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

All that remains...

I was writing the email to my kids which follows, as I stepped on the treadmill this morning. There is no small irony in the fact that I was unable to walk and thumb-type at the same time. My workout waited until I pressed the ‘Send’ button.

It struck me then, like an errant piece of cardboard upside the head, that if a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, perhaps this is a signal that my writer’s block is on its last leg. A literal bit of irony as this is the first thing that I have written, beyond a postcard or an Instagram caption, in over a year.

I’ve taken it a step further and added the crime scene photo that inspired the title at the end of the post. Thanks for reading.

To: the usual suspects
Subject: It was seeming weird

To not send something to you first thing in the morning now that my Lenten observance is at end.

Then I opened an email about guided meditation...

“A guided meditation uses the sound of a person's voice to direct you through an inner process of relaxing your body and shifting your mind's focus. The voice may be a person in the room with you or a recording--even something downloaded from the internet--and it is generally spoken in soothing, soft tones.”

The article went on to say, “Whether you are familiar with guided meditation or you are a beginner, being guided gives you the opportunity to benefit from the insight of others.” And, “Guided meditation allows you to learn from others in a way that is similar to ones used by ancients the world over.”

This all made me feel like maybe I had invented guided meditation, seeing as I’m ancient and I’m pretty sure I’m at least an occasional voice in your head.

Anyway, the only thing I can give you to meditate on today is an illustration of my deeply ingrained thought processes, which may or may not have influenced your development. My apologies.

You’ll recall the story of the cockroach in my first apartment. The first cockroach...the one I understood to be a cockroach on a primitive level, since I had heretofore been blessed not to have real world knowledge. And how I slayed the cockroach with a package of tomatoes and using said tomato package, unceremoniously guided its body to the drain in the kitchen sink, whereupon I turned on the floodgates of the faucet and flushed it to a watery grave.

Some part of my brain remembered that cockroaches had survived when dinosaurs hadn’t, so I followed up with a pot of boiled water in case the room temperature tap water, like that ancient meteor hit, was survivable.

Now, y’all know if there were cockroaches in this house I would not be living here. I have, however, made exceptions for the occasional centipede.

Last night I was throwing some laundry in. Workout clothes and a fleece. I was in the process of tossing in a sheet of detergent (yay for Earthy friendly detergent sheets) when a centipede scurried across my fleece as it sat in the tub of the machine!

(My skin crawls as I type this.)

What to do?! I mean cause normally I wash the delicates on cold but I was thinking maybe a centipede could survive a delicate cycle.

Age old conundrum.

I opted for delicates on heavy using warm water.

When the cycle was done, I gingerly approached the washer. Lifted the lid. Scanned for movement. Sensing none, I used the universal pincer hold to pick up a corner of the fleece with the tippy tips of my right thumb and forefinger, slowly pulling it up and out of the washer.

I held it over the floor...and shook.

And out dropped a wholly formed, freshly washed centipede.

And me without my shoes.

We’ll never know if he was an arthropod in an arrested state of animation or just a well turned out corpse.

I dared not grab a tissue to pick him up and risk him reanimating in my hand. It was a super earth friendly detergent sheet in his spa treatment, not toxic chemicals, I probably didn’t have to worry about him morphing into a horror flick monster and attacking me when I came to empty the dryer...but could I take that chance?

No. No I could not.

From the corner of my eye I spotted the cardboard insert from a recently purchased set of sheets.

The coup de centipede. His Waterloo of boiling water, as it were.

I mopped up his remains with a paper towel and deposited him in the trash.

Don’t think I didn’t look to make sure that paper towel was still in the trash this morning.

And now that I’ve shifted your mind’s focus, enjoy these scrabbled eggs and have a great day.

Love,

Mom

Not only was I without my shoes, but without my camera. I couldn’t run to get it for fear the miscreant might shake off his lethargy and skedaddle while I was gone. So I dropped the cardboard bomb.

I discovered all that remains this morning.

that centipede doesn’t have a leg to stand on.