Titles Matter/Names Don’t

Published on September 3, 2010 in Quotidien. 50 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

I am not a big believer in the maxim that you can’t tell a book by its cover. That idea is a kind of Cartesian split which says that the inner and outer are separate and distinct, but they aren’t. The cover is part of the book and it tells me something about the book, at least it better. I know that publishing houses have teams of experts who decide on the best colors, fonts, foregrounds and backgrounds that will sell the story inside.  The graphics and the author’s photographs are all analyzed and scrutinized to create a book that is sellable and appealing and consistent with the message that lives inside the cover.

Titles are especially telling. As of late I have become a bit obsessed with book titles. It started with a fish out of water memoir that I am hesitant to name, not because I didn’t like the book—I did like the book. It is just that the title of the book was wrong and I feel disinclined to openly take the book to task for its bad name and it really is bad. Not that isn’t true, it is a fine title. It just shouldn’t be the title for this book. The problem with the title was that I believed the title and I believed that I was going to get a story that reflected what the title implied. Some may say, “it’s just a title. For goodness sakes, Belette, you said you enjoyed the book. Isn’t that enough? Why are you so hung up on the  gosh darn title?” I’ll tell you why. If I go to the store and buy a jar of mayonnaise and bring it home to add a heaping tablespoon of it to my tuna salad and it turns out it was Cool Whip or horseradish I am not going to enjoy my tuna salad. Not that there is anything wrong with horseradish (I refuse to say nice things about Cool Whip) it just wasn’t what was on the label.

Whomever chose the title of the aforementioned book had wanted this book to attract women who like Audrey Hepburn and/or books with Prada in the title. I feel sure it wasn’t the author as the title wasn’t consistent with her voice. I hope that she made an impassioned argument against the title and that she ultimately relented out of promises that if she would agree to their suggested title that she would be the biggest thing since Elizabeth Gilbert, one is liable to make all kinds of concessions with such a promise.

I am not sure if you know this, I don’t think I have ever told you, but I love the title “Thursdays with Igor”. I am pretty attached to it. The title, for me, is part of what gives the book its spirit and its structure and I dread (and highly anticipate) someday find myself in a meeting with powerful people who have paid me money for my book telling me that they want me to call the book “Dr. Freud 90210″ or “The Prada Patient” or worse “Psychoanalysis in a little black dress”. I like to tell myself that this wouldn’t happen and if it did that I wouldn’t cave and yet if someone is telling me that such a title could persuade Sandra Bullock to buy the film rights, I cannot be sure of what I would do ( actually, I am pretty sure what I would do and yet I want to appear to you as if I would struggle with the decision). That said, I know that there is so much about the title that I love. “Thursdays” tells you that this is a ritual. “Thursdays” says that this is something that is scheduled for, planned for and anticipated. “With” tells you that Igor and I are in this together and he isn’t the expert—we both are. And “Igor”, to my mind, tells you a little about him being foreign and how every word he says to me has an accent.

Okay so back to the Prada/Audrey Hepburn inspired fish out of water memoir, the whole time I was reading this ill-named memoir I kept thinking “but where is the girl that they were talking about on the cover? That is not THIS girl.” What I am saying is that for me this title ruined my read. If the book had no title I would have enjoyed this book 100% more than I did.

In opposition to this unnamed/ill-named memoir there are two books whose titles got me through some really hard places in their prose. The first book is my friend’s, Laura Munson’s, This is Not the Story You Think It Is. This is one of my favorite titles ever, it is right up there next to Dave Egger’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (so many of my favorite titles come from authors in Lake Forest. Coincidence? I think not. ). What I LOVE about Laura’s title is that each and every time I made a decision about how her story was going to go or making any assumptions at all, her title would come to me and gently remind me “This is not the story you think it is.” This title changed the way I read her book and for that I am grateful to the title.

I just finished reading Abigail Thomas’ A Three Dog Life. Let me tell you that without the title and without the cover of Abigail sitting on a comfy couch, the kind you can imagine sitting on for hours and drinking tea and eating shortbread, with her three dogs, I could have not gotten past the second chapter and that isn’t because this isn’t a wonderful book—it is—it is just a hard place that Abigail finds herself. As I read Abigail’s painfully beautiful prose describing her life after her husband’s traumatic brain injury that required him to leave their home and live in an institution it was the dogs I would hold onto. Even when they weren’t there, in the early chapters, I would tell myself, “She’s not alone. The dogs are there. She has the dogs.” It took a while for the dogs to find their home in the memoir, Abigail had other stories to tell about her husband’s hallucinations, psychotic episodes and his highly poetic manor of speech. If by page 78 there had not been the dogs I wouldn’t have been able to go on—the pain would have been to much. As a reader I needed those dogs to sit by my feet as I read about the grief, the loss and despair that I felt as I imagined myself in her shoes. That said, I can imagine Abigail’s book without the dogs and I feel sure Abigail would have found a way to go on without Rosie, Harry and Carolina—but there would HAVE to have been another title.  If there were just teases of dogs with that title and no real interactions with her pack, I, as a reader, couldn’t have taken it.

***

My father gave me a first name that he considered lacking in gravitas, he told me so. And when he would talk about this he would always remind me of his largess in giving me a middle name that he thought was more serious, “So just in case you ever do anything serious with your life you can go by your middle name.” I would bristle each time he would bring this up. I always hated my first name. In middle school I started threatening to change my name to Blaire-Hamilton. I wanted two first names, names that sounded like I might be the first female President of the United States. I didn’t want a name that made people think of cheerleaders or porn stars. It wasn’t until the summer of my freshmen year of  high school when I saw a journalist with my exact name (different spelling) in Vogue magazine that I decided my father was wrong. I could do important things with the name he gave me, even though I would prefer to have a name that immediately makes one think of great literature and not of an archetypal cheerleader.

***

When and if I publish “Thursdays with Igor” I hope that the title will remain. And, I can tell you, that I will not be going by my middle name when and if I publish, so take that Daddy-O. I will be going by my first name that lacks gravitas and my married name that makes me sound like a Greek shipping heiress.

Projective Identification and Prince Charming the Conceptual Artist

Published on September 1, 2010 in Meaning Making and Psychology. 39 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

When as a MFT trainee I first started seeing clients I had normal bouts of self-doubt and fear that I wasn’t at all ready to be seeing them yet.  Usually after a few minutes into the session I would remind myself just to be there with the client and listen and respond authentically and that all would be well and that was usually enough to make my self-doubts go away. However there was one client that I was seeing that whenever I would sit with him/her no amount of self-soothing or self-talk could make my self-doubt go away. And strangely, even if I had been feeling confident, competent or otherwise effective, as soon as he/she would walk into my office my positive feelings would be replaced with ones like, “You will never amount to anything” or “You are hopeless and you should just stop this now.” I tried to push these thoughts away and just be with the client—only these thoughts and feelings wouldn’t budge. By the time the session would end I would feel like a complete and total failure and an absolute fraud.

At the time I was lucky to have  a WONDERFUL supervisor whom, upon hearing how I felt when in session with this client, introduced me to the concept of Projective Identitification. She explained to me that the client was unconsciously communicating to me about their subjective state via how I felt about myself in this client’s presence, i.e. the person was projecting their inner state onto me. The client said with his/her words that he/she was doing okay and all was well but via their unconscious they were communicating to me how he/she really felt about him/herself. As soon as I heard my supervisor’s interpretation it made sense to me. Once armed with this insight I was able to understand the subjective states as transference and what had once felt intolerable now felt like valuable clinical information. However, if I had not had the supervision I might not been able to differentiate my feelings from what was in fact a classic Projective Identification as this is a psychological state that can be difficult to differentiate without a skilled someone on the sidelines.

All of the above is just my attempt to introduce you to the concept, in case this is an idea you are not yet familiar with( and I am sure that many of you are and/or have at least experienced this dynamic in your life with other humans). So when I got back from my trip to Portland I was feeling extremely numb. I felt that I wasn’t able to love. I couldn’t feel my heart. I felt totally disconnected from myself. I had no idea how I was feeling and my thoughts felt strangely distant. My inner life felt foggy and far away and when I tried to access it I felt like I was trying to make out the words and melodies to a song playing on a far away radio. It took me almost four full days for me to figure out that what I was feeling was in fact a Projective Identification.  It is not me who is numb and who can’t love or feel my heart or  can’t access my thoughts or feelings. I am, for all of my many faults, a person who loves, feels, and is totally connected with my inner life.  As soon as I recognized that I was in the midst of a P.I., and that I was feeling the feelings of another who shared my week long journey, I felt the way you do when you are dreaming and you know you are and you want to wake yourself up from it, but you can’t.  Don’t get me wrong, knowing it is a Projective Identification makes the pain of being numb less painful—yet I don’t feel fully out of it.

Igor is away on vacation this week and so I don’t have him to help me process all the feelings I had during the trip nor to help me free myself from the Projective Identification that I presently find myself in.  It helps to write about it. It helps to have to use my mind and words and notice how I feel as I write them, to do so feels a bit like how when your leg goes numb and you get up and try to shake out the numbness and tingling.  Strangely exercise also has helped. Last night was the first time since I broke my toe that I was able to run and feeling my body and my breath and feeling myself move through space also seemed to bring me back to myself a bit.  All that said, I still feel a little numb and a little distant and not 100% myself.

The good news is, that even though I have not woken from the Sleeping Beauty sleep of Projective Identification, I have been dreaming. I have been dreaming lovely dreams. Two nights ago I dreamt of being at a gorgeous Italian villa that belonged to a dear friend and I was very happy to be there. Last night I dreamt of an extremely positive Animus figure (i.e. a super hot guy who knew my soul) and we were very much in love. My Prince Charming was an artist who was working at Neiman Marcus doing art installations on all three levels of the store. All was well until we met my mother for lunch and then He left me. I chased after him in the parking lot and tried to get him back to me. I got him to come back into the store. When we went back into the store we saw this kind of sculptural office/playpen set up in which these two parents had created as a way to keep their kids close by as they worked. My Prince saw this and was upset that they had only one way to move and so he was going to create a swing (shaped like a tube) that would allow for more freedom of movement.  Both seem like surprisingly positive dreams considering how I am feeling.

Neiman’s, I think, is symbolic of a commercial palace—the kind of palace that I can, on occasion, be imprisoned by. Also, as dreams love word play, it is interesting to note that Erich Neumann was a writer who wrote the definitive work on the Great Mother archeptype. My positive animus is played by a Post-modern Prince Charming( an artist/ a creative/ a guy who works with ideas as the source of his creation). I believe this Prince has been sent by my psyche to wake me from the sleep that the dark witch(played by my mother in the dream). Only the dark witch separates me from the Prince in my dream—it is when I try to get nurturing from the feminine (go to lunch with her) that I lose the relationship with my Animus.

I leave the palace (the mother) and go to the parking lot (where drive is stored) and we come back together through his seeing children merged to their parents. The dream concludes with the Animus attempting to create more movement for the children. My Animus, I believe, is telling me that the way to reconnect with my Self and to separate from the dark mother is through creativity. I think he is telling me that there is a way to be connected to family without being imprisoned by them.  I wish that he would have just kissed me and woken me from this Projective Identification I find myself in and besides a kiss is much less work, and he was really hot.

I am no Pollyanna

Published on August 30, 2010 in Quotidien. 99 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

I don’t come from the school of “If you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all.”  And, as it happens, I have lots of not nice things to say about my trip to Portland.  Those of you who had some apprehension about me being so close to my mother for nearly a week were absolutely right about your concern. I won’t go into the gory details about what went wrong in this post as I am still in a traumatized state and whenever I think about the bad parts of the trip all I can come up with is a chant rant of “it was very-very-very-very bad.” If you would prefer a visual of the experience I think that this image on the left says it all.

So, for today and for for my mental health, I will focus on the positive aspects of my time way.

1. The Hotel Monaco was lovely and was, as advertised, very dog friendly. I especially enjoyed the whimsical interiors of the hotel (He-weasel is not a fan of whimsy in home decor and even he liked it).  There was a entertainment chest in our suite that was covered with the faces of famous philosophers that I covet in away that Kant would categorize as morally unjust. I know you are just supposed to take the sample size toothpastes, shampoos, and shower caps, but for several moments I tried to rationalize  a philosophical argument that the furniture festooned with some of the greatest thinkers of our time was indeed a complimentary keep sake.  I wasn’t able to do it, but I feel sure that Descartes or Socrates could have managed it. Hotel Monaco, if you would like free advertizing on my blog all you have to do is send me one of those philosoper chests and/or a 10 day stay in any of your properties. Coveto ergo I sellouto (that’s Latin for “I covet and so I sell out”).

I also enjoyed the complimentary wine bar that the Monaco held in the lobby each evening. A large glass of sangria or three was just what the doctor ordered at the end of a VERY-VERY-VERY difficult day of mother/daughter proximity. I, uncharesterically, thanks to the sangria and the stress did some socializing with the other guests. I am not usually one to make small talk with strangers but there was something lovely about talking to people who don’t know me enough to be openly hostile and rude and who had no idea how to push my buttons or even where they are located.

2. The maple bacon bar doughnut at Voodoo Doughnuts. Anthony Bourdain was right, it was in fact worth waiting in the 30 minute line for. I waited in the long three times. In hindsight I wish I had gone there daily.

3. We saw lots of my grandfather’s buildings and it turns out that he was talented and prolific. As for any insight that came from my meeting my grandfather’s creations? The jury is still out on that one. The only thing I know for sure is that I wished he had left me just one of his apartment buildings, preferably one on 19th and Irving. I am not greedy, I don’t want all 80 of his buildings. Just owning one of those buildings would have kept me in shoes, JCrew and all the useless graduate degrees that I long to pursue (philosophy, women’s studies, mythology, cultural studies and to top it off an MFA).

4. I got to brunch with the blogging elite of Portland. Angie Muresan, Phantsythat, Vix and Writerquuake.  It was the only meal during my time in Portland where there was no complaining and no thoughts about which of my grandfather’s buildings were the tallest and be the best to jump off from.  I have to say that these smart, talented and highly creative bloggers were even more delightful in 3-D than they are on their wonderful blogs and that is saying something because of all of these bloggers blog on the brilliant side (no hyperbole). Lily also enjoyed meeting these lovely ladies and meeting Angie’s gorgeous children. Thank you, ladies!

5. I love Portland. I love how it manages to mix urban and green and granola and chic. It is a highly walkable city and every chance He-weasel, Lily and I had we snuck away and walked-walked-walked. It is a good thing we did so much walking as my nearly daily maple bacon bar and sangria. It turns out Lily likes urban centers. She loved walking in downtown Portland and wherever she went she made friends. She made friends with two Westies staying our hotel and Bijon Frisses, Pomerians, Poodles on the N.E. side and also sniffed the butts on both sides of the Burnside bridge. She even made friends with some homeless dogs. When I tried to explain to her that not every dog sleeps on down comforters and 1500 count Egyptian sheets she didn’t seem to understand me. She tilted her head in that perplexed way that she does when she hears fire trucks pass our condo or when the word “cute” is used to describe something other than her.

6. Lil met some of the high society of the canine crowd when we attended the pawsitivlely perfect fundraiser, “The Dog Days of Summer”. The event was held at Jake’s Famous Crawfish Restaurant to benefit the Dove Lewis 24 hour ER and ICU Animal Hospital. The dogs in attendance were served a three course meal: A starter course of Cat Burgular Tartar which is a sirloin tartar topped with a raw organic egg. The entree choices were Tuna Poodle Casserole, That Darn Cat Fish Hash or German Shepard Pie (a lamb dish and the one that Lily chose). And for desert there was a Carrot Pup Cake with a Banana Bacon Frosting. I think she liked all three courses as she ate all of it up and then was eyeing the Pug at the next table’s Tuna Poodle Casserole as Lily was getting the eye from a flirty Golden Retriever named Bo.

Lily learned at the fundraiser that the next big social event on the Portland Pup calendar is the Westie Walk on September 11th. Lily insists that we have to go back for this event. I’ve promised her that next year we will schedule a trip to Portland so that she can attend.

7. I only had to call Igor once. I did have to call friends more often than that. And when I did speak with friends on the phone I had to whisper and speak in code and even throw in some Spanish as a way to make sure that no one could eavesdrop on my conversation which sent me back to the High School years when I was big on using my High School Spanish as a way to make sure my parental units had no access to my inner most thoughts or my after Sadie Hawkin’s dance plans.

8. Cannon Beach was perfection. We took Lily to the beach as soon as we got there and to say she love it is just not a big enough description. She was, I believe, in a state of perfect joy. We ran the beach with her. We chased waves. She swam in large tide pools. We chased seagulls and sandpipers(no birds were harmed in the chasing of them and actually I think several of them were taunting and laughing at our feeble attempts. Lily went off leash( her first time ever) and she chased her ball and ran circles around us and played with other dogs—-all the while making sure that the other members of her pack (me and He-weasel) were close by.

Seeing Lily so happy made me sooooo happy. I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. I was so happy that I forgot all the drama and trauma of the previous days. We spent the better part of two days walking/running/walking the beach at Cannon Beach.  It was especially magical because I remember as a little girl when we summered at Cannon Beach that I would envy those with dogs. I knew every dog on the beach. Some of them become longtime friends. Each summer we would go I would meet my friend, Poker. Dogs, for me, are synonymous with Cannon Beach. So having my own dog that I could run and swim and chase tennis balls with was the best. We all loved it so much that we are making plans for the three of us to go back for a week long stay (sans Mrs. Grumpypants). We even have fantasies of moving close to a dog beach so Lily and I can share these perfect days of happiness more often.

9. I am full of Omega 3 fatty acids. I had salmon and crab and shrimp and scallops and more salmon and then a little more salmon after that. Actually, I think other than the bacon on my maple bar, seafood was the only protein I had while in Oregon. This is not me complaining.  This is me trying to make a compelling argument that between the salmon and the walking and the running that this trip was somewhat physically healthy if not emotionally so.

10. I lost my sunglasses (again) and bought an emergency pair of Marc Jacob glasses at Nordstrom. I know I could have just as easily gotten an emergency pair at Target but if you knew the week I had you would say what I said to myself, “You deserve them”. Truly, with the week I had, I deserved Chanel diamond studded sunglasses.

11. I have been home for two days and I am feeling a little more human and less traumatized. I was sure it was going to take at least a week of sitting like a blob staring at a wall before I felt human again. I was wrong.

Leaving in a S.U.V., do know when I’ll be back again

Published on August 18, 2010 in Meaning Making, Psychology and Quotidien. 34 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

Tomorrow we are leaving. And I feel all kinds of nervous and fidgety and ill-prepared. I haven’t gone to the bank. My nails aren’t done. I have a pile of clothes on top of a bench in my bedroom–but as of yet there is nothing that has made into the yawning abyss of my orange suitcase. I do have my emergency kit packed. I am taking a large bottle of Ambien  even though I only need 10 of them; something about not taking the whole bottle makes me feel like maybe those ten little pills might get lost without a container holding them safely with all their other Ambien friends. Then there are the other mental health tools that I am carrying with me at all times: ear plugs, journal, I-phone, Ativan, Rescue Remedy, Calming aromatherapy oil, lavender hand cream, chocolate and Advil.

I am also taking books (more than I will be able to read in a week)–lots of books. Oh, you want to know which books? You Can Go Home Again: Reconnecting with Your Family,  The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays by Camus, The Plague by Camus too and a whole bunch of books on psychotherapy: In Session: The Bond Between Women and Their Therapists , Inside Therapy: Illuminating Writings About Therapists, Patients, and Psychotherapy, and Developments in Infant Observation: The Tavistock Model. I do think that there should be a couple of lighter books that might make for good vacation reading but the truth is that I am not really one for light books intended for vacation reading and, anyways, my book bag is already really heavy.

I thought I was going to make travel themed play-lists for the trip. I would create an amusing and inspired array of songs about travel and home coming and maybe about fathers. Maybe Vacation by the Go-Go’s, The Passenger by Iggy Pop, Graceland by Paul Simon, On The Road Again by Willy, and Daughters by John Mayer, etc. No such play-list exists. Then there was my plan to go to ToysRus and buy travel games. I thought it might be fun to play Scrabble on a magnetic board once I got tired of counting cows and I had run out of amusing things to say and He-weasel had gotten deep into the Zen of driving. However, I have not managed to make it to the store to buy Scrabble: The Travel Edition. I hate ToysRus. It is an evil store that those who are childless not by choice should never have to enter. Maybe it isn’t too late to make a play list.

I was hoping I would have a dream before the trip. We psychodynamic therapists are big on what dreams happened prior to big life events.  I have been waiting all week for such a dream. No dream. I am writing this Tuesday night…so there is still hope for a big dream or a little dream or some kind of dream that might give me the smallest clue about what my psyche thinks about this journey. I think that the reason that I am not dreaming this week is that I am really tired. I am the kind of tired that has you falling asleep during your favorite show. When He-weasel convinces me to get off the couch and go to bed, I am the kind of tired in which I seriously consider not brushing my teeth, washing my face or applying the various creams, potions and jams and jellies that make up my pre-sleep ritual. I have interpreted my extreme fatigue and my inability to wear anything for the last week but the same black Gap tank top, black yoga pants and a black long sleeved tee, that I wear when I get cold because the air conditioner is too high and yet if I turn it down I will be too hot, as a depression. Only I don’t know what I am depressed about. I have nothing to be depressed about. I have asked myself if maybe I do and if I do what it would be—no answers have come.

It’ll feel strange for 12 noon to come tomorrow and to not be at Igor’s. If I was there instead of driving on the 101 I would have told him about how K-Line, Mardel and I were Tweeting and how out of some jokey banter I came to realize, thanks to K-line, that I have this phobia that I have never told him about. Actually, I have never told anyone other than K-line and Mardel about it. He-weasel doesn’t even know and I didn’t even realize that I had never told him. When I go shopping I have a completely irrational fear that something will fall off the shelves and into my purse and I will leave the store and I will be stopped by store security and I will be in BIG trouble for stealing something that I didn’t take and I didn’t know that I had. The only way that I can preempt my fear of accidental shoplifting is to be sure that my purse is completely zipped up and snapped shut—even that doesn’t always prevent the anxiety. The theme of this fear is that I am afraid of getting in big trouble for something I didn’t do and that no one will believe that I didn’t do it. I think this all goes back to being born to parents who weren’t married. I arrived into my family BEING in BIG trouble even before I had taken my first breath. My Aunt wouldn’t talk to my Father because I was born. My grandparents disapproved of my arrival. I had, without doing anything, caused a lot of trouble. And I didn’t, for years, know why everyone was so upset. No one told me.

Last weekend I bought a pair of sandals at Macy’s. I decided that I wanted to wear the shoes out of the store. I sat down in the shoe department and I put my new shoes on in full view of the salesperson who had sold them to me, the shoes that I had paid for, and then I started to panic (mild panic). I imagined that store security didn’t see me pay for my shoes and that they were on their way  down to come and get me.  In preparation for their arrival I got out the receipt and  had it ready for theml and I walked nervously out the door—preparing to be stopped by security. No one stopped me. They never do. It has never happened. This fear is completely baseless and knowing that doesn’t stop me from having it.

Did I mention that as of yesterday I can no longer read the Tivo menu on the television without my glasses? That has to be symbolic of something. The timing of it is too weird to just write off as normal and devoid of  any  kind of greater meaning. Okay, gotta go, I have packing to do. Next time you hear from me I will be out of L.A.  I liked writing those words…I think I’ll do it again. I will be out of L.A.

My Architect: A Granddaughter’s Construction of Identity

Published on August 16, 2010 in Meaning Making, On Home and Psychology. 83 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

On Thursday I will not be going to Igor’s. This Thursday I am beginning an adventure.  Me, He-weasel, Lily and my mother are going on a trip to find my grandfather. We are  packing the car and driving from L.A. to Portland, Oregon. It will be a kind of family reunion, only there will be no one waiting for us—no party at a park to celebrate our surname. You see my grandfather isn’t actually in Portland; he is buried somewhere in Orlando, Florida. I suppose we could have made a trip to Orlando and gone to Disney World and stopped by the cemetery in which he resides, but I prefer to see the buildings he built. As soon as I learned about my grandfather’s buildings I knew I had to see them for myself. There was an impulse that demanded fulfillment. When I told my mother that I was going to see my grandfather’s buildings she told me that she wanted to come too.

“They thought that it would be a disgrace to go forth as a group. Each entered the forest at a point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path. If there is a path it is someone else’s path and you are not on the adventure.”
— Joseph Campbell

When we arrive in Portland on Friday we are going to go to the county records office and stand in line and fill out forms and pay a clerk to give us a listing of all the buildings that my architect grandfather built in Portland. And then we are going to spend the next week going to these places. We will get out of the car and help my mother get out of the car and get Lily’s leash on and make sure we have batteries in the camera and we will stand in front of his buildings.  We will bring no flowers to these monuments of his memory instead we will bring a Rashomon of reactions.

He-weasel will take pictures and talk about the architectural elements of the edifice. My mother will tell stories about her father and she will feel things about him and his abrupt departure from her life. She will feel pride at seeing these things that her father accomplished and she will feel grief that this man who built these buildings that endure was incapable of creating any relationship that did. Lily will pee on the grass in front of my grandfather’s buildings. She will excitedly smell the smells she has never smelt before and she will greet any passer byes as if this was her home. I will stand  in front of what remains of this man, as if standing at his grave-site. I will quietly reflect on this man that I never knew whose choices have impacted my mother’s life and hence, indirectly, my life. I will see if I feel anything. I will listen for any messages that the ghost of my grandfather has for me. I will look to these buildings hoping that they can serve as a mirror, giving me some kind of greater understanding of myself and perhaps some greater insight into my mother.

When we get back in the car my mother will sit quietly and I will know that even though she won’t say it that she feels something like depression in response to these paternal structures and she will imagine the life she would have had if her father hadn’t left her. Other days she will fill the emptiness with a manic spree of recollection. She will tell me stories about where she went to school and how she remembers walking down this street with her brother and how much Portland has changed since she was a child. He-weasel will ask me excitedly which address we are going to next and then he will turn his attentions to navigation. Lily will use the time to nap in her crate or work on her plans for destruction for her chew toy. I will open the new journal I bought just for the trip—the journal that will house the thoughts, feelings and the names of places we stop for coffee along the way. I will document my reactions to this place that we just saw and I will write down all the things my mother said while we stood in front of this building that her father built.  I will write all that I notice. I will watch my mother mourn her father  and I will think about what Jung said,”Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.” I will watch my dreams to see how my psyche is responding to this meeting with my grandfather’s ghost. And I will keep a list of things that I want to tell you and another list of things that I want to tell Igor.

There is something about this trip that has a tone of great gravitas and finality to it. And I get the sense that this is the last trip I will ever take with my mother. Maybe that is why I feel that death is coming with us on this trip—or maybe that is just the ghost of my grandfather who will come along for the ride. For my mother and for me, taking this trip is some kind of nameless ritual—it is a ritual of a homecoming, only this isn’t my home and all of the homes we visit will be closed to us.  Likely during our visits to all of his buildings will be us on the outside looking in with no access or entry to the interiors of these buildings  and even if we could enter the man we are seeking would not be there, his ghost eclipsed by the lives of the occupants who call these houses, that he constructed, home. However, I do believe that by showing up at his doors…something will be opened, I just don’t know what that will be.

“We have only to follow the thread of the hero path.
And where we had thought to find an abomination,
we shall find a God.
And where we had thought to slay another,
we shall slay ourselves.
And where we had thought to travel outward,
we shall come to the center of our own existence.
And where we had thought to be alone,
we shall be with all the world.”
— Joseph Campbell

All pictures posted here are of some of the photos I found online of my grandfather’s buildings. I can’t help but notice that he has a sort of Jungian aesthetic (yes, I am aware that I could be projecting).

p.s. Please check out this LOVELY, LOVELY, LOVELY post!

Counting on therapy (the summer rerun edition)

Published on August 13, 2010 in Meaning Making and Psychology. 19 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

I interrupt the regularly scheduled posting with a repeat from last summer. I tried to write something new for today only I found that I was hating everything I wrote  ( it all seemed too dark for a Friday).  After the third attempt at a new post I decided I was going to walk away from the keyboard and go for a walk with Lily and cook some dinner and watch a movie and that I would repost something from last year.  I know repeats, at least the TV variety, can be disappointing. If it is any consolation this is one of my favorite posts.

When I am nervous or anxious or bored, I sometimes count words. I count out how many letters the word has in it. So, if the word is ‘therapy’ that would mean I start counting on my left hand pinkie finger and run out of fingers on my right hand by ‘a’ so I have to move over to my right hand thumb finger and then I use up two fingers for ‘p’ and ‘y’. But, then the problem is that means there are three fingers left and I can’t quit counting with three fingers left. I need to find a three letter word or if the word is longer than that I have to keep going until I have managed to use up all fingers on both hands. If I used the word ‘car’ I would be done; the three remaining fingers would be used up and I would be free to stop counting. However, if the next word I thought was ‘traffic’ then I would have six remaining fingers before I could finish counting.

When I started seeing Igor I couldn’t stand to think about driving all the way from Valencia to Beverly Hills. It felt too much, too long and too far. I needed to break up my drive into segments. For example, segment one was from the door to the hallway. Segment two was from the hallway to the car. During one and two I would almost always brim with energy and hope and optimism which I often lose by section five.

Driving from my parking space to the exit of my building is section three. It is in this section that I often realize I forgot to take my medicine, or bring my phone or do something else of great consequence that I should have done before I left the house. It is also in three that I curse neighbors for driving too fast or too slow in the parking structure. It is in this segment of the trip in which I am most likely to call someone a f*ck*ing a** hole from the protected safety of my rolled up windows that mute my expletive.

Section four is the road from my building to the freeway. This is the last section I can safely check my cell phone for messages or fiddle with my Ipod. Here I am both in a hurry to get to the freeway and yet if there is a new email I want the light to turn red so I can read it. I feel a mix of stop and go that registers in my body as energy, a feeling that is far too infrequent.

Section five is from the freeway on ramp unto Highway 14. This section and #10 are the places where accidents are most likely to happen. If it happened here it would be better as I wouldn’t be so far from home. Usually by here my optimism and hope and fun in the sun feeling starts to fade. There are trucks, carrying produce and products from Sacramento and Fresno, that I fear can’t see me and there are merging cars that want to be where I am and by this time I usually hate what is playing on my Ipod and wish for traffic so I could stop it for a minute and change the song.

Section six is from Highway 14 until the on-ramp of the 405 freeway. It is here that will determine if the ride is going to be easy or the kind of drive that makes me hate this place. If there is no traffic this portion seems completely without consequence, like the easy part on a difficult exam.

Sections seven, eight, and nine are all on the 405 freeway. Seven and eight I am fine in unless there is traffic. It is nine where if I am feeling particularly horrible about being in L.A. that the grief, shock and tears will hit me. It happens less and less lately. But when I first started going to Igor’s it used to happen almost every week. From nine on I have stories for each and every off ramp. I have memories for that exit and the next one and that is the one going to Andrea’s house. That is the exit I took to the museum for the Freud exhibition. That is the road I took to see that doctor after I had the car accident in 83. It is even worse when there is traffic because then I have to sit and stew in my memories. That is when I feel like I am trapped in a MRI machine and I can’t get out and I can’t breath and I wonder what would happen if I jut got out of my car and left it and let the anxiety swallow me.

Section ten is where I get off of the 405 freeway. When I am off the off-ramp and on the street this is when I feel that I have arrived even though I haven’t. I am now in the west side and that means I made it and I can relax as I am here and it also means that I am someplace other than I was. I am no longer going through someplace but I am now in someplace different. The cars are different, the drivers are different… it all feels a mix of leased luxury, practiced ease, and auras of “I could be famous” mingling with the cardboard requests of homeless men, “I could work for food” and fruit vendors selling cherries from their concrete islands.

I pass the federal building and my mind takes a tour of the many times I have waited in lines for passports. Once I have traveled past that memory I see everyone getting over to the left like a migration of geese or salmon or some other creature with a driving biological imperative that has to make a left at the next stop light or it will die and fail to live its genetic destiny.

Section eleven is all through the high rise area of west L.A. Something about the height of the high rises makes the memories feel contained and that they will go no further. 30 story buildings with their circular driveways, valet parking and marbled lobbies stand like fierce fortresses against far reaching memories that are only blocks away.

I pass the temple that the family of a man I once loved attended. They would go to that temple on Fridays and pray that their son would come to their senses and marry a nice Jewish girl. To the right is the high rise Farrah Fawcett lives in. I wonder if she is okay. When one day she dies will she sit on the top of the building like an angel in a Wim Winder film? On the left is the church we almost got married in. A little further down is the Beverly Hills sign where tourists stand in front of to pose and prove their time in 90210 and then there’s where Robinson’s department store used to be. That is where I bought the Chanel Tempting Taffeta blush. Each memory sticks to the ground like tulle fog and prevents any further memories from flooding in.

It is here in the eleven that I invariably say to myself, “You have waited all week for this and in an hour it will be over and you will be going home.” The truth of this reminder always makes the drive and all of it seem a bit futile. Then another part of myself says things about how there are all kinds of things in life you have to repeat over and over and that doesn’t mean you don’t do them. I start to count them.

Section twelve is on Santa Monica Blvd. This part of the ride always feels light, bright, quick and animated. It almost feels like sections one only the optimism is more external and less internal. If there was music for this section it would be something by Sheryl Crow.

Section thirteen is on Rodeo drive which I am on for only a few blocks. While in section thirteen I look for people who could be characters in my book. I watch for clichés, tourists, celebrities and bad plastic surgery while I maintain an aura of calculated indifference which no one notices as no one is looking at me.

Section fourteen is the nameless street I turn onto to get to the parking structure ( it has a name only I don’t know it. I never remember to look. I am not there long enough). This section is often marked by subtle anxiety, acausal frustration and the slightest fear that I won’t find a space this time( it has never happened and yet the fear remains). I could, I think, remember each parking space I have ever parked in, in this structure, and I could, if pressed, tell you something about that session in which my car was in the third spot from the elevator.

Section fifteen is the walk I take from my car to the parking lot elevator. It is often here that the outfit I am wearing, that I liked when I left, has turned into something ugly and unattractive. It can be made worse if a gorgeous stick woman in the elevator has shoes and a handbag on that costs more than I earned in 2003.

Section sixteen is the walk from the elevator to the security guard who works at at shoe store who every week tells me to have a nice day. Each week I wonder if he remembers me from week to week or if I forever seem like someone he has never seen before. I put my sunglasses on after I walk by him and I go into a zone of my own. I check my email and do a walk not unlike a walk one would do in NYC.

Section seventeen goes from the greeting of the security guard into a quiet and peopleless place into Igor’s building and through the lobby. It is the most quiet section of the trip. I can hear my own breath and the clomping of my heels on the lobby floor. If one were to count: my steps taken are 25. The number of floors I climb are four and the amount of doors I pass before Igor’s are three.

Section eighteen begins in the elevator and continues after I arrive on the fourth floor and walk to his door. I look in the mirror in his elevator to see if I was right in section one or section fifteen. Most often I stick with my self assessment that I gave in the elevator in the parking structure in section fifteen. I wonder each week if I will see someone in the hallway of this old office building and if I do the other person and I will politely pretend not to see each other.

Section nineteen is the waiting room where I sit and wait for Igor. Depending on how sections six through nine were determines how long I sit in nineteen.

Igor’s office is section number twenty. I count the minutes, waiting for him to open the door and then I count: ‘Twenty’ has 1-2-3-4-5-6 letters and ‘Igor’, Igor has 1-2-3-4. Ten letters, that means I can quit counting.

Things that may have more meaning than would appear to the unsunglassed eye

Published on August 11, 2010 in Meaning Making and Objects. 65 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

Whenever something changes and all of a sudden I love something I previously hated or I stopped doing something I have always done  or something uncharacteristic happens, I have two choices,( at least) I can: 1) Ignore the change or 2) I can ask what is the meaning of this shift/change or desire is really about. Today I will do the later.

Lucky Charms

While they are magically delicious and that is enough reason to crave them if you are 12, I haven’t had any since I was in my 20’s and I can’t understand how this Irish themed cereal found its way into my consciousness. I tend to stay away from this LSD of cereal (seriously, who needs a cereal that creates avarice, greed and hallucinations of leprechauns). In my darkest days of depression my carbohydrate comfort food of cereal has come in the form of “oh Captain, my Captain“. But for the last couple of weeks I have found myself dreaming of pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, and green clovers. And I feel sure that there is no nutrient in this cereal that my body is craving as I feel sure that this cereal is devoid of all nutrients. So why Lucky Charms? Maybe because it is the only cereal inspired by the charm-bracelet( this is true) and I love a good charm bracelet. Maybe I feel the need to indulge my inner child. Perhaps I have been too much of a “High-fiber, no sugar and no TV until you have finished your homework” kind of mother to my inner-child. Maybe I need to lighten up ( even thought the LC will do nothing to help me lose any weight, so the only kind of lightening-up would be around internal rules). Or maybe I feel the need for some luck. Perhaps this cereal is the culinary equivalent of a rabbits foot or a good luck charm. It could be that I am trying to become more charming through my child-like food choices. I will admit that I caved  into my craving and I bought a box. If I hear from the agent and she takes me on as a client all of the credit will go the the cereal. So far no news, but I have only eaten one bowl.

Sunglasses

I have lost two pairs of sunglasses in the last month. Two. One pair were from Target so I didn’t shed any tears over them. The other pair came from Giorgio Armani and so there were metaphorical tears which led to metaphorical puffy eyes and the need for non-metaphorical sunglasses.  My take on the case of the missing glasses is that I need to see something clearly and maybe, like my reporter friend, I need to see and be seen in a different way. Or perhaps my perspective has changed and so it is time to put on a new lens of perspective. However this could just mean that I am careless and distracted and I need to stop treating $300 sunglasses like they were throw aways from Target.

All of a sudden I am finding “True Blood” to be boring

I think I don’t need to analyze this one. I just am not loving all the vampire/werewolf drama.

Ava the avocodo

I am not a house plant gal. It is enough that I manage to feed and water and walk Lily. I don’t have anything left over for a ficus trees or an indoor palm. I have never had a green thumb and if I did I would likely find my way to a dermatologist to see what kind of cream I needed to be rid of the unsightly affliction. When He-weasel and I decided to take the pit from an avocado that we had enjoyed and put toothpicks on it and let it grow roots and excitedly watch it grow big enough to plant, I knew something was going on. We are loving our new house guest, Ava the avocado. As of today Ava has 12 leaves. I am so excited about Ava that if I was tech savvy I would start an Ava the avocado cam so you too could watch Ava grow. Yes, I know that you might not find Ava’s growth as riveting as we do. But we are goo-goo-gaa-gaa over her. This has to mean something. Doesn’t it? We are excitedly watch something take root. We are dreaming of the day when Ava will be big enough to bear fruit. We have even discussed how at some point we might graft in another kind of avocado plant and produce our own variety of avocados and I have read broadly on the topic of the best plant food for my lovely Ava.

So what exactly are avocados symbolic of? The ancient Aztecs believed avocados were an aphrodisiac. The Aztecs called them Ahacatl which means “green testicle”. The Avocado is widely understood to be a symbol of love.  So we are growing roots, an aphrodisiac, a testicle, and love?  I am still confused. What about Ava? What does the name Ava mean? Life, serpent or bird, according to Thinkbabynames.com. Now I am even more confused.

I am mad for gorgeous older women with white hair

Yesterday I discovered Mary L. Tabor’s blog and it is gorgeous and I can’t wait to read her book—but that isn’t what I want to talk about today, I want to tell you that when I saw her I was awe struck by her hair and how gorgeous she is.  It made me realize how whenever I see a woman with white hair who is gorgeous I can’t stop myself from staring at them. Recently at Costco, in the frozen food section,there was a 60-something goddess with the most gorgeous head of white hair I have ever seen and I had to go up to her and tell her how beautiful she was. When I told her how I couldn’t help myself but tell her how beautiful she was the women lit up like I was Ed McMahon with a big check in one hand and a bouquet of helium balloons in the other. It was a really nice moment.

I think that my love of gorgeous women with white hair is an attempt at self-love. Because under my blondish-reddish mane lies a mass of white hair. I am a 100% white. No grey, no brown, no black…all white, all the time. And I think in my appreciation for Mary and Carmen Dell’Orefice and women like them, I am telling myself that white hair doesn’t mean death, decay, dentures and Depends.  White can be gorgeous, sexy and awe inspiring. It is easy to be gorgeous when you are 16. It takes a little more effort to be gorgeous at 70–but it can be done( great bone structure and a gorgeous face don’t hurt).

I am wanting to read Camus again

I haven’t read any French philosophy  in a long time —so long ago that I was sporting a Jennifer Anniston hairdo and I thought 30 was really old. So why the call to Camus now? Maybe it was all the stuff we talked about in our last session, I mean post. I think I am going to read the Myth of Sisyphus again. This last paragraph of Wikipedia’s description of Sisyphus is exceptionally meaningful: “The truly tragic moment, when the hero becomes conscious of his wretched condition. He does not have hope, but “[t]here is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.” Acknowledging the truth will conquer it; Sisyphus…keeps pushing. Camus claims that when Sisyphus acknowledges the futility of his task and the certainty of his fate, he is freed to realize the absurdity of his situation and to reach a state of contented acceptance…Camus concludes that “all is well,” indeed, that “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” All of this is ringing a few personal bells: he doesn’t have hope; must keep pushing; fate; freed by accepting the absurdity of the situation and that all is well.  This sounds like a recap of my last several posts.

I have had the J Crew Fall catalogue in my posession for the last week and I haven’t even looked at it once.

This is a weird one. Not sure what to make of it. Maybe, like with True Blood, maybe I am just bored with it.  Perhaps I just don’t care about J Crew as much as I used to. Or maybe it is just August and I don’t want to torture myself with the promise of Fall.

Oh, and another thing: Part 2 of the session in which I thought nothing would happen

Published on August 9, 2010 in Meaning Making, Psychology and Thursdays with Igor. 56 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

When we last met we were talking about the book and publishing and what all that means to me, as you know if you read Friday’s post.  But on Friday I didn’t get to the part in the session in which I was telling Igor my personal myth and how this myth seems to run in my mind like a kind of fatal error that I don’t know the html code to reprogram.

“So here is my myth,” I said it like some grand pronouncement. I left space after I said it with full awareness that what I had just said had been an incomplete sentence. Yet I knew that there needed to be space between the introduction and the actual content and that if I rushed it and didn’t leave my listener hanging for a bit that the importance of what was to follow might be missed. I know enough about comic timing to wait for the laugh, only I suppose this myth isn’t really very funny.

“It goes like this: I am loaded with potential. I am the one in the class who was told she would publish in the New Yorker.  I was told by professors that I was the one they were sure would “make-it” and I was told by my infertility doctors that I had fantastic eggs and had an excellent response to the stimulating drugs and that our embryos were all grade-A and that they were very hopeful and then nothing happened—no baby. I am the girl who has loads of potential and no fulfillment. I am all promise and no completion. That is my myth.”

“And what I worry that the same is true with my writing. I have lots of potential and yet I will never publish a book.”  I said that much more ebulliently than was fitting for what I had just said. Therapists are always on the look out for times when clients say things that should be loaded with emotion and are said flatly or for times when there is a dissonance between message and meaning. This was one of those times.

I went on, “This thought is always there  in the background whenever I think about my writing and the better things are going the more that the myth seems to pop up like an unwelcome weasel. It is there in the back of my mind, running like the text scrawl on the bottom of the screen on CNN, even as everything is going great and the big picture looks really-really good—the myth is there reminding me that all this potential and promise is nothing but a set up for a cosmic joke. Only I am not at all sure who has set up the joke and who is finding my failure to fulfill my potential as so fantastically funny.”

“So what if you gave up?” Igor asked.

“Huh?”

“What if you told yourself whatever I create goes into the void? What if you embraced that? What if you told yourself that your myth was true and you embraced it”

Igor might as well have asked me to jump from the ledge of his fourth-floor window, “Are you kidding me? It would kill me. Are you saying to live without the goal of publishing? I couldn’t.” I got antsy and sweaty and I took off my cardigan. I was reacting like an addict who had just been asked to get off of his/her drug of choice.

“No, seriously. I couldn’t. If I gave up hope on giving up on publishing it would kill me.”

I could see in Igor’s face that he didn’t believe it would and so I reminded him of times in our work together when I had lost hope and how depressed I had been and how much despair I felt—and how horrible those times have been.

“Yes, I know that it feels that way. But every time you have let go of the goal something has happened.”

I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask him for examples. I want examples. I want them written down and alphabetized and notarized. I want a document that proves that what he is saying is true. As for today I am still completely unsold on his suggestion. In the session I ignored his assertion and moved on to what I have already given up on. “I gave up on having kids. Isn’t that enough? Should I give up on hoping to publish too? No, I couldn’t. Really, it would kill me not to have a goal.”

“Would it really kill you? How would your life be if you gave up on the goal of publishing this book? How would it be different?”

My thoughts raced and I wasn’t able to answer his question directly, I only knew that I felt like he was asking me to give up my life preserver and that my life-instinct was feeling particularly strong and that I had no intention of giving up on hoping to publish. Only he wasn’t really asking me to give up on that hope—he was asking me to embrace the myth that I was already holding onto and to see what would happen if I did.

A few months ago after a particularly bad bout of self-doubt, He-weasel and I were at my favorite Peruvian restaurant. As I devoured spicy muscles and bits of octopus with hedonistic gusto, I told He-weasel something straight out of a Disney comedy. I wished out loud to have my desire to be a writer taken from me.  It is a wish I had made many times before about having a baby. If I couldn’t have a baby I wanted to no longer have the desire to have one—it seemed only fair. In the Disney movie version of my life in which I would have been played by Lindsay Lohan( pre-jail), I would have instantly lost my desire to write and then I would have learned how valuable it was to write and by the end of the third act I would be desperately trying to get the wish to write back by the end of the film I would have learned my lesson and I would have gotten my writing mojo back and I would have gotten a book deal. Only this wasn’t the Disney version of my life.

He-weasel responded to me in a way that made me want to pick up the empty mussel shells that sat on my plate and throw them at him. “You can’t. You can’t give up. You are a writer. It is who you are. No matter if you publish or not, you are a writer. If your laptop was taken away you would write on paper. If your paper was taken away you would write on the wall. If there was no wall you would write on your body…writing is what you do. You can’t not write.”  In that moment I felt like a somewhat modified Salieri. I didn’t want to be a writer if I wasn’t a writer with a published book. Instead of throwing mussels at him I went home and wrote about being mad at him and how he didn’t understand and how awful it was that he used a double negative. But even as I vented to my journal about how he didn’t understood me, I knew he was right.

I am not far enough along with all of this to know what it means. And as of yet I am not able to take Igor’s advice. I can tell you that I have been thinking a lot about hope. I have been thinking about how Igor says that holding hope for clients in psychotherapy can be sadistic. I have been thinking about what my boy-friend, James Hillman*, says about hope, “Hope is an evil. It was the one evil left in the box when Pandora snapped the lid back shut. Hope is about the unknown future. It’s like the promise of salvation in the afterlife…I just think we should pay attention to what is here right now. It’s this hope thing that has gotten the planet into such a mess. If we paid attention to what was true right now, instead of what we hoped would be true in the future, the world would look very different.” I am not sure how this relates to everything I have said before, maybe you do and if you do I invite you to tell me. The only phrase that comes to mind is a Latin one, sorry if that sounds fancy-pants, but it was the phrase that my psyche gave me and my psyche does have a tendency towards fancy-pants, it is Amor Fati which means “love your fate”. I wish my psyche would think of something else, something more constructive. And if my psyche doesn’t have anything nice to say I wish it would just shut up. If it doesn’t I will reward it for its bright ideas by watching “The Real Housewives of Washington D.C.”, that’ll teach it to bust out Latin on me.

* Just in case you are new to the blog, I have non-dangerous and completely harmless delusions that James Hillman is my intellectual-boyfriend( i.e. the boyfriend of my mind). Hillman doesn’t know anything about this and it is probably best that we keep it this way.

What happened in the session in which I was sure nothing good would happen

Published on August 6, 2010 in Meaning Making, Psychology and Quotidien. 55 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

No traffic on the freeway yesterday and yet there was coo-koo-loo crazy traffic on Rodeo Drive. I was sure Angelina or somebody huge was shopping at Chanel to cause such a riot of pedestrians to take to the street and snap photos of some unidentified A-list object—but there was no one. There were just LOADS of tourists, many who looked as if they had just fallen off the turnip truck, all taking pictures of the street. I tend to get somewhat irritated by tourists taking pictures of this street and yet I know I have done the very same thing on the Avenue Montaigne.

I got to Igor’s office a half an hour early and because of my broken toe and the HUGE influx of tourists I couldn’t walk around BH like I usually do when I get there early. I instead called a friend  on the phone and we talked as I sat on the planter in front of Igor’s building, a planter that would comfortably house a size zero derriere and uncomfortably hold my size 12 tushy. As I sat there talking I saw a cat walk of curiosities that would have all gotten the Sartorialist’s attention and most certainly made it to the pages of his blog. I felt like a curbside Anna Wintour at a fashion show, peering behind my enormous glasses trying to determine if a given ensemble worked or not as my friend and I discussed the merits of MAC’s Spice lip pencil and just how many hours of sleep each of us managed to get. My friend was in the middle of telling me a story about a Youtube makeup artist who dances as he applies makeup when I saw a homeless man dragging a piece of luggage with a cardboard sign that he had made that he affixed to his portable closet. The sign read, “Screen Actors Guild Lies. I knew Frank Sinatra. I produced 40 films. I am a retired  veteran.” I so wanted to take a picture to show you but that would have meant I would have had to get off the phone with my friend. I instead told my friend what I saw. I hope that she will comment here and verify the veracity of my vagrant sighting.

I left the curbside catwalk and my friend at 11:58. I only had two minutes to get to Igor’s office. In normal circumstances that would be plenty of time however the broken toe slows me down. I got to Igor’s waiting room by 12:02 and I stood waiting. If I had sat he would have just come out and got me and then I would have  just had to get up again. It seemed a better plan to just stand and wait.

When Igor opened the door he asked me “Did you just get here?” I think my standing position threw him, but I wasn’t sure what he meant. I went all Bill Clinton on him and asked what he meant by “here”. When he explained that he meant his office I affirmed that yes, I had just arrived. When I sat I thought of you and my post from yesterday and how I had nothing to say. As anticipated I complained about  my toe and my eye and we spent some time, too much if you ask me, in which I explained the boring story of why I have lashes that grow down into my eye ( I was in a car accident when I was 17 in which I put my face through a windshield of a AMC Pacer) and how the lashes scratch up my cornea and why the opthamologist wants me to have surgery to remove the offending lashes. All of that took a good 15 minutes.

Then Igor asked me if I had heard anything about the book ( he knows that “Thursdays with Igor” is currently being reviewed by an agent) and I told him if I had that he would have been the third person to know. Then I started to winge a bit about how much I want to sell the book and how much selling the book would mean to me.  He asked me why I want it so much. I instantly bristled. I started to defend myself. “I want it because I want it. Isn’t that enough?” I didn’t like the answer so I gave him another version,  ”No, I want it because I want something I create to be born. I want to publish because it would give me a sense of legitimacy.”

“Legitimacy?”

“Yeah…my parents weren’t married until a year after I was born and I didn’t know about that until I was 27. They were really ashamed of that and they hid it from me. When they found out that I knew about it they lied to me, even when it was clear that I had evidence. When I asked my mother for a copy of their marriage certificate she whited out the year  they were married with Liquid Paper and she wrote in the year before my birth before she gave it to me. Their shame about my illegitimacy had to play a part of my obsession with legitimacy.”

“Can the book being published give you that?” Igor asked as if he knew the answer.

“Maybe. I also think that it has something to do with my father. My father wanted to be a writer. And he never wrote anything. And I have…and in publishing a book I would triumph him. I would do what he couldn’t. I felt that when I got the job at the paper and I had my own column. That happened the week before he died and him knowing that helped me somehow. I think that publishing book will help further.”

“I can see that.” Igor paused and put his hand to his brow and did his ‘Igor thinking deeply’ posture. “But isn’t it enough that you get feedback on your blog that you are a good writer. Isn’t it enough that I tell you that you are a good writer?”

‘Don’t get me wrong, I am extremely grateful to my readers. I am beyond grateful that anyone wants to read what I write. I am truly amazed that I have an audience. And, yes, it means a lot to me that you think I am a good writer. But I guess what I am seeking in terms of being signed by an agent and having a publisher buy the book is something that will deal with the my father complex. I think that all of the praise, feedback and encouragement I get through you or the blog is relational and hence maternal and that maternal need is met. Being signed by an agent and having my book bought would be masculine and objective and would be a real hit to my father complex.”

“So the masculine is distant and removed and objective? The feminine is relational and more subjective? ”

“Well that’s how it feels to me,” I explained. Even as I was saying it I felt as if I was discovering these truths as the words emerged from my mouth.

“It is like your father is like an archetype. You are wanting to experience that archetype through publishing.”

“My father was Zeus. He was distant and constantly screwing around with woman he considered to be beneath him…mere mortals. Only he never became a swan.”

“What?” Igor asked.

“He didn’t take the form of a swan in order to seduce them.” I quickly gave Igor a refresher course on Greek mythology.

“Let me give you a hypothetical” Igor interjected  ”let’s say someone you were working with, some masculine authority that you respected, told you that he saw certain talents and abilities in you. Would hearing that feel masculine or feminine?”

“Both. It would be masculine because he is an authority. It would feel feminine because it would come out of the context of a relationship.”

“So what started out as objective and masculine could become feminine and relational over time?”, he asked trying to get the gist of my internal rules.

“Yes. Sure.”

“So the publisher could start as masculine and as you get to know them and have a relationship with the people at the publishing house  it could switch over to feeling feminine?”

“Right. Yes. But that doesn’t mean that having the experience of having an objective masculine approve of me wouldn’t be healing. It has been healing to have you approve of me.” I said that last bit without looking at him. I talked to some distant listener.

“And over time I feel like our work together has helped to fill that hole of longing for approval from “the father”. Because of our work I can now trust the acceptance that comes from the feminine. When you say something complimentary about me I can now believe you. I no longer devalue someone for saying something nice about me or just chalk up their positive feelings as their just being nice because they like me. That is a big change for me.”

The hour passed quickly.  I left Igor’s feeling that maybe I had been wrong about August. Oh, and just in case you read my last post, it was cool enough yesterday in Beverly Hills to wear a cardigan.

Not feeling august

Published on August 4, 2010 in Psychology and Quotidien. 57 Comments Tags: , , , .

Is my least favorite month, even in Chicago. I don’t enjoy heat. No matter where you live, save down under, I imagine it is the hottest month of year. And after two months of summer I just don’t have it in me to endure one more month of over 100 degree heat. June and July have taken it out of me and I have no fight life. I ended July trying to have a good attitude about August. I am trying to pretend that August is the month equivalent of Friday. I have even made half-hearted efforts by saying, “Thanks god it’s August.” It isn’t working. I am, it feels, in a weather induced state of crankiness( it feels like a mix of fatigue,  low blood sugar and PMS).

Therapists world wide take August off. And I thought I was going to have the month of August off from Igor. He usually takes August off and as much as I love seeing him I will admit to feeling disappointed when I heard that he wasn’t going to be taking the whole month off. He is only taking the last two weeks of August off and those two weeks I will be out of state and because of that I feel strangely ripped off.  When he told me that I would be seeing him tomorrow I was uncharacteristically disappointed.  It is too hot to be poking around in my psyche. It is too hot to make interpretations. I just want to sit in my apartment with the air conditioner on high and read and sleep and watch Bravo and eat Popsicles. It is too hot to be thinking about my mother or my father or my many assorted complexes. There is a reason therapists take August off.

Tomorrow I will throw on a sundress and put my hair into some kind of ponytail or chignon and slap on some tinted moisturizer and I will drive the 405 to see Igor and I will feel like the kid who is going to summer school when everyone else is at the beach. Really, I have nothing to talk about. I could complain about my toe. I could tell him that I have had insomnia and because of that there are no dreams. I suppose I could tell him how annoyed I get when my mother calls and tells me all the things she is worried about and how I feel dumped on. I could tell him about my scratched cornea and how much my eye hurts and he might turn it into some Oedipal symbolism and that would annoy me. Or I could tell him how much I don’t want to be there. That would get him going. He would think that has great psychological meaning. But I think it just means it is August and it is hot and I am feeling burned out.

I feel sure that tomorrow will be one of those sessions where nothing happens. It will be one of those sessions which I will feel was a total waste of time (those do happen). I have a feeling that until I have had a proper vacation and the heat is below 80 that no big insights will happen. I tend to have more insights on days that require a sweater. My theory is that there is only so much suffering a person can take before they check out and go into a mildly dissociative state. I am very aware that when the temp is over 90 that my I.Q. goes way down and  that extreme weather has a direct impact on my capacity for self-awareness. And because August is the most extreme weather in L.A. I feel sure that I will have no self-awareness for the rest of the month. Or maybe because I said that here, maybe something good will happen and I will be forced to eat crow and write a post telling you how wrong I was…but I doubt it.