Day 97: Talking to the Girl in the Mirror

While I believe that true self-esteem and security are qualities that a person carries with them at all times, there is also the type of self-esteem that comes and goes. I have the latter. While I have come a long way towards being more confident in myself and my appearance, like most women I still have ugly days. I think what is so damaging to most women in this situation is that we’re not even aware of how damaging our own thought process is to our self-esteem.

I had a very meta moment of self-realization yesterday that drove home the point that even at 36 I am still not comfortable with my looks and that I am way too concerned about them. This happy moment came after a day at home just hanging out. Just before I headed out to the grocery, I took off my glasses to clean them and when I looked up into the mirror at my slightly blurry reflection I said to myself, “Hmm, I’m not too bad looking when I can’t see clearly.” If I hadn’t said it out loud, I probably never would have caught it. How can a woman think this way about herself and what’s more, most women I know think this way. I know I’m not hideous, but I do not see my attributes, I see my flaws.

I have written about self-esteem in the past, but my point this time, is how subversive our own negativity can be. A hundred times a day we think damaging thoughts about our weight, our hair, our poor diet or workout routine, our career, our mothering skills, our time commitment to friendships, our relationships, our nails, our skin, the list goes on and on. The worst part of it is, we think these things so routinely and automatically that we often are unaware we’re doing it. So when you get to the point that you are actually telling yourself negative things that are masquerading as a compliment and you do it out loud, it’s probably a safe bet that you need to take a step back and get a grip.

Most of us aren’t going to win any beauty contests, but then again why are we so obsessed with beauty anyway. Do guys look in the mirror and wonder if they are good looking or as handsome as their friends? I bet even if they have, they don’t do it often and they probably don’t do it out loud. We’re all going to have negative thoughts about ourselves now and again but at some point you need to shut your inner voice up and tell it that it’s stupid. I still love my hair, I’m learning to like my boobs despite the fact that they won’t stop growing, now I just need to work on everything else. But I guess if I can’t learn to love myself, I can at the very least adopt my Mother’s favorite motto: if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. So just shut the hell up, Ame, shut the hell up.

Day 96: As He Lay Dying, Photographs of a War

In the news today, was a story about the Associated Press's decision to publish a photograph taken during a battle in Afghanistan of a 21 year-old Marine as he lay on the ground dying from a Taliban RPG attack. My gut reaction is that to publish this photograph or others like it is horrible, but my deliberated opinion is that it is important to have such an image out there. Like the images of flag draped coffins, photos and stories about the reality and trauma of war are both necessary and newsworthy. War isn't just about winning; no one wins a war. War is always about death, destruction, and heartbreak -- and almost always on both sides. I feel for the family, but this young man's sacrifice illustrates our current disconnect over what war means.

Now that we can pop popcorn and watch a war on television we are so distanced from it, unlike wars past when it touched our daily lives. World Wars, Vietnam, these battles were injected into the daily lifestyle of those both fighting and at home. As much as I would hate to see the final images of my husband captured on film and splashed across print and web media, it doesn't make it not news. The war is news. People are still dying, we are still fighting, I am still without my husband. These things are real and just because most mainstream media prefers to cover sex and sensationalism does not make it less of a daily occurrence in world reality.

While you eat your cereal in the morning, men and women are on a mission in the dark, trying to capture an insurgent they believe to have set off an IED. As you watch your football game, men and women are being shot at, as you sip your tea before drifting off to sleep, men and women -- MY HUSBAND, are planning the next mission, a mission in which they will knowingly walk into danger. I'm sorry if looking at a picture of the horrors of war is difficult. It's supposed to be. War is difficult and tragic and filled with death. Pictures don't make it worse, they make it real and that's what we have problems with.

We don't want to know. We don't want to see it. We want to support our troops with yellow ribbon magnets on our car. Well fuck you. Real support comes from remembering that there is still a war happening and not just when there is a slow news day in events surrounding the conspiracy, funeral and whatever else about Michael Jackson. The war is happening now, and people are still dying and being put into danger, RIGHT NOW.

People ask me all the time how I do it. It must be so hard they say sympathetically. Let me tell you something that everyone in my position knows and we just keep from you so that we don't make you too uncomfortable. It is so unbelievably difficult and there isn't a minute that goes by that you're not aware that your loved one could be lying on the ground with parts of his or her body severed by an RPG. We get it, we feel it, we know it, and not just when a newspaper runs a hard to look at photograph. No one wants to hear the truth and so we go about our day as normally as possible and try to not to let it take over our thoughts. Instead, it just exists on our mental back burner, like a constantly simmering pot. The slow cooker of our hard truth.

We see photos of other people dying. We have seen hard photos from natural disasters. This is no different. this is a disaster, only it's man made. Just because you don't know any starving children in Africa, or the US for that matter, doesn't mean they do not exist. Maybe if we put a more public face on tragedies, we will be more motivated to help or to express empathy. Thousands upon thousands of Iraqi and Afghan citizens have been killed during this war, but we are pre-conditioned to think of them as the enemy, so we're not as bothered by those images and stories. The irony, is that these are largely civilians, or police and military forces working with us, not against us.

Maybe having a bit more empathy will force us to open our world view and to see what is real and there even if it's not featured on E! News or the Today Show. Sometimes you have to look at a hard image to see the truth that was there all along. And whether we like it or not, that photo is news, because the war is news and its casualties are very real and very much the main point of the story.

Day 95: The Many Phases of Ame

Tonight I hung out with my oldest friend. She and I have known one another longer than we haven’t and we’ve been through all sorts of struggles and issues together. Somewhere in the middle of our conversations about marriage, sports, hot guys, flirting, guys who flirt with us and are not hot, and public displays of affection with the respective husbands, she mentioned that I was just now becoming somewhat normal again. As a woman who pretty much analyzes everything I say and do (although always after the fact so that when I screw up it’s too late to rectify), I agreed that I have been a bit crazy lately and am finally feeling more grounded.

My progression largely is the result of suddenly living alone after my husband deployed to Iraq. I cannot overstate the overwhelming effect it has on your life when your partner is suddenly gone for a year. Add to that the additional difficulties of moving to a new city and being unemployed and life is bound to get a bit unpredictable. Unlike my friend, my husband, and pretty much everyone I know, I reacted . . . well, let’s just say I responded to the drastic alteration of my circumstances in a fairly dramatic way.

The first three months I spend drunk. This is more difficult that it may seem on the surface. I have an admittedly low tolerance for drink. This is made especially unexpected when you consider my alcoholic roots on the Esterline side and my fervent adoration of Ernest Hemingway. I have been trying to increase my alcohol tolerance for years, to no avail. So while getting drunk is actually quite easy, staying drunk is tricky because how do you maintain a drunken state when you’re pretty much done after four of anything? This was my challenge and I learned to navigate around it by drinking until drunk and then switching to food and water, before once again swinging back around to alcohol. It’s all in the timing really, and for about the first three months it kept me busy.

That’s when I entered the stage I refer to as my “Fuck You” phase. For about the next three months I let myself indulge in self-pity at being alone, anger at being alone, sadness at being alone, and finally reckless self indulgence at being alone. It was not exactly conducive to being an adult, married, responsible or smart. In this phase I pretty much decided I could do whatever I wanted because my husband left me for Iraq, I was lonely and angry and in a huge bitch phase that made me somewhat intolerable to be around. I was entitled to spend all of our money on clothes or new pillows or even socks for that matter, because I was feeling abandoned and angry and was therefore entitled to do anything I felt like doing. Luckily this phase was not combined with the drunken phase or else things could have gotten much, much worse.

The next step in the Ame evolution was redemption and a little self-loathing. At this stage of the game, I realized I was selfish and self-destructive and neither my friends nor my husband deserved to have to deal with my behavior. This is the point at which I began an interestingly versatile routine of carelessness, self-doubt, drunkenness, piousness, and belligerence. It was not the most fun stage of my evolution, but it was the least boring. Most days I’d vacillate between feeling sorry for my husband for having to put up with me and then deciding to go out, drink, flirt and not get a job because I deserved happiness and freedom since the only reason I was in a new town was because I’d moved with his job. Logic and reason in the traditional sense are not so much my friends, but I do have a special brand of Ame logic that allows me to make sense of all of my craziness.

These days, I am in a pretty chill zone. Jeff is set to return in less then three months. I am working out every day. I am realizing that while I am flawed, I’m not evil. Life is . . . well, life is unpredictable enough, I don’t need to add to it. I just want to be worthy of the life I’ve built for myself. If I gain five pounds I’m not freaking out. True, my waistband is cutting into my stomach rolls, but on the plus side, my tits are ginormous. Back on the negative, is the fact that no one is around to enjoy them. Still, I try to take pleasure in just being me, and having a man I love, a cat that is crazy but sweet, and a friend that will tell me when I’m out of control. It has not been a great or perfect year, but it’s been a learning a experience and an opportunity to rediscover who I am on my own while I’m still married. Without these last nine months, I might be getting lost in the identity of a wife, instead of rediscovering me. I like this phase best, because I’m not worried about it or analyzing it, I’m just learning to be.

Day 94: Trailer TV, Guilty pleasure or Just Trash?

A recent email discussion with friends regarding our collective bad TV habits got me to thinking about what bad TV is, or rather, what is bad about TV. Some of us are addicted to reality shows, the bigger the trainwreck the more we love to watch. Rock of Love, Tool Academy, Charm School, America’s Next Top Model, complete and utter bottom of the barrel human behavior and we lap it up. The rest of us, are hooked on Oprah, the Today Show, even the occasional daily soap. It’s not something we’re proud of, but when faced with reruns of the combined 13 variations of Law and Order, CSI and all the other crime related shows, they seem oddly refreshing. What I want to know, is why with so many truly good shows out there are we overrun with reality and trash TV?

Better off Ted is a fantastic show that nearly got cancelled last year and may still not make it. Pushing Daisies, Samantha Who?, Eli Stone, In the Motherhood, and my adored and beloved Life all got the axe this year and they were well-written, interesting, quality shows. Why are people not watching them? Why do we prefer to waste our time on the TV equivalent of a night at Walmart and dinner at Golden Corral?

After careful consideration, a half bottle of wine and three hours watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, the rerun first episode of Glee, and Rescue Me I came to the conclusion that we’ve taken to watching televised crap because it limits our time commitment. It seems like every time I get invested in a good show, it then starts jumping around in the TV lineup making it hard to remember to watch, then it gets cancelled. A reality show generally has a shorter run and is condensed. You get the whole story from beginning to end without worrying that it’s not going to come back next season and you are left wondering who shot JR?

Reality TV is the closest thing we have to instant gratification and with the exception of a few select shows like the Amazing Race and Ellen, they are all really, really bad and embarrassing. I am not proud that I actually set my DVR to record All My Children. I didn’t mean to start watching, but I’m unemployed and it’s on at about the same time I roll out of bed and have breakfast/lunch. I actually prefer quality TV. You remember when we had that, right? They were well-written shows with good acting and thoughtful storylines. If I’m laughing, I want it to be because there is real humor in the writing and delivery, not because some chick pooped on the stairs on a crappy (pun totally intended) MTV or VH1 reality show.

Please people, I beg of you, save me from All My Children. Start watching good TV again so my shows will actually get an audience, make the network money and stay on the air. I don’t want to resort to watching Stargate SG-1 reruns next year when all original programming is cancelled save for a reality show based in a trailer park. I like TV, please don’t take that away from me. As a book snob, TV is the only real option I have for regular brain candy. I need it.

Day 93: They Can't All Be Winners

September 1. This marks the three month anniversary of my blog! Every day for 92 days I have written about my experiences, goals, emotional states, fuck ups, and whatever else I could think of. On some levels I cannot imagine coming up with nine more months worth of material, but something tells me that I will find no shortage of material. I appreciate every one of you who has taken the time to read my blog, whether you read it every day, once a week or just once in a while. I know I don’t always edit and sometimes I write it when I am so drunk I don’t remember it the next day, but what can I say, they can’t all be winners.

The goal for me was always to simply be honest and to hopefully discover a few truths about myself along the way. I am learning and evolving, though not as dramatically or rapidly as I’d hoped. Life is a process and it’s one you cannot hurry or cheat. So I am looking forward to the next nine months and in growing as both a writer and a woman. I still have a lot of secrets and there are days when I have to fight not to write about them and other days when I think maybe I hit “publish” too soon.

One thing I know for sure, I am going to keep revealing, criticizing, questioning and confessing. As my style develops and my topics become more interesting I hope you will stick around with me. I always appreciate hearing from all of you who read or have read me, and I do take your comments to heart even if I don’t respond.

Thanks again for embarking on this journey with me and for not judging. I am the first to tell you I am flawed and judgmental. I like to be right, but am often wrong. If you don’t like one of my blogs or agree with my topic, give it a day, you might change your tune with the next one.

Cheers.

Day 92: They're Not Really Homeless if You Don't Make Eye Contact

I passed a man standing alongside the street a few nights back while out with a friend. He didn’t look homeless or drunk or strung out. He just looked like a normal guy that probably had a family and suddenly found himself unable to pay the bills or find work. The sign he held, though too faint for me to make out entirely as we sped past, said something about needing work and having references. Seeing him made it difficult for me to converse normally for a few minutes, but I moved past it that night. I have not, however, been able to get his face out of my head or how easily it was for a friend and all of us on the road that day to keep driving, without so much as a pause in the conversation.

Seeing people struggle is never easy for me. I give a lot of money and food to people whenever I see them on the streets. Several times I have been tempted to offer my couch and a hot shower, but as a woman alone, I do recognize that good will and dangerous behavior can lead to unfortunate consequences. There are faces that haunt me still, and a few experiences that anger me after the discovery that I’d been duped. Still, nothing distresses me more than acknowledging just how easy it is for most of us to not acknowledge any of them. For that matter, do any of us ever actually tune in completely to the world around us? Are you conscious of those we’ve hurt, ignored, slighted, angered, or overlooked?

Each of us is limited in what we can do, certainly, but rarely do most of us even try or approach truly reaching out. We write a check, spend a few hours volunteering, visit church one hour a week, join the PTA, these are valued contributions though they do not come close to seriously affecting our way of life. Do we give when we have little for ourselves? What do we actually sacrifice to the extent that overall way we live our lives is affected? We do what we can, though not what we should or nearly all that we can. We do what we can afford in terms of time or finance.

I believe that the ability to look past those in need or to argue that all of them are simply lazy or scammers is a way for people to escape the haunting faces of their neighbors, who ask not for great sums of money or worldly goods, but simple acts of humanitarianism. We see it, but do not comprehend that in our global society we are each responsible not just for ourselves but for our global sisters and brothers to whom we are interconnected. What happens to each of us ripples out and affects those around us. But if we opened ourselves to those ripples we would not sleep so soundly at night. We would not so easily drive past the man that looks like any one of us, rather than the dirty, disheveled picture of vagrants we have come to expect.

What if that man were me or your brother or your father or your friend. Would you still drive past, pretending not to see. Could you still sleep so peacefully after writing checks for your bills, eating a good meal, putting your children to sleep? The faces haunt me, but nearly as much as the knowledge that I do so little, really, to help them or to change the world. Still, I don’t talk about it. So who’s to say that you do sleep soundly? Maybe you’re haunted too, but it’s not the kind of thing we talk about is it? I don’t give them money and food because I am such a generous and caring person, I give them money and food because of the guilt I carry at knowing I could do so much more and simply choose not to.

Day 91: Work Email Makes Me Feel Popular

There is nothing quite like the feeling of opening your personal email to discover you have several new messages. There is also nothing quite like the disappointment that follows when you discover that those messages are the web equivalent of junk mail or bills. When I had a career and my work and personal emails were intermingled I did not notice this as much. I assume, this was primarily due to the fact that within any given six hour period I might rack up between 20-50 emails. Most would be work related, but in a career do you even notice the distinction?

Being outside of the workforce these days means that I acutely feel each payday that I don’t get a check as well as each email that I simply move to trash. I might expectantly open my mail to find seven new emails, only to shortly realize that one is from Time Warner, one is an AT&T bill, two are job leads I sent myself, two more are Facebook notices for comments I already read online and the last one is some store I bought something at who are now trying to sell me more crap. I never noticed until I stopped working how much of my life was filled by email. These days, even my personal messages reach me not as emails, but as text messages or comments on FB. We have so many tech avenues available to us that email is suddenly becoming the online version of snail mail. Not only do I no longer rate a phone call or letter, but now even email is too long a process. If you can’t say it in 160 characters or less what’s the point?

I am learning that the point is that once you strip away the white noise of a job and junk mail (both of the paper and web variety) life is a bit lonelier than you imagined. When I worked I spent a great deal of time on the phone, in meetings, or reading/writing emails. When I got home I did not want to get on my computer, let alone check my mail or interact with other people. I think one of the primary reasons for my acute loneliness upon moving and being unemployed was the realization that rather than a busy life full of social engagements and friends, I had work and a quiet, slightly barren personal life.

These days I am diligently working on building a more robust social life in the absence of a job, but I still catch myself getting excited at the sound my computer or iPhone makes when I have new mail. Sadly, I am equally let down when I open it to find that the only people interested in communicating with me are various merchants to whom I owe money and several groups I think I might be erroneously associated with such as Christian singles (I am neither) and penis enlargement products (barking up the wrong tree for two distinct reasons).

I miss email. More than that, I miss email that contains real messages. I am a pen and paper girl at heart, but since letter writing is pretty much done for, I have adapted and come to appreciate the news and greetings email can bring. Now that we are firmly entrenched in the ever more shortened communication technology of text messaging I cannot even enjoy a good email. Am I the only person left who prefers full sentences and paragraphs? Ah well, I suppose I can still revel in a good text conversation going back and forth in real time, or so I thought. Tonight I got a junk text message. I miss people, and I don’t even like most of them so that’s kind of saying a lot.

Day 90: The Vacay With Friends, Do it at Your Own Risk

Vacationing with your friends can be fun, but does that mean it’s a good idea? These chums you enjoy for a few hours at dinner, or a cookout, or at a party with lots of other people may not mean you’ll want to hang for days on end. There is also the additional question of vacation styles. Some people prefer structured vacations with a set itinerary and others like me, prefer to wing it and take things as they come. Mix different vacay styles and too much togetherness and you might come home with one less friend. We tried vacationing with another couple once before and it was not great, now we’re looking at potentially doing it again. Stupid or optimistic?

When the husband and I vacation, and we have travelled quite a bit all over the world, we get along really well. Neither of us are huge into major tourist attractions, so beyond the major museums and a few mandatory tourist stops we like to just stumble about, going from one meal to the next and drink to drink. For us, it’s more about the local color and we’re not great at following a structured plan. We also enjoy opportunities to be social and each vacation there comes a time when we kind of wish we had friends with us. It looks fun when you see all those photos of groups at the ocean or skiing together. We’re fun, we want to be in a social group.

Then again, other people can be annoying and what if they want to get up at 7am so they don’t miss anything and hurry, hurry, hurry we need to make it here by then or there by now. It could be a catastrophic mistake if you vacation with the wrong types of friends. I am not what you’d call an easy-going person, but when I’m travelling I am anything but structured. Last Summer we went to Vegas with another couple and it was not what I would call successful. We stayed off the strip at the place they chose, we tried to work around their schedule, and yet they did not do a single thing to work with us. We barely saw them actually, which made us wonder what the hell the point was in vacationing together and when we did see them, they managed to muck up anything we wanted to do. It made us wonder why we should adjust our plans if they weren’t going to make an effort?

So now we’re considering Cancun over New Year’s with another couple. We could end up hating them, we could end up best friends, we could just get really drunk and not care. The problem for me, is that if you’re doling out upwards of 6K for a vacation you want it to be good, because if it sucks, you’re still out the money and the vacation time in addition to the possible lost friendship. In a big group none of this probably matters because there are enough of you that at any given time someone will be up for whatever, but when it’s just two couples shit can go wrong. Then again, it’s Cancun, it’s the husband and me, how bad could it really get with those two pluses going for us?