February 14, 2010
Tags: family, love Posted in: Uncategorized 4 Comments
From the other side
I donāt want for a minute to belittle the storm we are having, or make light of the very real danger and difficulty that it poses for many people. Itās been a winter of historic difficulty and trial, that has taxed our resources and infrastructure, not meant to deal with 60+ inches of snow in a season.
But it has been beautiful. Awesome. Transformative.
It lifts me out of my usual way of seeing and makes old things seem new.
It calms and it challenges.
When I went for this walk today I did it full of knowledge and security. I had somewhere warm to come home to. I had food to eat, a bed to sleep in. The cats were waiting for me when I got back, and I even still have electricity.
Tomorrow weāll start digging out, again. And it will be time to focus back more on things of the world. But today I was glad to be able to walk out into a different one entirely for a while.
February 10, 2010
Tags: pictures, snow Posted in: Uncategorized One Comment
Didn’t we just have a snowpocalypse?
Weāre having exactly the kind of winter I would have adored as a little girl. Snow day upon snow day, the whole world turning magically into a hill to climb then slide down at high speed.
Snow as an adult is different. Mostly we have to go on with our regular lives but with more inconveniences, more things taking more time, more cold wet piles of clothes and shoes to deal with at the end of the day. And I donāt even have to juggle children and the difficulties that arise when schools are closed but work is not.
Snow like we had today is like kid-snow. Thereās nothing to do about it while itās falling. As soon as itās over itās about digging out, scraping off, checking the roads and assessing the risk, but while itās falling – no. While itās falling, we can watch. If weāre lucky, we can watch inside where itās warm, and where we have enough to eat and drink. We can slow down and do nothing. Itās okay. It is, in fact, fully sanctioned.
I was going to do my taxes today, but instead I went for a walk. Itās an okay to do nothing day. I hope you had one too.
Sunset and the road home.
February 6, 2010
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Closing Time
Over the years alcohol and I have had a very on-again, off-again relationship. I donāt often examine it but for the early years of my adolescence (by which I mean āuntil I was about 23ā) I was fairly prudish and had some very conventional ideas about how life should go. They were basically modeled on my parentsā life: I would get decent grades in school, go to college, meet a nice man and get married after college, settle down and have kids. There may have been something in there about a white picket fence, too, but donāt quote me on that. My parents both rejected using alcohol in great quantities for varying reasons, though neither was a teetotaler. Therefore that never appealed to me either. My 21st birthday was not a drunken binge; a few friends and I went to a nice restaurant and I got an Irish coffee for dessert. Fun. Tasteful. Tasty!
Fast forward to 23, remember? The later years of my adolescence arrived, well, later. And with a vengeance. I had tried the route my parents went and it had let me down. Iād gone to school and faced challenges I wasnāt sure how to deal with; Iād met a man but it had not worked out; what NOW?
The answer can be summed up with a single word: VODKA. Oh, we drank vodka. Cheap, crappy, plastic-bottled-in-Dundalk vodka. I have the very distinct memory of watching that one X-Files episode (āSyzygyā) where Mulder makes a screwdriver by carefully, deliberately spooning dribbles of orange juice concentrate into a pint bottle of vodka and honestly believing that this was a brilliant idea. My friends and I were once accused of ācloset alcoholismā because we never went out to bars, we just got enormous bottles of turpentine-grade vodka and sat around making up drinking games. (An example: Watch the movie Dune. Drink whenever you see sand.) On the contrary, we were merely being thrifty: a liter or two of āRubleā vodka shared out between ten people was a much cheaper way to getting an eveningās drink on than going to a bar.
Eventually these thrifty ways caught up with me. Iād done my drinking. Iād done my (admittedly somewhat later in life) rebelling. It was time to put aside childish things. Suddenly, drinking did seem childish. Wanting desperately to be – or at least seem – more together, I veered almost completely into teetotaling myself for a few years, mainly in my early 30s. I might have a beer or a glass of wine, but more often than not Iād volunteer to be a sober driver and not fuss about it. Two years ago, when I was 35, I was diagnosed with Type II diabetes. The slow changes I had been making to my health and habits turned into Big Fast Changes. Alcohol was an unknown quantity and so I just stayed away at first.
Now I like to think Iām at a happy medium. Between no longer consuming truly stunning amounts of vodka and losing 90 pounds, my tolerance is back down to laughably cheap-date levels. And do you know what? I love it! I love that a beer or two is all it takes to set me giggling. What I see now about alcohol is that it does have an acceptable place for me socially, now that Iāve finally figured out what I use it for.
I use alcohol to stop thinking. But unlike when I was young and thought I had to obliterate all thought, what I know now is that my brain is a busy place. Iām an over-analyzer, a studier of things, sometimes maybe an overenthusiastic looker-for-signs. I write and I talk and I ponder and I try to create and also I gesticulate a lot. Thereās not a thing wrong with that but I have learned to admit that itās exhausting. A night out with a few friends and a couple of beers, where someone else can drive me home? Itās a tiny mental vacation. With proper hydration, and with sparing use (donāt want to build that tolerance again!), good friends raising a glass together can be one of the most rewarding ways possible to spend an evening.
–
Note: With many thanks to Genie, I submit this as my first tentative entry into her brilliant Living Out Loud project. You totally owe it to yourself to go check it out. Cheers, Genie!
February 1, 2010
Tags: booze, living out loud Posted in: Uncategorized 14 Comments
Let it go, kid.
Sunday night was a big night. I got home from Momās before it even fell dark, and it seemed I could do more than my usual weekly ritual of cleaning the apartment. There are still unpacked things in my bedroom and office, things that can be more neatly sorted and organized. I spied that one particular box in my bedroom and knew: it was time. I bustled for a sharp knife and sawed through the packing tape. A single word was printed on the box: āWRITINā.ā
Inside that box, I knew, were all my childhood journals. Iāve been keeping a journal in one way or another since I was 11 years old. There are a few gaps, but never for too long. What I imagined happening when I finally opened that box was taking the first steps on a long journey, a journey back to The Girl I Was, a chance to search for clues to the Woman I Have Become. I may as well have gotten a hanky and a glass of wine when I got that sharp knife, may as well have baldly stated my intentions to get wrapped in a ball of nostalgia so immense, so dense, that it would qualify as its own roadside attraction.
Turns out that didnāt happen. Oh, there were discoveries that made me pause. Sheaves of beginnings-of-stories that Iād forgotten. Poems (seriously?) written for boys I no longer remembered. The lovingly hand-written lyrics to a song by my high school boyfriendās punk band. (I cannot be 100% sure but that slip of paper may have once hung in my locker.) By the time I excavated my way down to the actual journals, past all the loose sheets of ephemera, I felt numb, and not just because my leg had fallen asleep. There was so much! Plenty to smile and laugh at, but also a reminder of the way writing used to be for me, more vital and more urgent than it usually seems now.
In the journals themselves, though, was another side. It was easy for me to idealize the energy of youth, to look wistfully at the work I could do before I had Bills and Responsibilities and Worries and wonder if I could ever do āpureā work like that again. The first thing I saw when I cracked one of those speckled composition books, though, was red ink. What I had managed to forget was that throughout my adolescence, I would read what I had written before in my journal – months, even mere weeks before – and make derisive, self-mocking notes in the margins in colored pen. The me of October 1986, for instance, could not BELIEVE the stupidity of the me of July of 1986. And letās not even discuss poor little me of December 1983. The older the journal entry, the more buried it was beneath jokes, editorial comments, and insults born of embarrassment. What a strange pattern! I would open up, to no one but myself mind you, and then later I would feel so uncomfortable having opened up that I would have to put myself on the record as disagreeing with my younger self.
What? Woman I Have Become was, frankly, appalled. Iād forgotten how hard on herself Girl I Was had been. Just when I should have been letting myself work with the unfettered enthusiasm inhabiting my fiction, I was slamming the door on my own ideas, on the story of my own life.
Say what you will about this blog, but Iām putting these ideas up here, for me and for others, with no self-derision whatsoever. Funny or serious or sad or ridiculous, thereās value in these observations, not despite but because of who I am as I write them.
January 26, 2010
Tags: self, writing, youth Posted in: Uncategorized 3 Comments
Reductio ad absurdum
Itās been nearly two years since I set up a Facebook account. Iām the first to admit that I did it somewhat begrudgingly, accepting that it is becoming the normal way for people to connect, or to reconnect after being out of touch for a while. Itās certainly a useful tool in many ways, a mildly terrifying example being the official word I received there recently of my 20th high school reunion to be held this summer. My acceptance can even become enthusiasm, getting in touch with a few long-lost friends and even making a needed apology many years later than I should have done.
For the most part I havenāt paid much attention to my profile over the years other than to upload new photographs from time to time. Not long ago I went to do just that and happened to take a look at the rest of my profile. There was my status, āSingleā…and there were my political (āliberalā) and religious (āweirdā) views. Why on earth had I let those tossed-off answers stand? Talk about two things that can hardly be summed up by one word each. My āreligious viewsā answer bothered me the most, because they are something I consider a constant work-in-progress, and it seemed wrong to dash them off with a single word. Therefore, after I set up my new photo I also deleted my religious and political views from my profile.
Sure enough, there was the little notice: āJen Raffensperger has changed her religious views.ā How absurd. Was I going to get ālikeā messages on that? Putting out a chipper little notice like that just seemed wrong, and I couldnāt quite put my finger on why.
Today I happened to hear the news that a friend of mine had ended a relationship. She reported that when she went to change her status on Facebook, the message it gave her was: āClicking āsaveā will cancel your relationship. Are you sure you want to save changes?ā I was incredulous. Iāve never had to change my relationship status on Facebook, and was struck by the absurdity of that comment. Really, Facebook? Clicking on a button will cancel a relationship? As if weāve suddenly achieved the memory-wiping technology of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? As if all the hard work, thought, occasional tears and sometimes very great pain of ending a relationship could somehow be summed up with a single little click? Sure, boom, it never existed, right!?
Thatās when I thought of that little message. āJen Raffensperger has changed her religious views.ā Sure. Sure, thatās what Iāve done, just with a click! I didnāt have to live through angry years of denial, didnāt have to explore the legacy of religion within my family, didnāt have to confront the failings that my spirituality presented me with, didnāt have to own up to years of willful ignorance, didnāt have to struggle to come to a mindful place where I could explore my own ideas and beliefs and respect those of others. Just had to push a button! Silly me! Iāve been wasting all this time praying, writing, reflecting, railing, crying, fist-shaking when I could have just clicked āsaveā!
When I first heard about click-to-cancel-your-relationship, I laughed, but I was angry. By golly I was ready to write a screed about the work behind human connections, and the folly of reducing them to a mouse-click kiss-off. I would say itās taken a step back from screed, but I think itās important in todayās click-intensive world to remember that the messages we send arenāt meaningless, even if the semantics surrounding them are thoughtless. Canceled relationship indeed.
Friends, the next time youāre on Facebook you might notice a little something in your news feed. Itāll say āJen Raffensperger is no longer listed as single,ā but donāt get all excited. I just decided the next time I do make a large, and largely thoughtful, change in my life like that…youāre going to just have to wait until I can tell you about it. In person, at length, and possibly with hand-gestures. Click on that.
January 21, 2010
Tags: absurd Posted in: Uncategorized 6 Comments
Scrabbling
My maternal grandmother loved to play Scrabble. When I was a little girl and she would stay with us, she and my mother would stay up late playing Scrabble and smoking, peering intently at their little trays around the kitchen table, occasionally adding new melty burn-marks to the vinyl tablecloth. How I wanted to join them! They always seemed to have such fun! They would laugh and talk throughout the game! Surely something was going on that was very exciting!
As a girl I longed to be older than I was, always. I wanted to talk with the adults at the dinner table. I wanted my nine-years-older-than-me brotherās friends to talk to me, to like me, even though I was a little kid. The thing I most wanted was not to be a little kid any more, but try as I might I couldnāt really do anything about that. I just wanted to be in on more of the jokes, to understand more! I read books and listened to music that I saw my parents or brother enjoying. And of course I got in on Scrabble as soon as I could.
I was terrible at it. My mother and grandmother were kind and supportive and encouraging, and I figured it was just something that would get easier for me as I got older, like reaching things on higher shelves or understanding āDoonesbury.ā I got older. I got smarter. My vocabulary became, frankly, intimidating.
I could not beat my grandmother at Scrabble. Ever. I am not sure I ever did, at least not before she started sliding into senile dementia in her 90s.
As a surly young adult I turned against the game Iād so wanted to enjoy as a girl. Clearly Scrabble was a stupid game and not worth my time. When my grandmother would visit and weād get out the board, I would heave a meaning-laden sigh and make it very clear to all that I was resigning myself to my imminent defeat out of a sense of familial obligation only. I was a good daughter, so I did my mother and grandmother the wonderful favor of āplayingā Scrabble with them, for some definition of āplayingā that really meant āwhining and complaining.ā Iām sure they were thrilled to have me āplayingā with them by emitting a constant low-volume stream of mild obscenities occasionally punctuated with an outburst of āALL I HAVE IS VOWELS!ā and some scowling. Surely the light of shared experience shone in their eyes as I practically tripped over my own feet getting away from the table at the end of the game.
When I grew up still a little more I learned something. My mother was never all that fond of Scrabble either. āYour grandmother just loves it,ā she said, shrugging, when I asked why she kept playing. That certainly put a different spin on things. I started getting into the games a little more. Instead of focusing the whole time on the fact that I have the pattern recognition skills of a three-toed sloth with a migraine, and that the biggest vocabulary in the world canāt help you when you have six āEā tiles and an āXā sitting on that damned little tray, I started to focus on the shared time we had at the table. Mom and Grandma werenāt smoking inside anymore, and maybe the games took a little longer now that Grandma was moving a little slower. But there was talking and laughter for hours. The smiles around the table got more genuine, mine because I was finally starting to get it, theirs because I was not such an insufferable git about the game anymore.
I almost got it. Sometimes we do things that we donāt love with, or for, the people we do love. At first I thought that was all – suck it up and do the thing you hate because it will make someone else happy. What it seems to have taken me forever to learn is that itās about more than sucking it up. Itās about letting the love you have for the other person transform you. About feeling the joy that they experience, nearly as your own. True empathy is hard to come by, but maybe if we sit at enough Scrabble tables we can start to figure it out.
January 18, 2010
Tags: figuring it out, love Posted in: Uncategorized 9 Comments
Nowhere else.
The cats are wrestling behind me and my ears have a little of that post-concert jangly sensation. Iām sitting on a folding chair that reminds me, every time, that I need to build myself a better workspace, a desk instead of a folding table, a chair thatās kinder during long writing sessions. The bills are paid for another month, but more will come. In a few minutes Iāll brush my teeth and swallow more pills, continual reminders of what my body can and canāt do without help. My legs are a bit tired. Not ten minutes ago I rubbed my right eye so hard that it got a bit red and irritated.
Not a single bit of it matters. Post-concert, remember? For years, and no I donāt remember which ones, I didnāt go to concerts. I drifted away from radio (too boring) and mainly concentrated on artists I already knew, deeper into catalogs rather than broader musical experiences. Plus concerts were expensive. Turns out the artists you grew up with, if theyāve had careers that long, can sell some pretty expensive concert tickets.
I no longer remember quite what got me back into going to concerts, either, but if I could Iād go back and thank it. Or kiss it full on the lips. The experience of live music is like nothing else. There are bands out there you havenāt heard of, theyāre probably local, you might not like them. But maybe you will. Do you know you can try out a local concert for less than the price of a movie ticket?
Driving home tonight felt like it took no time at all. And one thought stuck with me: For a concert to be successful, I think you have to ask yourself when itās over if it ever once occurred to you during the show that you wanted to be anywhere else on earth, doing anything else at all. If that never occurred to you, the concert was a success. Nothing, no one else could have gotten my attention for a couple of hours tonight. No cats, no chair, no bills, no pills, no worries. If thatās not worth the price of a movie ticket, what is?
January 17, 2010
Tags: music Posted in: Uncategorized No Comments
