This one's for the birds

Another in what appears to be a series.

To: The usual suspects
Subject: You heard it here first

Last Monday it felt so good to string more than three sentences together, I told myself I was going to do that every Monday, good, bad or ugly, to develop writing habits and work on….um…oh, yeah. Focus.

Yesterday I was having a mood.

I was deep into it, you know when I get so irritated that I start cleaning? I channeled the energy into cleaning my office so I could sit down to write, when I noticed a text from Ali.

how are you?

i'm having a mood

wanna talk about it?

nah. i don't like you to see me having a mood

ok. well if you change your mind i'm just having coffee and folding laundry and avoiding things to do

 Avoiding Things To Do. My MO. Which is generally followed by self-recrimination about not having gotten it done.

And guilt that I have passed it on.

I changed my mind.

During the on-again-off-again convo that ensued, I considered the cyclic nature to my mood. In days of yore, maybe it was hormones, maybe an occupational hazard of zookeeping. Since those ships have sailed, I think it’s more like seasonal affective disorder, only counter intuitively, it happens in the spring.

I thought back to this time last year. I had a mood that manifested itself in a frenetic day of window washing.

Avoiding what was already on my To Do list, I rolled up my sleeves, hauled out the ladder and frittered the day away with Windex and a squeegee. In a no-good-deed-goes-unpunished twist, this resulted in an extended reenactment of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

Also the period in which I was dating prolifically.

Your father maintains the birds had been out to get me since I had (with callous disregard and malice aforethought) evicted them without notice from the awning, but hello?! They were attacking the freshly washed windows of his office.

Dude. No Loitering.

But it ultimately became a problem for both of us, since they started thumping into the window super early in the mornings, and the windows to his office are below the bedroom windows on my side of the bed. The assault continued for weeks. Part of the fallout was the not-inconsequential incontinence which struck the bird each time it struck the window.

In any case, the attacks led me down a rabbit hole, not unlike the one I find myself in at the moment…

Diversion One: google “birds flying into window repeatedly”

According to MassAudobon.org, it’s not an uncommon occurrence as certain species turn territorial at nesting time.

“When a bird, searching for a nesting site, accidently sees its image in a reflective surface on its territory, it mistakes it for a rival and tries to drive the “interloper” away. This activity may continue throughout the breeding season, usually from May to early August, often with a pause as the birds move to a new location to start the next brood.”

 We waited it out.

 …a quick side trip to find Ali a photo of the window - illustrating the unfathomable number of times the bird had hit this window. How many times do you have to fly into a window before you realize it’s a reflection of you?

somebody was not getting the message.

The next diversion google: “did Albert Einstein really define insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result”

Thank goodness for 12 Famous Quotes That Always Get Misattributed from businnessinsider.com. In true rabbit hole fashion,  ol’ Al didn’t make the top 11, so it was a hot minute before they pointed me to Rita Mae Brown and a Wikiquote entry…

“Brown did include this quote in her book Sudden Death (Bantam Books, New York, 1983), p. 68, but it appears she was just paraphrasing a quote that had already been written elsewhere. The earliest known appearance of a similar quote is the "approval version" of the Narcotics Anonymous "Basic Text" released in November 1981, which included the quote "Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results."

That was a circuitous route to…where were we?

Right, my inner Stanley Kowalski screaming “I coulda been a contender!”

Along the way, Ali said

 maybe we’re just wired this way. i think we have to accept that that's just part of our process instead of trying to change it. maybe. or at least while changing, accepting it instead of being hard on ourselves

And then Ali said another thing.

i LOVE you just the way you are and wouldnt want you to change a thing. all the pieces parts are you. think of how you would talk to a friend, or to me.

And I said,

where have i heard that before

And then she said,

i say b/c it's good advice. it's so easy to be kind and loving to everybody else

and then we're like totally bitches to ourselves

I hadn’t wanted Ali to see me in a mood. In retrospect though, sharing highlighted how empathetic my people are. I appreciated her insight and perspective.

I confess though, that I was frustrated this morning. I had thought I was gonna hop on the treadmill and crank out a quick piece for you guys, suitable for framing, so to speak. I wanted to keep the promise I made to myself last week - that I would write again this week, but I had nuthin’.

Then I opened my email and there was the Daily Om: “Calling on Friends”

“When we include our friends in the full story of our life, we build authentic relationships in which we can be who we truly are.

When we are going through a difficult time, we may hesitate to call even our best friends because we don't want to burden them with our troubles. This can be especially true if we've been going through a series of challenges, and we're starting to feel as if we sound like a broken record.”

It seems we’ve come full circle.

Did I mention that I washed the windows again last week?

This just happened to Dad’s window.

sometimes you’re the bird. sometimes you’re the window.

Love,

Yo Mama