Category: life

No ladies at the gym

I wake at 5:00 AM, probably because I wrote a bit yesterday and had conversations with people that turned into a whole new screenplay idea — so this morning my eager writer-brain clearly thinks we are back on our drug of choice. (Side note to writer-brain: we are nearly there, just hang on a little longer…).

6:02 AM. I am driving to the gym. It’s dark and for the first time truly cold, but the trees still have their leaves and so in spite of the chill, everything feels lush and mysterious. I have a clear, sharp memory of being about 12 — my parents owned a restaurant, and sometimes my father would wake me at 4:30 or 5:00 and take me with him to the Farmers Market. It was always dark, and often cold, and we would drive silent together through empty streets. And then around a dark corner into the light of trucks and stalls and ceiling heaters, voices yelling, the smell of coffee and diesel fumes, baskets of berries, enormous oranges, mountains of potatoes put into careful piles by the hard hands of men whose easy laughter made their hard faces beautiful. Those mornings made me realize that there were other worlds beside the one I lived in, and that I could go to them. All I had to do was get up early and drive.

That was a long time ago, but I still love the memory. When I was in my 20’s and often drove between Chicago and Florida, I would set off at 3:30 or so, drive through the dark and then the dawn, and by the time day came I already felt free, as if being out of sync with the regular schedule of the world somehow made lighter whatever baggage I might be carrying. I am sure that came in part from those few mornings with my dad.

6:05 AM. Curves is a women-only gym and the workout is based on resistance training, so anyone at any fitness level can go to their own personal max and get something out of it. And so we are not glamor girls at Curves. We are in our 40’s and 50’s and 60’s, we are fat and lean, we are mostly white and straight, married or divorced. And as is so often true of women in the absence of men, we are still nice, but not particularly careful or shy. When I walk in today, the place is full of us.

6:06 AM. I join the circle of machines and start my workout to an aerobicized cover of “Dark Lady” by Cher.

6:09 AM. The woman across the circle is talking cheerfully about anal leakage from eating too much olestra. The rest of us are laughing ourselves sick.

6:15 AM. The discussion has moved on to sports bras and breast bounce during exercise. All the large-breasted women in the room are holding up their boobs with their hands and making funny faces. The rest of us are laughing ourselves sick.

6:23 AM. The anal leakage woman is talking about dating (men) again after 28 years. She met a man recently who gets four days’ use out of a single pair of underwear by wearing them (consecutively) right side out facing front, inside out facing front, right side out backwards, inside out backwards. This same woman is bemoaning the lack of nice men to date in Seattle. She says that since few men have the courage to ask her out, she feels like she has to go out with anyone who asks. She is re-thinking this strategy after Underwear Man. Someone suggests that she should ask men out instead of waiting for them to make the first move. She responds, completely sincerely, that men don’t like to be asked out, it makes them uncomfortable, and so the only ones who would say yes are the ones who are really needy, and she doesn’t want to deal with that.

6:36 AM. As I finish my second circuit, there are several conversations going on, but one voice rises over the top: “Oh, men don’t want women to talk!” This is met by a shriek of general laughter as everyone gets the brief mental picture of what men would prefer women do with their mouths. Everyone, from the very quiet 30-something who just came in, to the woman in her 70’s who has done more than a thousand of these workouts, is pretty much helpless with the kind of cackling laughter that I imagine sometimes renders women absolutely alien to men.

6:45 AM. I have stretched and done pushups and crunches while the talk around me has moved to other things: jobs, grandkids, the election (That debate just made me want to puke! someone says), how long it takes to drive to Tacoma in the morning commute. I leave. I feel good.

I grew up Southern. I learned early how to get along with men, and I saw how the women of my culture managed the men around them. I know what a lady is, and I know how to be one. I’m pretty good at it when I must be. But I have to say, I much prefer the company of women, and the company of men who like them. I’m glad there are no ladies at my gym.

Like a writer after all

Robin and I are having an interesting conversation over in “Multitudes,” and she asked:

What is it like to be you today?

Well, here’s what it is. I have been nose-to-the-grindstone-focused on my new business project for several weeks now, and it’s starting to get to me. I will tell you all about it very shortly. It’s a cool project, cool enough that I’m a little worried it will change my life in ways that I’m not sure I want or am ready for. Or maybe it won’t. It’s hard to know. So it’s exciting…

…but it’s not creative. Or at least not the particular kind of creative I need to keep the channel open inside me, that passage to the deep places of myself. When I do the kind of work I’m involved in right now, I become microscopically focused on the details of what must be done. I line them up and knock them down. And when I pull my focus back, I don’t find myself tired-but-fizzing with work well done, bright with some new life lived for those hours. I just find myself tired.

And so last night I ate an entire 11″ South Philly with spinach after-bake pizza all by myself, drank a little too much beer, didn’t sleep that well, got up thinking I would get back to work on the project…

… and found myself doing this instead.

[scrippet]

FADE IN…

Onto a small-town commercial street at dusk… as a pirate runs shrieking from a hardware store, chased by a princess with a sword.

GO WIDER: Other kids in costumes. Parents chatting. College youth sauntering into bars. Halloween is in full swing in a small college town.

ENGINES GROWL as two motorcycles turn onto the street. Both RIDERS wear battered leathers and full-face helmets.

The locals stare. RIDER #1 stares back, invisible through the black-glass visor. RIDER #2 gives the little princess a wave.

They park outside a hotel next to a bar, Rider #1 with visible reluctance. Engines OFF.

Rider #1 begins to pull off the helmet…

EXT. HOTEL – DAY (DUSK) – CONTINUOUS

Several DRUNK COLLEGE STUDENTS have paused outside the bar. One girl gives the bikes — and the Riders — an appreciative look. Her boyfriend tugs her against him possessively as Rider #1’s helmet comes off —

— and reveals a woman. RAE DONOVAN, 40’s, a little detached, a lot tough. Always on alert.

The college girl looks confused. The boys react predictably to a woman in leather. Rae gives them a dismissive stare.

Behind Rae, Rider #2 removes the helmet. She is STELLA DONOVAN, early to mid-60’s. No Botox, no surgery, just strong and sexy straight out of the box.

Stella gives Rae an impatient look. Rae grabs a bag from the back of her bike and stalks grimly toward the hotel entrance. As Stella follows —

DRUNK COLLEGE BOY
Yow! Bring it, granny!

STELLA
I’m not your fuckin’ granny.

RAE
(doesn’t look back)
Mom.

The college students jostle each other as Rae and Stella enter the hotel.
[/scrippet]

What’s it like to be me today? A little bit more like being a writer. And that feels good. And it turns out that western civilization didn’t end just because I took my eye off my other project for a couple of hours.

Thanks for asking!

Formatted using the extremely cool Scrippets plugin.

What’s important?

I was shopping yesterday for birthday chocolates for Nicola’s dad. He has a passion for chocolate ginger. Nicola and I were talking the other day about how unusual it is for men to jones for chocolate the way some women do — I know it’s gendered of me, but honestly, we couldn’t think of a single guy apart from N’s dad who seriously loves chocolate. All the men I know like pie.

Anyway, as I walked from my car to the chocolate shop, I passed a Young Person’s Clothing Store, the kind of place that if I’d walked in to buy some low-rise jeans the staff would have assumed they were for my daughter. I have made Nicola promise that when I fall over the line into age-inappropriate dressing (which in our house we refer to as “Mutton Dressed As Lamb”), she will tell me even though it will be a nightmare for her.

But today is not that day (grin).

The window of the store carried a large message: “Your voice is more important than your fear.” And rather than thinking deeply about voting, which I think was the intention, I started thinking about the construction of the sentence, and the infinite possibilities of it:

Your ________ is more important than your ________.

How would you fill in the blanks?

Strangers

Tonight we are going here to celebrate our friend Pam’s birthday. Eight people will meet for drinks, dinner, and what I hope will be good conversation — most of these folks are strangers to us, from a different part of Pam’s life.

Pam is a (hearing) ASL interpreter, as are many of her friends who will be there tonight. They are, based on my small experience of the Seattle Deaf/deaf/hearing ally community, an elite group — accomplished, expert, well-known and widely respected, deeply involved in the communities. Not just a j-o-b. I have looked through windows into that world, but I’ve never really walked there, and it strikes me as being like military service or sex work or firefighting, the kind of work that you don’t talk about to civilians. Partly because of the confidentiality that is essential to the interpreter/client relationship, but also, I imagine, partly because it’s an intense world and you just have to live there to understand. Interpreting is such a huge responsibility — to facilitate true understanding between people of different languages requires more than just a working vocabulary. I think the best interpreters have great empathy and a practiced, expert understanding of how to make a bridge between different languages, cultures, worldviews… all in the middle of Real Life happening to someone, a trial or a medical situation or a work issue or financial crisis. Or a concert or play or celebration. Or an interminable business meeting. I expect some specific interpreting jobs are just boring. But I don’t expect any of them are easy.

When I was studying ASL, and considering pursuing interpreting, I found myself on a regular basis wanting to slap some of the interpreting students I met (and some of the so-called professional interpreters as well). People who just “signed it in English” because it was easier than actually interpreting cultural meaning — to those folks, it was more important to be fast and flash and just that wee bit smug than it was to give people more complete access to each other’s meaning. Interpreters who didn’t know the difference between ASL and signed English, who “didn’t believe in” Deaf culture or assumed that it was like hearing culture except, you know, without the hearing. Snarl. I am no expert on any of this, and am prepared to be wrong about it, but that’s how it felt to me, and those people really did make me want to scream.

I do not expect to be screaming about that tonight (grin). And I hope it goes well. I know we’ll all make sure that Pam has a great time, that’s the goal and the pleasure. But I also hope that we like each other.

It’s always interesting to meet the friends of my friends, but it’s not always successful. I don’t mind that in general (although I sometimes find it very tedious in the particular). It’s one of the fascinating things about being human, this variety of others that we connect with. The space that we make in our lives for all kinds of folks, and the bias toward relationship that I think most people have — the tug toward establishing some kind of positive connection, or a negative connection if that seems the only option. But it seems like we do have to establish some kind of relationship, you know? Even ignoring someone is a relationship, if the ignoring is an active choice (and sometimes even if it isn’t).

At any rate, it’s a party! A celebration of my friend and all the good moments I’ve had with her, the things I’ve learned, the comfort and connection and recognition I feel with her. It will be nice to share that with people, and perhaps by the end of the evening some of us will no longer be strangers.

——-

Edited to add: Lovely evening, lovely people who are no longer complete strangers. There’s nothing like a five-hour dinner… Good conversations and lots of laughs and hugs, and my friend Pam glowing in the center of it all. What better way to celebrate someone’s life?

Sparkle sputter

Well, I tried, but it turns out I have nothing of interest to say today. It’s a damn shame, but there it is. So instead I will share Other People’s Things in the hopes that they will be so interesting that you’ll think wow, that Kelley Eskridge sure does have interesting things to share! and not notice that they aren’t actually mine (grin).

This is my second favorite Far Side cartoon (actually, I have about 10 second-favorites, since I think that math is just as relative as everything else, but that’s another topic).

The Far Side by Gary Larsen

And if anyone has my favorite strip, I will be superfreakingrateful and publicly bow to your superior archival skills… it’s the split panel of a man and woman in separate beds, thinking what they’re thinking, and therein lies the punch line of “Same Planet, Different Worlds.”

And for the left side of your brain, this New York Magazine article takes a long and interesting look at the current state of publishing, which has interested me for a while, possibly because I am no longer playing by all the rules.

Back with more sparkle tomorrow, I’m sure. In the meantime, go talk to Nicola, she’s way more interesting than me today!

Special day

Today is Nicola’s birthday. It’s a special day for me because she was born; and somehow across thousand of miles and more than two dozen years, we made the millions of choices that brought our paths together.

We like to celebrate — almost any reason can be a good one. But today is the best reason I can think of (blows a kiss to Nicola through the internet). It’s not hard to get the party started: She’s talented and smart and loving and kind. She’s brave. She’s in love with the world even when the people in it piss her off. She can still surprise me, confuse the hell out of me, make me laugh, make me feel challenged, make me feel safe.

And she makes me want to give her the moon. Which means I always have to reach for it. I’ll get it for you one of these days, honey: but today I have something else you’ve been wanting, although they won’t be turning up at dinner (one of these days for that, too…)

Happy birthday, Nicola!

And I’m wishing all of you a lovely day. I hope you find something to celebrate, however large or small. Even in these confusing times, there’s a lot worth being glad for.

Scary/beautiful

An odd day. Such scary financial news, very worrying on a global level and right here at home. I’m pretty much one piece of bad news away from unpleasant choices in my future, but that news hasn’t come in yet, and it may yet turn out well, and then it will okay. But there is nothing I can do to affect the course of events. All I can do is wait… I feel not so much stressed right now as stretched, suspended between possibilities that are just a little too far apart for comfort.

And in the meantime, it’s an achingly beautiful day here, made all the more so by being unexpected. Clear and blue and 75 degrees, green leaves and red berries and three exuberant roses (red, white and a lavender one that feels and smells so soft), the birds throwing themselves around the sky with exuberant whistling songs… And tomorrow is a Special Day so I am thinking of a Special Post, and making Special Preparations.

I don’t know what will happen. I just don’t know. I guess we’ll see. I suppose one reason I was compelled to write yesterday about returning to balance is that I am getting a lot of practice right now. I hope that your balancing act is going well, whatever it may be.

Finding the balance

hi,

i read your book (solitaire, not dangerous space. apparently my city’s library does not possess copies of dangerous space?) a few months ago. and i thought it was amazing. i’m just letting you know that. i really did like it. now i am so scared of crocodiles, like terribly concerned about the prospect of their existence, in my mind and in the world. this is sad, because i have crocodiles painted on my bedroom walls. but i also thought it was one of the best ways to describe the voices in your mind that are always there ready to poison things. i could never figure out what was happening before.

i also really liked the concepts used. the descriptions were really vivid. you know this, i’m sure. it is, after all, your book. i thought it was really nice, by the way, that you had the relationship between snow and jackal without editorializing about the difficulties of samesex relationships, and focusing the relationship on the people, not how difficult coming out may be, or how prejudiced the surrounding culture was. i’m sure that there are probably many books like this in that respect (i hope) but solitaire was the first one i have read.

i’m fifteen. i guess that explains a lot? or maybe nothing at all.

i think i might be using run-on sentences. i’m sorry if this message is not quite clear. i write the way i talk and so….yes.

what i was actually wondering was what kind of degree and career training you would have to go through to become a facilitator or project manager? what things would be a good idea to major in?

okay, thank you even simply for reading this. i really did enjoy your book.

have a good day,

kelsey

Hi Kelsey,

I’m glad you liked Solitaire. Thanks for taking the time to find me and let me know.

You’ve caught me in a thinking/talking space, so this is a really long response. Hope that’s okay. Sometimes too long can be just as frustrating as too short.

I’m sorry your library doesn’t carry Dangerous Space, although I can understand it — the book is from an independent press, and sometimes either those books don’t come so easily to the attention of libraries, or the libraries choose to spend their budget on books from trade (major) publishers.

My library system has an online order form where I can request that they either buy a specific book, or get it for me on interlibrary loan from another system. Maybe yours will have that service available. If so, the publisher is Aqueduct Press and the publication date is June 2007.

Ah, the crocodiles. Here’s another conversation I had about them, if you’re interested. I’ve never met anyone who didn’t have that voice inside, which I believe is the voice of fear. Not fear of spiders or fear that the cop behind me is about to pull me over for speeding, but the Big Fears that we all carry… I think of them as fears about our own identity. The big insecurities we have about ourselves, the fears that we will be “not good enough” on some level. Some people are terrified of intimacy. Some people are terrified of showing how smart they are. Some people are terrified that they aren’t smart enough. And so on… everyone’s crocodiles are different, because they belong to us, you know? They are tailor-made for us.

But here’s the thing. Crocodiles are part of being human. We all carry them with us. Don’t be fooled by the people who seem like they’ve never had an insecure thought in their lives — they are either covering like mad (because they are afraid if people find out their insecurities, they will use them as weapons), or they are not yet self-aware enough to know that the crocodiles are there. That’s not about age, it’s about maturity. You know it at fifteen, but some people don’t know it at eighty-five. Not being aware doesn’t mean that we don’t have fears — it just means that we will never be able to see how they affect us, and we won’t be able to do as much to help ourselves.

Quieting those crocodile voices is a life-long process. Sometimes you shut them up for a while, and sometimes they come back and bite hard. I don’t think they ever go away completely.

There’s an idea I came across when I was learning about conflict resolution (as part of facilitation stuff, more about that later). The idea is that conflict makes us feel off-balance inside, and people avoid having conflict because we don’t like that feeling — which only means that we repress our disagreement or anger and it builds up and gets worse.

Peole are always looking for ways to not have these feelings. We think that if we feel knocked off-balance by someone’s anger or disagreement, it means we are weak. But that’s not how it works. The real trick is not to keep our balance — it’s to keep finding our balance again and again and again. All through life. Whether we are arguing about who’s turn it is to do the dishes, or listening to the crocodile tell us we will never be good enough writers to sell a book. It’s all about finding our way back to our own center, in small everyday ways and in big life-changing ones.

I have actually been thinking about this a lot lately. There are things happening for me right now that make me feel off-balance, and I’m coming back to center over and over. It’s a skill. It gets easier with practice, and I’m good at it. But even so, I still have to go through it. Being good at it only means that the curve is shorter.

I’m glad Jackal and Snow’s relationship in Solitaire works for you. I think it’s good and important that there are books about coming out, about dealing with cultural disapproval, yadda yadda, but I get tired of reading them. Revealing oneself to others is not the only part of being bisexual or gay or trans or polyamorous or BDSM or queer in any other way. There are all the other human experiences — falling in love, being loved back, not being loved back, discovering sex and finding people to have it with, negotiating relationships through our differences, making a long-term commitment, losing a lover…. All of it. We all have those experiences, regardless of our sexual or gender identity or class or race or religion. We’re all human beings.

There are definitely other books out there that show people just being human without the cultural hetero-normative baggage. You can try books by Nicola Griffith (here’s her website and her blog). I am biased because she’s my partner, but honestly, there is no better writer. She’s an awesome storyteller.

You can also look for Mary Renault’s books about Alexander the Great (seriously, really good stuff): Fire From Heaven, The Persian Boy, Funeral Games. Or anything by Renault. Melissa Scott writes queer science fiction (try Trouble and Her Friends). Emma Bull’s Bone Dance is a great book about identity in all kinds of ways (here are more of my thoughts about it). Tripping to Somewhere by Kristopher Reisz is about teenage lesbian/bisexual girls searching for the Witches’ Carnival — there’s a lot of angst about love, but not a lot about sexual expression.

Hmm. That’s just off the top of my head, on only one cup of tea. More caffeine would probably bring more titles to mind.

Okay, I went and made another cup of tea, and thought of some more. Elizabeth Lynn’s Watchtower series (start with Watchtower). Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, and The Privilege of the Sword. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness.

On to facilitation and project management. I learned these things over a period of time in my 20’s and 30’s, mostly by teaching myself, watching other people, and reading. I did go to a couple of workshops — these sorts of things can be pretty interesting or really lame, and it’s hard to know which ahead of time.

In terms of majors, there are no “facilitation” majors that I’m aware of. Here are the things I think might have some relevance: psychology, organizational development (this is often a grad-level course of stufy, but not always), communication. I majored in theatre, which I’ve actually found quite useful in facilitating (grin). There are generally electives you can take in project management (you’ll sometimes find them in the engineering school or in the business school). You can major in business if it interests you, although honestly I don’t imagine you’ll get much in the way of communication, effective management, facilitation, etc. there. That’s one of the big problems with business education, in my opinion.

Facilitators have to understand about how communication works. Any books, online articles, workshops or electives that deal with topics like active listening, interpersonal communication or interpersonal dynamics, conflict management, negotiation, ladder of assumption, etc. might be interesting. Although personally I would stay away from pop-culture books like “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.” Anything gender-based, anything that claims that men and women are separate creatures, is not useful right now. Focus on the things that are common to all of us as humans.

The best book I know about communication is Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen. This would be a great place to start. Your library should have this or be able to get interlibrary loan for you.

Wikepedia on facilitation and what facilitators do. Just a place to start getting an overview. There are links to books that you could request from the library if you were interested.

But many of those books will be pretty in-depth, so I also recommend you look for some basic books on facilitation skills. I actually suggest starting with your library for this — there are so many books out there on the subject, and no one book is necessarily better as an introduction. They’ll all give you a good overview. Same with project management. It may take a few tries to find something that gives you the big picture as well as some of the basic details.

Project management is a very dry thing to read about and study, but it can be a lot of fun to do. You need to truly enjoy managing details, organizing information, solving problems, and working with other people to find those solutions (that’s a big part of where the facilitation comes in, as well as in keeping the entire project moving forward). Facilitators and PMs don’t do the actual work of the project themselves — that’s what the experts in the group are for. The facilitator/PM is the person who organizes the process, keeps everyone headed toward the goals and deadlines, and has the big picture of the overall activity. So it’s like having a dual focus — on the one hand, you are the Big Picture person that everyone trusts to manage the overall process, and on the other hand you are constantly down in the weeds with all the minute details. That “balance” thing again… And having facilitation skills — communicating clearly, knowing how to have effective conflict (so it doesn’t get personal), making sure you get all the input you need, having good systems for making decisions, etc. — really helps when you are trying to keep everyone marching forward to a plan, because when a person or the project itself loses balance, you can help describe what’s happening and help people find the way to get back to center.

The best thing to do is to find a real live human being to sit down with and talk to about their work. You’ll find all different approaches to project management (some of it all based on schedules and checklists, some of it much more focused on “people management”) and different styles of facilitation (some of it focused on business meetings and activities, some on more personal coaching and interventions, etc.) If your parents have friends or business contacts that might do this work, that’s a place to start. Or if there are any teachers you think have good communication/classroom management skills, ask them for ideas about people to talk to.

Is any of this helpful? If not, or if you still want to talk about it, just say so. I will be happy to focus on whatever you think would be useful.

As for being fifteen, I think age has both everything and nothing to do with anything, if that even makes sense. We are where we are in life. We know what we know. We have the experiences that we have. That’s partly due to how long we’ve been on the planet, but also due to what we do with the experience we have so far. How we use our experiences and thoughts and feelings, our hopes and fears, our sense of joy, whether we are open or closed to the world and other people, all of that stuff. It all goes into making our “self.”

You’re in a stretch of time right now where your brain is madly hard-wiring all kinds of connections. You’re building yourself in very real ways. That self will keep changing and growing, but the actual biochemical and physical changes are pretty massive in one’s teen years and into the 20’s… I always felt like I was standing in the eye of a hurricane, and then bam! I would tumble out of my safe place and get swept up in the storm, and then have to find my balance again (see, it’s all connected…). I still get swept away sometimes (grin) but for different reasons now. And now, it’s more of a choice.

I hope you have a good day too. Write back anytime.

—————
You can start your own conversation now or anytime — just use the “Want to talk?” link on the sidebar or email me.