Stay of Execution

Love Stories

This Fish posted recently about a failed relationship.  One of the problems, she notes, was a blog post about a previous relationship that the fellow she was dating didn't like.  She is angry at him, it is clear, and her post is not kind.   The disputed post isn't kind, either.  There's a bee sting in both of the posts, the narrator rubbing a red welt and lashing out at the men who inflicted it.  In each post, she tells someone else's secrets, in a voice of contempt.  It makes me sad.   I like This Fish for her honesty, but I also like her because I sense that she is kind.  Posts like these, with the attendant dozens of "you go, girl!" comments from loyal readers who relish the snarky deconstruction, make me feel betrayed in that belief.  These stories are hers to tell, I suppose, but they also hold the secrets of men whose lives she touched.  Even if the men aren't worthy romantic partners, they are people, not anecdotes, and if she cared enough about them to feel stung and disappointed, they deserve better than caricature.  I hate that people seem to like contempt so much.   

I blog from time to time about my own romantic life.  Mostly, I don't.  That's for a lot of reasons.  The most obvious one is that my romantic life is in flux, and has been for most of the life of this blog.  I'm afraid to count on it when things are good, and I'm afraid to tell the truth and expose my vulnerability when things are bad.  I'm afraid to write about it because my words, out there in public, might affect my real-world life.  I'm afraid to acknowlege my longing, give power to my fears, own up to my confusion.  I'm afraid to clutch too tightly to happiness.  I haven't managed to hold on to it yet.

The alternative is this strange coy silence, as if I'm not all those things: confused, longing, vulnerable, happy, afraid.  I am all of them, sometimes all at once, sometimes in quick succession, and sometimes one at a time, flooded and overwhelmed.  I haven't learned how to write about it.

Do you know anyone who does, without sounding hardened, or stung, or contemptuous?  I'd like to read that kind of writing: honest, from someone with an open heart.   

Moss

Another sweet part of the weekend was a walk in Witherle Woods, a preserve in Castine.  The old paths were covered in pine needles, soft and sweet smelling.  The air wasn't quite drizzling but it was thick with moisture.  And there was moss everywhere, the brightest green, all shapes and sizes.  I kept stopping to touch it and peer at it.  Once upon a time, I knew a little bit about moss -- how it grows and reproduces, which kind is which.  I can't remember any of that but the soft green stuff still fascinates me, the way it holds moisture and the pillowy way it grows and how it seems to make a grey day seem quiet and peaceful and fresh.

Girls With Tools

A long weekend, largely good.  Full, intense.

One of the highlights was spending Saturday with the Hooked On Tonics girls, working on the boom of our boat.  The outhaul didn't work at all last year.  It's a wire at the end of the boom that pulls on the clew corner of the mainsail.  You pull it tight on windy days and let it loose so the sail can be a little baggy on not-so-windy days.  That's as much non-technical talk as I'm going to indulge.  Anyway, the outhaul had stopped working last season -- tight and tangled up somewhere in the shaft of the boom.  To fix it we had to take off the endcaps of the boom, which involved removing some screws and popping out some rivets.  Not all the screws wanted to come out so we coaxed one out with a drill and a hacksaw and a hammer. 

Once we got the boom opened, which took a couple of hours, we had to figure out what was going wrong with the outhaul setup, and how to make it better.   We identified a few things wrong: a clugey, cumbersome set of blocks were twisting around one another and getting caught on a bolt in the middle of the boom.  The wire with the shackle at the outboard end of the boom was fraying and twisted.  The block at the mast end of the boom was coming apart. 

We formulated a new system of running rigging for the outhaul.  It's only a two-to-one purchase system now, down from eight-to-one, so it may be too hard to pull.  Still, it works better than nothing, which is what we had last year, and there aren't so many things to go wrong. 

Setting up the new system involved a trip to West Marine to get parts.  A salesman met us at the door, but couldn't help us.  He sent an older guy, who also couldn't help us.  The older guy suggested that we might want to look at the clothing on sale at the front of the store -- 20% off.  We were brisk with him and headed to the back where the fittings and the tools were.  Wirecutters, a nicopress tool?  Oh, there they are.  Where are the sleeves?  Great.  We brought the wire and cut the warped end off it, then re-swaged it around the original shackle.  To make a loop in wire you put a metal sleeve on it, then bend over the bitter end of the wire and thread it into the sleeve beside itself.  It's a tight fit, and once it's in you use a tool to clamp the sleeve very very tight, smushing it and the wire all together into a round shape.  It's fun to do.  We cut new line for the running rigging part.  We need some #10 round head machine screws and a couple #12s as well. 

I've never gone boat part shopping with girlfriends before, and it was fun to be there together, NOT looking at the clothing, but doing real work.  We got back to my driveway to finish the job.  It took a long time, and it's not pretty, but we have a working outhaul now.  The mast and all of its projects are our next horizon. 

Birth Control Breakfast

This morning while I ate breakfast I poked and pulled and fiddled around with an IUD.  Housemate brought several of them home from a contraceptive workshop she went to this week.  She's very into the IUD.  She even has a little silver lapel pin that looks like an IUD. 

I was very skeptical.  I kept making a face, a sort of uncomfortable grossed out wince, when she was talking about the IUD and how great it is.  I don't trust it, it sounds too invasive, it sounds like it hurts.  Can't it go drastically wrong and make people sterile?  Just, ick.  But of course my curiosity, plus my respect for Housemate's medical judgment, made me ask questions.

What's so great about an IUD?  Here's what I learned. It is as effective as sterilization, and it is immediately reversible. When you have it in, you are as unlikely to get pregnant as if you have had your tubes tied. (And of course, "tubes tied" is a misnomer -- your tubes are permanently, irreversibly CUT.)  99.8% effective.  When you take it out, you can start trying to get pregnant right away -- there's no time lapse due to hormones, etc.  Surgery, obviously, is expensive and dangerous and irreversible.  The IUD is inexpensive, safe, reversible, and works just as well.  It's better than the pill, from the standpoint of efficacy, and there's no room for human error.  You can't forget to take it.   There are no hormonal side effects. (Hormonal side effects are sometimes good, and sometimes bad.)  It's about $400 to get screened and pop it in, which over its life is pretty cheap. 

It works because there is a little tiny coil of fine copper wire wrapped around the flexible plastic shaft of the T-shaped gizmo.  The copper ions kill sperm and damage the lining of the egg, so fertilization can't happen.  The mechanism of action is just the presence of copper in the uterus.  I'd imagined that there was something more physically destructive going on, that an IUD had something sharp that was cutting or breaking tissue.  Not true. There's nothing sharp on it at all, even after I pulled and twisted and tugged and bent the sucker. 

Housemate is fired up about the IUD for social reasons.  I guess 25% of women who choose contraception in this country are getting sterilized, and 1% use the IUD.  The proportions are different in Europe, where there was no Dalkon Shield and no fear about the method.  She thinks that's needlessly expensive, risky, and dangerous.  Right now poor women are disproportionately less likely to be offered the IUD as a choice.  The prevalence of homone based birth control means a lot of women are peeing out synthetic molecules that impact hormones, and it's not clear what having those substances in the water does to people or the natural world.  The IUD's been maligned in this country, falsely, because of irrational fear. The defect in the Dalkon Shield had to do with the string, and that's been fixed.  That product been off the market for 30 years, and safe, proven IUDs have been around and available for a dozen years or so, but doctors and clinics still rarely suggest or even mention the alternative to patients.  That seems silly.

 

Remind Me Not To Move To Seattle

It has rained the whole month of May.  That can't be true, but it is pretty close to true.  I just went surfing around looking for confirmation and I can't find hard statistics.  I found another blogger who asserts there has been exactly one full day of sun in May.  That sounds right.  It's been well over a week since I've seen the sun, and then it was only a glimpse, and it was gone within a couple of hours.  It has been in the 40s and 50s, grey and wet and drizzly, with a cold wind, for as long as I can remember.  Scarf, hat, gloves, raincoat weather.  My dad posted about the bleak rain a month ago, and I had to check the date because it could have been written almost any time in recent memory.

The impact on my mood has been dramatic.  I haven't been going outside, I haven't been exercising, and that has a big impact on my energy and self-esteem.  I've watched more movies than I usually do, and I've read more fluff.  I've eaten too much comfort food and drunk too much tea with honey.  I have a lingering headcold that's not going away, as do most people I know.  I have a big ouchy wound on my left hand that's making me wince.  I have a lot to do.  All of these things don't help.  But the constant rain, the cold wet nasty unpleasantness every time I try to go outside, and the gray unceasingness of it has made me despondent.  I feel like an animal in the zoo: listless, trapped, unmotivated, out of my element.  I don't want to get out of bed in the morning -- there's not enough light, I'm sick of the sound of rain on the window.  I am not myself.   It's very strange. 

Tomorrow I have to go for a run, and maybe visit a tanning booth or something.  The forecast shows nothing but clouds and rain through Monday, when it offers the small respite of a "mostly cloudy" forecast. 

How do people live like this?  I want to throw myself off a bridge. 

Guilty Pleasures

I tell you readers the truth even when it doesn't flatter me at all.

I was out to dinner at a funky little hip restaurant with a couple of friends tonight, and we were whooping it up, having an intelligent -yet-edgy, banter-filled conversation while eating fried pickles (yes), and I lost my train of thought and got a dreamy smile on my face and said, "I love this song, you guys...." 

The song?  Elton John's Someone Saved My Life Tonight.  Say what you will.  Butterflies are free to fly. Fly away, high away, bye bye.

What I Am Thinking About Today

1) Where does shame come from?  I know what makes it go away, but I don't know where it comes from. 

2) How do I want my life to look in a year?

3) Personal power politics that flare up in organizations, and how I can defuse them.

4) What to plant in my side garden this year.

There's more, of course, but those four subjects are taking up about 60% of my brain space.  The shame question really interests me. 

Question for People With Wounds

So when you have a big deep wide yucchy wound, is it better to leave it un-bandaged so that it can be exposed to air and get crusty and hard sooner, or is it better to keep a bandaid on it so that it will be free from lint and dirt and ouchy things that might sting or poke it? 

Also, which strategy will lead to a cooler looking scar?

Legal Satisfaction Quiz

Via The Greatest American Lawyer, I surfed over to see what Ellen Ostrow, a "Life Coach for Women Lawyers," had to offer on her website. 

The true-false questions offered here seem like a good first-pass at job satisfaction.  I thought about how life was when I was practicing law, and took the test.  I had 23-24 "True" answers and 6-7 "False" answers, which I think is a pretty good result.  I wonder how the rest of my readers (lawyers and nonlawyers) would rate their jobs.  If you're so moved, feel free to share your results in the comments below, and whether you're a lawyer or not....

Destruction

I was right to worry last night.  I drove out to check on my boat this morning, telling myself I was being silly.  When I drove across the bridge I looked out at the bay and saw a big boat up on the rocks of a small island, one of the Brothers.  It was a ketch, well above the high tide line, leaning on its side at a terrible angle.  I speeded up.

When I got to the yacht club I could see my boat, safe and sound.  But there was carnage everywhere in the anchorage.  Three or four boats had shredded sails flapping from their headstays, roller-furling jibs that had blown out and were now fluttering in the strong gusts, destroying themselves.  There was an upside-down skiff just to the right of the main dock, its outboard prop sticking up out of the water, and its aluminum hull half sunk.  It doesn't belong to the club, and must have blown from somewhere else and then hung itself up on a club mooring.  The docks themselves were all akimbo, and the ramp leading down to the docks is completely gone -- it blew apart, and the commodore, who came down at low tide, says it's sunk tothe southeast of the first float.   The club's workboat, an open punt, broke free from its mooring and you could see it smashed up against the pilings of the marina downwind. 

I looked at all of the Etchells and the ones I saw seemed to be okay.  One had a boom cover that had come partly loose and was flapping in the wind.  As I watched, the grey cover on my boat, stretched over the cockpit to keep the water out, tore loose in one section and began to flap.  I watched for a while, concerned that the loose cover would act like a sail and pull the boat off the mooring, but that didn't seem to be happening.  There's no way to get out there to fix it, anyway, with the docks loose and the launches on their moorings and the wind as wild as it is.  I suppose I could have taken the little club dinghy and rowed against the wind out to my boat to secure the cover down again.  It didn't seem like a good idea.