For you busy types, here’s the topline: the communicatrix is well rested, the happy couple is well (and legally) married and (surprise, surprise) I did not get half as much done as I thought I would on my merry jaunt up the coast.

For the rest of you, settle in. Because that last bit was the source of a lot of deep thinking over the past several days.

I thought about it as I gazed out the window at the view of all views, not doing the Important Writing I was sure the solitude would facilitate. I thought about it as I walked the six happy, hilly miles to get my cup of espresso from the village every day. And I thought about it quite a bit on the long and tedious drive home this afternoon.

One of the excellent civic truisms I learned from my ex-husband, Chief Atheist of the West Coast and World-Class Urban Driver from way back was “If you’re passed on the right, you’re wrong.” Clearly, 95% of the people on the 101 S never had the Chief for their traffic school instructor. Between the uptick in asshats and the population boom overall, what used to be a beautiful drive is now little more than a colossal pain in the ass, at least for sadly long stretches.

Get mad at the people for being in the way. Get mad at me for not being perfect. Expect things to be different without really changing. How ridiculous I can be! How amazing it is that anyone at all listens to a thing I say! How fortunate it is that I have my monthly shrink appointment in two days to sort out some of this mess!

Of course, the heavy lifting of shrinkage is done outside of the 50-minute hour. You get assignments and perspective for those 50 minutes, but you do the work on your own. Or you’d better, unless you like wasting time and annoying the pig. And I have done a bunch of mine this week, even if it wasn’t the Important Writing kind.

• I spent a day positively convinced I had back-of-the-leg cancer, when really I just had a case of too much exercise for too-atrophied muscles. Because I worry about everything.
• I spent two nights watching Law & Order marathons. Because I am an addict.
  
• I spent five nights freezing my ass off before I finally broke down and turned on the gas furnace. Because a part of me will always be 12, forced to live in my grandparents’ drafty barn of a house and afraid afraid afraid to ask for anything.
  
• I ate cookies and burritos, beans and bread, chips and corn and god-knows-what in the delicious sauce of the meal my friends Terry and Gus bought me, and paid for it all in many square yards of methane output. Because I am the spawn of the King and Queen of Denial.

That’s a lot of thinking for one week, huh? I wish I could give credit to my wonderful brain and ferocious will to change. The truth is, though, it was the house: I was staying in a magical house.

Its location is magical, certainly, poised as it is a mere 10 yards up from and 20 yards away from the mighty Pacific. Few things are as restorative as viewing a fine sunset over sea water and a cold beer.

But I think the house itself must be magic. Compared to the outsized homes of the neighboring “Yankee fuckers”–swathed in decks, crapped up with all manner of aggressively country decor, my house is a pint-sized throwback to another time–a kinder, funkier time, when four swingin’ cats might just bake a doob in the glassed-in turret (accessed via the bathtub!) or while away a rainy day playing strip Yahtzee. My house all crazy angles and dark, moldy wood–including the countertops! It’s practically decomposing before your eyes, with its long-busted pocket doors, its non-functioning locks, its stop-gap newspaper insulation held in place with brittle masking tape. So what? There was a broken recliner and high-speed internet and a view: I was ready to move in, brother.

And I’m not the only one. My fellow outcasts–the ones without yellow magnet ribbons on our SUVs, the ones who like things a little sexy-grubby-rundown, had all left pieces of themselves there. Books with loving inscriptions to future guests. A closet full of puzzles, games, and 8-track tapes. A pantry full of foods, fancy and plain, with a little extra stock in the fridge.

People leaving stuff instead of stealing the toiletries. I was ashamed of my fleeting thought to abscond with a jar of barely used peanut butter–which I’d bought myself.

Never fear–it was fleeting, and just the lack talking. The weeks and months of people not letting you merge, not saying “please” or “thank you”, avoiding “hello” or even eye contact. And I can’t blame them: I am them, on my not-so-great days. I left my own contributions to the pot: Mrs. Meyer’s Dish Soap, the aforementioned jar of Laura Scudders, a lone Sierra Nevada beer.

I suppose the real topline for this week’s adventures is Wherever You Go, There You Are. I had my Dorothy Gale experience and it was all marvelous and trippy and very, very Technicolor in nature, but now I am back in my own backyard, ready (I hope) to deal with the accumulation of rusted out cars and old refrigerators that have been piling up there.

Because I would like to have fewer not-so-great days and more dancing-around-the-house days. More laughing days. More reading, walking, thinking, skipping, lounging days. I got an infusion of good mojo from the residual juju of a thousand happy Stone Soup House inhabitants before me; now it’s up to me to get some of that good witches’ brew going down here.

xxx
c

Photo of paradise courtesy of The BF.

TOPICS: communicatrix, life, sabbatical, self-development, vacation.

Skip vacations at your own peril.

On my way up to mine, I cried no less than five times. I think. Frankly, I was so disgusted with myself, I kind of lost count.

I also spent a good portion of the trip doing 75 - 80mph, having to pee but refusing to stop because I was in a hurry to get to vacation, and worrying about the kettle I was sure I’d left on to burn down my entire apartment complex.

Oh—and there was a lovely phone fight with The BF. Because nothing says “relax and kick back” like some hating on the one you care about most.

When you are a workaholic—meaning, when you “love” your work so much you become addicted to it—it is as hard to let go of the feelings you wrap around yourself to keep it together as it is for some people to knuckle down and get to it, period. Neither is better than the other; like the man said, everything in moderation, moderation inclusive. (Of course, workaholics and our dopplegangers—would they be slackaholics?—latch onto that last bit as our saving grace/”out” clause.)

Fortunately, even assholes like me can have their rough bits worn off by long walks on the rocky coastline and a fine quality sunset cheered on with beer and a burrito. The sweet-funky, ’70s love shack I rented comes complete with everything I need to readjust my attitude: wraparound view, high-speed internet and yes, cable TV. PLUS a hideous old recliner from which to watch it.

I have work to do these next few days—work I truly love, elective work I’ve been itching to get at. And get at it I will, tomorrow morning, with a strong cup of black tea to inspire me (and a killer view of surf crashing on the rocks if that doesn’t work.)

But for now, it is me, my Archie Bunker chair and an evening of Sam Waterston et al stretched out before me.

I am so happy in my little self-love shack by the sea I could cry.

Tears of joy, of course…

xxx
c

TOPICS: burnout, exhaustion, overwork, TV, vacation, work, workaholism.

While I definitely spent most of last week supine on various surfaces along the Central Coast of California, rumors of my demise are greatly exaggerated.

It had been I-Don’t-Know-How-Long since I took a resting vacation. Christmas didn’t count; for as much (frozen) fun as I had in Chicago, I had things I had to do as well. Resting vacation, to me, means no agenda other than no agenda; the point is not only to shift from the usual to the unusual, but to downshift significantly—which in my case usually means no to-do list, lots of rest and no electronics, save the recreational kind (and I’m talking video and audio playback devices, kids, so get your minds out of the gutter).

Of course, I dragged along enough Relaxation Aids for year-long sabbatical: three books and a clutch of articles torn from old Vanity Fair (visions of me catching up on my reading); guitar and mandolin (visions of me & The Boyfriend having a hootenanny on the motel balcony); my sketchbook; a notebook; and, between me & The B.F., a stack of DVDs that would make the check-in clerk at Blockbuster break into a cold sweat.

This, of course, is the grown-up equivalent of lugging home all your textbooks for spring break: if you don’t have them, you’ll feel their absence keenly; if you do, you can leave them to molder away in the corner, untouched, with blithe disregard.

We slept…a lot. We ate…a lot less than we do at home, actually, and far better. We met up with some friends I made on my last trip up the coast. In short, gentle reader, we did for five days what I’ve learned I must do more of all the time: not much of anything, and only when we felt like it.

Some rest easily and often. Cats are notoriously good at this, I’ve noticed; small babies, too, before they start to suspect that perhaps they’re missing out on some madcap adult hilarity when they hit the hay (note to kids: you are, but don’t worry: there’s more where that came from, and the cultural references will be funnier when it’s your at-bat).

I had always hoped that when I left my 9-to-5, I’d leave my workaholic tendencies along with it, but no such luck. While I’ve gotten a mite better at carving out rest time since my epiphany, I’m a long, long way from being zenmistress of anything. Besides, I actually like to work; it’s no hardship for me to spend hours/days/weeks plugging away at the thing I love. One of the things The BF (who shares my love of work, among other things) and I discussed was whether there were ways to thread rest through work—or work through rest—more efficiently than we have done to date. Going offsite seems to offer a greater opportunity to work well, but not non-stop. A stripped-down laptop and rental condo provide the necessary tools without the customary distractions, which, in turn (theoretically, anyway), are replaced by new attractions that might prove restorative: a beach to walk between three-hour work jags; a grocery store you can’t shop on autopilot; a restaurant to repair to after a workday that actually ends rather than bleeding into the next calendar day.

Because if resting vacation is no agenda whatsoever, vacation itself is a shift from the ordinary—a modified agenda, or one’s usual agenda, relocated. And that can mean anything from a hedonistic sun-and-fun junket to working at a coffee shop on the other side of town (with your cell phone turned off, if you usually leave it on). I’ve returned from an afternoon of the latter better rested than I have from a week of the former, and not just because I burn easily. I think I probably require more rest than I’m willing to admit to myself, and (for those on modest budgets, anyway) it’s easier stolen in small chunks here and there—90 minutes at the movies, a couple of hours at a museum, a work-week’s time in a nearby cheap motel—than it is in expensive two-week increments.

It’s also easier to justify when cost is low and/or tax-deductible, and if there’s one thing that has no place on a vacation, it’s guilt.

Still, every so often in the off-season, when the crowds are thin and the rates are low, it’s nice to nothing much at all. Next (rest) stop: Palm Springs.

In August, of course. And maybe on assignment…

xxx
c

TOPICS: communicatrix, self-development, vacation, work.