Action is more interesting than inaction.

( On the fire road. Home. )

Time for a change in life.

as happens sometimes.

In other news, I had a physical this morning. I asked several questions about aches in apparently unrelated parts of my body, and my doctor seems to think I have the first hints of osteoarthritis in my hand and foot. (Not sure why she decided against gout.) This is separate from the rotator-cuff tendonitis I saw the doctor for last week, but the good news is that treatment for both of these things is the same: NSAIDs and lots of 'em, so at least I'm getting maximum benefit my ibu-buck. This is yet another thing where yet another doctor has told me that the only restriction to activity is how much pain I am comfortable with. Lucky for me that's a lot.

I have a growing list of mistaken preconceptions I have had about myself. Some of them were based in decades-old fact that is no longer true, but others magically generated themselves without any basis in experience. One of the items on that list of false beliefs is that I am sensitive to pain. On the contrary, I seem to be oblivious to most of it, though back and neck pain can get to me. Even the broken leg wasn't that big a deal -- I was off everything but ibuprofen for the pain within days.

Other misconceptions: I am lazy. I have weak knees, I have a weak back, I have a bad hip, I have asthma. I need 9 hours of sleep a night. I hate writing.

In comments to my last post, desperance mentioned that he'd seen me write about the pea gravel, and about life after the fall, but not about the fall itself. I did write about it as part of my final grad-school packet, but I didn't post it here. It's very much first draft, and the last few paragraphs are more placeholders for actual content, since I plan on working more on it. If anyone's interested, ( this is what I wrote. )

I wish I had a copy of Dark Descent here. There's one in a box in my parents' basement, which does me precisely Zero good.

I am really tired of having boxes of books and everything else in my parents' basement. I'm 48. Doesn't it seem as though I ought to be able to have my stuff around me? To browse my own books, or sort through my own jewelry, or look at old letters? I've lived two time zones away from half my stuff for three years, and I'm neither in college nor working overseas.

I haven't even seen the boxes these things are hidden away in for two years. It's been longer for their contents-- my Crawford and Sturgeon Awards, thirty years of photos, my diaries, drafts of unfinished and now forgotten fiction, the silk scarves I collected in college, lavender ribbons from the flowers of my second wedding, my first poem, a white cotton blouse I wore until it dissolved along its seams, taxes, motorcycle leathers, books, books, more books, a hat in its box, some stuffed animals, framed pictures wrapped in towels and then taped into boxes, 100+ tiny china dogs, a mirror, an antique drum. My life.

Next time I go back to visit my folks, they'll still be there, a pile of boxes I won't have time to open. I'll try to at least get downstairs, to see my tidy stacks and the dusty Victorian table where my grandfather used to write his newspaper columns: mine now, though I have never used it, never had a home to put it in. Maybe I'll open something, but more probably I'll just look at it all for a moment and then go back upstairs. Because opening a box not because it's the right time but because it's at the top of the stack and it's my last chance for who knows how long, hurts like hell. I found that out the last time I was in Rice Lake.

The point of having (for example) boxes of photos is that they're there when you want to turn them over in your hands, which might be tomorrow or might be next year. They're pointless when they're just a box inside another box inside a basement 1800 miles away, as pointless as a box of books I can't read, clothes I can't wear, tables I can't sit at, memories I can't refresh.

Half my life is 1800 miles away and too heavy to ship. I am unhappy with this, but what's the alternative? Rent a truck and drive it all here? Two-thirds of my vacation is spent running the novel workshop. So that I can turn around in a year or two and rent another truck and drive somewhere else? All my stuff would be in one place, but there would still be no place for it to go. No home.

I don't have that many things -- well, who knows? It's not like they're all in one place for me to know, is there? -- and I stay pretty clear of attachment most of the time. But nights like tonight, I wish I could walk into a nonexistent other room and pull Dark Descent off the shelves, and maybe suddenly pick up my college sketchbook instead, or decide to riffle through the little woolly sweaters my grandmother used to knit. I don't even know if I still have those. It's been years.

There are no words for how strong I felt tonight. Even warming up I knew it was going to be a good day -- the traverse that I usually warm up on seemed less of a haul and more of a glide. On Tuesdays, I often climb with Peter, so since I'd been doing a lot of bouldering lately, we top-roped. Sent a couple of easier routes beautifully, and then on-sighted a 5.10+, an interesting technical climb. Got two very difficult moves into a 5.11+ before I hit the stopper for me. Another 5.10, all sloping holds on a steep incline: again very technical. I love technical routes, the fiddly sequences and careful thought that goes into solving the problems. They're my strong suit as a climber.

( Cut for the crunchy bits, but this part was also the best part of it. )

( And there's a bit of it. )

There is not a day I have climbed yet that I was not afraid, a little or a lot. The bad days are the ones when the fear makes me back down, not because it's the right thing to do (because sometimes it is) but because it's the easy thing. On the good days, there's fear and there's courage and a lot of hard, satisfying work as I negotiate between them.

The great days, the days to mark with a white stone -- and yesterday was one of those -- are the ones when the fear and doubt transmute directly into courage, like lead into gold.

--At least as far as posts go. ( Three of you asked political questions. )

Of course I'm not consistent. Nobody's consistent about their politics unless they're not deciding them for themselves. And I'm not going to talk further about politics, either in comments here or later posts. I hate arguments. (I'm not even going to check this post for typos; writing it pissed me off and I don't want to repeat the pleasure.) I loathe politics and politicans, and it breaks my heart, because I want so much to believe that there is a just and ethical political system out there somewhere.

This is my first (third, now) Valentine's in many years I'm not with someone. It's a good holiday, though I never celebrated it especially -- I was pretty comfortable exchanging cards and going out for dinner. It always seemed a little dumb to spend gobs of money on chocolate just when chocolate is at peak demand, but on the other hand, February is gray and cold and it's still a long time 'til spring. A little bit of irresponsible loving behavior would warm it up some.

So I've never really thought much about it. This year, of course, I am.

Many of us celebrate Christmas and Thanksgiving with our families of choice or our genetic families (or the in-laws, of course). And at the end of all those celebrations, we go home. No matter how good a time we had, we think, I am so glad it's done. If we have husbands, wives, lovers or sweethearts, we say it to them (if we're not fighting), because being with them isn't the same as being with the larger family, even a much-loved larger family. It's closer, more honest. No one's "on." You can take your shoes off and whine about your sore feet, and they may not care, but they're there.

For me, Valentine's is about the time between saying good night at the door after Christmas dinner and turning out the light for the night. Who's in the car with you on your way home? Who is it you wish were there? Husband, wife, lover, daughter, dog? That's your Valentine.

Valentine's is all about home: the emotional or physical or spiritual home two or more people make, the roof that can't be held up alone. Sometimes the roof is more theoretical or wishful or whimsical or erotic than anything else, but it still takes two. Or more.

Living alone means I go home alone. That's cool. I'm not tired of being alone.

But that's why the discussions about how Valentine's is about love, so everyone can play get grating, for me at least. It is about love. But it's not about the love that goes out for dinner. It's about the love that drives you home afterward.

I've been thinking a bit about the implications of something I've been saying for several years now. While I find this almost totally positive as it plays out in my life, it's a morally neutral statement. Having an affair (an action) is probably more interesting than staying home with your spouse (inaction), otherwise you wouldn't be doing it.

There are days when I cannot go far enough. I walked six miles this afternoon, a steady smooth flow of movement along the Ship Canal and across the Ballard Bridge and back along Market Street. My muscles and ankle were warm but not tired, not tired enough. I paused half a mile from home and wondered whether I should walk past it, walk two miles beyond to Golden Gardens Park and then two miles back: ten miles total. I didn't because I knew that wouldn't be far enough, either.

I am more frustrated by not going to Switzerland than I had expected. I was -- and am -- restless. Travel seemed the safest, easiest way to scratch that itch, safer and easier than looking for a new relationship or writing climbing essays. It seemed like a really good thing, to take a break before buckling back down to the hard business of living and caring about people and writing -- and in the last week I started to think of the break as part of the process, the formal line to cross for things to change, like starting a diet with the New Year. Take Switzerland away and there's a gap between what I want to do and when I'm prepared to do it. I'm not going to face anything as soon as I get back from Switzerland because I'm not going to get back from Switzerland. Easy enough: pick another formal line, take a different trip or take no trip at all; and then get back to work.

I wish I could climb, so much. A few days in Moab or Joshua Tree or anywhere climbing would be perfect.

I got to say, though: I walked six miles in Docs and it was fine. I felt and heard things shift and crunch in my ankle, and then everything lined up and there wasn't any more crunching. My leg is warm tonight, but it's not the ankle as much as the fibula breaks. My leg hurts less than my weak knees did for the first year I climbed. When do I get to step onto a wall? Where am I right now, on the continuum of careful to timid?

Oh yeah, that was the other reason I scheduled the trip to Switzerland, so quickly and for so long. If I was lingering in Geneva cafes with GS, I wouldn't be walking across the street from my apartment to Stone Gardens and climbing. Along with thinking about love or writing climbing essays, it was another thing that wouldn't possibly happen until after I got back on the nineteenth.

SFWA members, you should have your preliminary ballot for the Nebulas. Don't forget to vote and get the ballot back in before 2/15. I've always been pretty lackadaisical about the preliminary ballots; now that I have a story on this year's, I see the folly of my ways. Vote, damn you, vote.

I hear from Sheila that "26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss" will probably be in the July 2008 Asimov's.

***

My recovery from the broken leg has been a strange thing. If I believed in miracles, I would wonder if this were a small one. Ten and a half weeks, four breaks, a mess of sprains and strains: I walked six miles last weekend. I can stand just on the toes of my right foot. I can put on my left sock and shoe while balancing on my right leg. When the light changed a couple of days ago, I trotted a few steps toward the sidewalk before I even remembered I'm not supposed to run.

Every so often during this, someone would tell me I was being strong or courageous or something. This embarrassed me because it's an unearned compliment. I haven't been brave because there hasn't been much to be brave about. I walked on my leg within a week. I didn't take prescription painkillers after four days (except for the whack codeine one, but that was just because it gave me cool dreams); I didn't take OTC painkillers after the first ten days, not even to sleep. None of this is due to any strength of character or stoic resilience.

I started Pilates last week, working privately with a trained PT to bring myself online in time to climb. "It's just astonishing," she said in her soft Austalian accent, "how you've recovered." "I was lucky," I said. She said, "No, I don't think it's that. I think it's how you approach the injury." Even that seems unearned. I approach it the way that makes sense. If it had hurt more or been more incapacitating, I would have approached it differently, I think. There would have been a lot more fear and grief, a lot less buoyant coping.

"Buoyant" is the word. I have been so grateful, so happy that it wasn't worse. Every morning I put my feet down on the little sheepskin bedside rug, and I stand up and I am just thrilled. I'm walking. This is a gift. Every day we wake up is another one.

The last issue of Urban Climber magazine included a quote from the 1937 book The Night Climbers of Cambridge:

As you pass round each pillar, the whole of your body except for your hands and feet are over black emptiness. Your feet are on a slab of stone sloping downwards and outwards at an angle of about thirty-five degrees to the horizontal, your fingers and elbows making the most of a friction-hold against a vertical pillar, and the ground is precisely one hundred feet directly below you.

If you slip, you will still have three seconds to live.

You're alive until the instant you're dead.

This is a test for the month of January, to think about how I buy things and why.

New Year's day. I ate muesli at home for breakfast, then coffee at Wayfarer and stopped for groceries on the way back.

I really wanted to buy something -- a ton of red-glass Christmas ornaments for half-price, and then kind of laughed about it. I also thought about needing a iPod and a vacuum cleaner, and about shopping for '50s furniture at Pelayo Antiques (mmm, coffeetable). Why am I so resistant to buying real furniture that might be worth hanging onto? Well, it ties one down. It says something about my life. Also I'm cheap. Anyway, a little coffee table and a side chair, and reupholstering this couch.

I also thought about medical bills, more money in my 401(k), bulking up my IRA before 4/15, paying off my credit card.

The house is in reasonable order -- the tree taken down, the rug rolled out again. I have no sweaty-palmed eagerness to change everything.

I drove out to Golden Gardens and walked along the sand some, which felt really centering. I need to do this.

Thinking about homes: I want my home town to have mountains and/or snow in sight.

I've spent the afternoon putting Christmas things away. I know it's early for most people, but I have no one to please but myself, and I like the idea of my house in order for the New Year. Most of my ornaments are tiny stuffed animals which makes putting them away pretty straightforward: open Rubbermaid; throw ornaments in; when the crate is full put a top on it. But there are some others that are fragile or from my family or associated with times in my life, and I'm more careful with these. This is a list of a few:

• Some of my parents' Scandinavian straw ornaments from the '60s: nisse, julbokke, stars and little hollow balls
  
• From my time at Oxford, a handmade stuffed Tigger from a Lewis Carroll shop across from Christchurch
  
• From my life in New York and Portland, a little wood coyote in a play-bow
  
• A tiny kiwi my grandparents brought back from one of their many trips to New Zealand
  
• My tin beetles from when I was little
  
• An antique mohair bear, only two inches tall, its legs held on with long nails, that my grandmother bought
  
• A tin Mexican swallow from my mother's childhood
  
• A yellow Micro Machine car I found in my first geocache

It was bittersweet tucking these things away, knowing December will be here again in an eyeblink, all the years and memories before this slipping another year into the past. The unexpected sun was pouring through my windows, by 3:30 already honey-gold with westering. And VAST, the last track from Nude playing. And I cried, and it was a good but complex thing.

When you live with someone their moods moderate yours. Even when you both have terrible days at work or a brilliant Saturday together at the beach, you experience what looks like the same feeling differently, and your (unconscious) reaction to the differences starts to subtly alter your own emotion. If one of you feels good and one bad, the effect on one another's moods can be a lot more obvious, and it can work for good or ill.

Alone, there's no regulator. I feel what I feel, happy or sad or something more complex. It comes and it goes, replaced by the next unadjusted, unmoderated mood. This can be a good thing because I can't run away from sad or scary things, I can't escape into someone else's moods. And because I'm there for whatever I'm feeling, it moves through, clouds and sun exchanging; and I'm actually looking up and seeing them.

My Christmas was mostly wonderful. I did go to work yesterday, which consisted of ambling in at 9:15, limping out for latte and coffeecake, and sending ironymaiden home at 11:15. I stopped at the grocery store for Diet Coke and crackers and the liquor store for cheap champagne, smirking at the lines of panicky people; took a nap with Tatsuko curled up purring, her seven pounds hardly even a weight on my pelvis; washed the dishes. (The less happy part: I took my mouse Cary in to the vet's to be put to sleep.)

I went to dinner with jeanineers (woadwarrior was ill), weaselmom and smirkingone at a local Italian place, Lombardi's (angelica della morte and cioppino); and then asked stroppy_baggage and cupcake_goth, and corwynofamber and V. to join us for howland's fruitcakes. We broke up at midnight, and then I washed the dishes and opened my Christmas Eve presents alone, very correctly waiting on the stocking stuffers until this morning. I made coffee and burritos for breakfast, then read the books I got for Christmas while gnawing my way steadily through the remains of the fruitcake, jeanineers's spritzen, and cupcake_goth's gingerbread bats. (Yes, they are all gone. Yes, I am sorry I ate them all in a 12-hour period. Yes, I will do it again next year.) I also had an invitation to a lowkey and pleasant-sounding ham-sandwich fest today, but I didn't go because my leg was hurting and the weather was wretched.

Single and childless, my holiday is made up of a disproportionate number of private moments. Looking at my Christmas tree just before bed is one of the happiest things I know. So is sitting on the edge of the couch trying not to wrinkle anything before dinner on Christmas Eve. Another one is getting so many Christmas cards that they stack up, a heap of bright pictures and photo cards and letters. Here's another one: remembering what it was like to be a child, all the rituals and games and surprises and comforts. These are all joys, and they vastly outweigh the negatives.

New favorite movie: Bride and Prejudice. This movie makes me ridiculously happy. It's bright and fun and made me cry at the end, the mark of great art. I've decided I need a romantic lead, so if any of you know one feel free to give him my phone number. Cute wealthy hoteliers receive extra attention.

It's odd watching this movie just now, because a couple of weeks ago I suddenly got hungry to see India. I have no idea why -- I hadn't seen any Bollywood or flipped through photos or talked to anyone or any reason in particular. It was like a spiritual postcard: Wish you were here. I'm restless in life again, maybe that's part of it. I want things to be different, things to change, new horizons.

If there really is a German word that describes the sense of longing for a home that doesn't exist, that word describes me. But. I do long deeply for home, a home I don't have; but I simultaneously long for freedom, the freedom that can take you anywhere at all. Right now I'm between the two: I don't feel anchored anywhere, but I also don't feel as though I can pile everything into a car and drive to, oh, Quebec or Costa Rica or New Mexico.

I worry sometimes that grad school is just a narrowing of possibiity: two years committed to not making any grand changes in my life, just for the opportunity to settle down and not make any grand changes later, either. I comfort myself with the thought that I can bail out for Thailand or Alice Springs at any time, grad school doesn't change that; and that even if I do get a nice stable job somewhere teaching writing, I can still spend four months a year doing something frivolous and unexpected.

But I want unexpected now, dammit -- not two years from now. Okay, not quite this minute, but in a couple of months, when my leg is all the way healed.

Saw the physical therapist today. Everything is going well. He made me swear not to do certain things between now and my next visit with Dr. Benca, mostly to do with multiple flights of stairs or long walks; but, he says if everything goes well, at that point the only thing limiting me will be what I'm up for. Basically: be patient, and go wild after the 15th. Well, not wild, not yet; but someday soon.

I managed to spend $80 on groceries today, not entirely sensibly. I tried a coriander beer, Traquair Jacobite, which was good tho' I didn't taste the coriander anywhere. I spent my twenties knowing All About Cabernets and beers are so much more fun, at least the way I'm playing.

I'm pleased about buying my ticket to ICFA in March. I'll be sharing a room with kylielee1000, which is likely to be a train wreck of the best sort. kylielee1000, I get in lateish Wednesday and am out Sunday afternoon.

--If I don't sell everything and move to Finland or Amsterdam before then.

I've been weirdly exhausted for the past few days. Staying up past 9pm seems to be impossible.

I was called yesterday, but I didn't actually testify in the domestic violence case until this morning. Because I don't think I ever bothered to write about it here, this was the deal. Back in April, I was getting ready for work and heard my neighbor and her ex-boyfriend shouting at each other, their toddler screaming in the background. Then there was a thud and heavy running, and Kelly screaming, "He's got my baby, someone help me!" I called the cops as I followed her screams, and found her boyfriend walking away from the apartment with the baby in his arms. And then the downstairs neighbor and I stepped in and he handed the baby over and the cops came and I forgot all about it. Until Friday when the prosecuting attorney called me after finding my phone number in the 911 logs. So I got subpoenaed to appear yesterday, except it got delayed.

This was the full courtroom deal, with a jury and diagrams of the apartment my neighbor lived in, and everybody in suits. I was on the stand for half an hour.

I realized as I left I didn't want to know how things worked out. I was the only witness to the sequence of events. The stuff I said in court was going to change three peoples' lives -- though it was the events and not me that were changing things. I was willing to take responsibility for telling the truth, but I was less comfortable with having that sort of input into other peoples' lives. I'm not comfortable with having that sort of importance in anyone's life anymore.

There was some other stuff I was going to talk about, but now I can't remember what it was. Oh, I see, it's past 9. No wonder.

but sometimes it's good to hear a voice in the house.

eta: In comments, sovay wrote this:

Like absent-minded sweepings, the second ghost
lives behind the radiator, between two and three o’clock
visible as a speckled reflection, his fingernails
pearl-parings, a little less luminous than foxfire
his eyes. Saying your name, he sounds like the clank
and bleed of steam on a bitter-white morning, the sighing
of a storm’s leftovers through the rain and rust of trees.
The clock paces back and forth across the hour.
Reach out in the moonless dark and he gathers no more
substance than the shivering atoms of the air,
but if his voice wakes you after midnight, before dawn,
he means to tell you only that he, too, is holding on.

This moved me so much.

Bleah. I just foresee so much agita in the months to come. I haven't been working on my first MFA packet at all (and especially not this past week, since the condo thing started coming to a head), so I now need to write 7K (2K of which is rewrite, but the rest doesn't exist even in my imagination), plus do the rewrite and edit of four papers. And look for a place, and try not to freak utterly out.

Home. When I feel distraught or tired or sad, my most primal reaction is an internal little-kid wail, "I want to go home!" -- not my parents' home or lost childhood or any given place, but Home: security, comfort, safety, love, and a sense of owning all that. In recent years I have heard that little-kid voice and wanted to go Home a lot. There's a similar little-kid voice that sometimes says, "Except you don't have a home to go to."

Okay, sure, in that "nothing is certain" category, no home is certain, it all can be taken away -- but surely the fundamental heart of Home is available? Cannot be taken? But I think Home requires some sort of roof and some sort of wall, something to keep you warm and something to keep you safe. If it's not shelter, then it needs to be the immaterial shelter of love.

I've been looking into house shares. I've talked to a few people, seen one place, and off to see another tomorrow morning. And I don't know what I think. I don't think living alone is good for me -- sometimes the only connections I make for days on end are work and LJ -- but does living with strangers change that? Has intentionally going out and taking classes, going to new places, changed things? I don't have any better ideas right now.

Lately it seems as though my life is an expressionist painting -- messy gobs of paint in shattering colors, surprising unexpected beauty and aggressive ugliness on the same canvas.

In one day I can gnash my teeth and cry about the conversion of the apartments, the fact that I am losing yet another place that didn't become home, but that I wished so much might do so. And today I can also know exactly what I am going to do about this, if I just have the courage. And I can go climbing and do well, putting together the long traverse V-2 I worked on Monday, and then another V-2 and a V-3, and do good work on some other routes, and come home full of calm and strength.

The schizoid part is that they exist simultaneously, on the same canvas as it were. I walk home calm and screaming, panicking and full of plans, all at once. I want to throw up; I wash my feet carefully. The climbing isn't any less joyous because of the apartment; the apartment isn't any less terrible because of the climbing.

So, a critical lesson in life, and I've learned it a million times: nothing is certain. Nothing. People, homes, pets, friends -- they can all be lost or mislaid or destroyed, and sometimes it won't have a fucking thing to do with you, you're just collateral damage. The only thing that is certain is that you'll eventually die.

Well, there's a second thing that's certain, too. You will die, definitely. But also: You are here right now. Just as certain. More, even, since I at least have no empirical proof that I, personally, will die; whereas I know that I -- or something, anyway -- is here.

The climbing (and it was strong climbing) was like that monk clinging to a bush halfway down a cliff, tigers above and rocks below, and a strawberry growing there. It tasted amazing, the strawberry. But the secret is not that the strawberry tasted especially good because the monk was in such travail. It is that the strawberry tasted especially good because it was just an especially good strawberry, independent of circumstance. Good climbing is completely independent of my day, moods, or physical state. Climbing is the only place when I attain momentary enlightenment.

Letting go of attachment can also mean letting go of context.

Lots of stuff I'm thinking about here.