how everyone should always react to my breasts (and: my mind, let me give you a piece of it)

How’s that for a long title?  The breast stuff comes at the end, if that’s what you are looking for.  But if that’s why you are here, you’re probably going to be disappointed. 

To wit:

My vegetable garden has been a lesson in the chaotic nature of life this summer.  (See?  Pretty low on the boob meter).  I pulled up the sod by hand (difficult, exhausting, messy), so the plot is fairly small – probably something like 4 feet by 5 feet.  I tried to space the seeds, seedlings, and larger plants out according to the recommendations, but I skimped a little – hell, a lot – and jammed quite a bit more into that space than should be there.  It’s my first real vegetable garden, so it’s a learning process this year anyway – at least, that’s how I’m looking at it.  What surprised me, though, is how much the plants sprawl and grow and find space for themselves.  The tomatoes (unstaked and “free range”) have entwined to become one large tomato hedge.  The basil and lettuce are taking shelter under part of that hedge, and the carrots have grown in so closely I can’t possibly thin them out without taking them all out together.  But what’s most impressive is the watermelon.  Two small plants have basically taken over.  They’ve moved in on the peppers, have twined themselves together into one big monster, and have even gone out into the lawn, grabbing hold of the grass.  I. said they are heading toward the car and house, and I believe him.  I look at it all – a little jungle on our .11 acre piece of land – and I practically feel like weeping with gratitude and amazement.  I broke my back (almost literally) to get our heavy clay soil ready for plants, but other than that all I’ve done is spray some water on it and hope.  And yet, there it goes, growing and flowering and producing life in the summer heat.  It reminds me what life is really like – not the neat drive thru for coffee, go to work, file your papers, make dinner, clean the kitchen sanitized and compartmentalized day to day most of us think of, but the messy, sprawling, wind-driven chaos of the garden.

I was thinking of how hard it’s been lately, finding money where there is none and trying to squeeze more time out of each finite day, when I realized it’s just another year before I start working again.  The money situation will not be perfect, but will be infinitely more livable, and while the days won’t get longer there will certainly be more opportunity for a minute or two to myself during the week.  That should make me feel better, right?  It’s only a year – I can survive anything for a year.  But I remember the garden, the chaos, the unexpected directions it’s taken, and I’m not so sure.  Think back a year – could you have predicted then where you’d be now?  In some senses you might have, but in the larger sense – the who you are now, the where you are in your life now, the places you’ve been – I’m guessing not.  I certainly could not have.  So while I’m aware that my life will change dramatically in a year, I’m cognizant of the fact that it may change dramatically during the year, too. 

What is a year, anyway?  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the nature of time, too.  I read this excellent interview in Discover Magazine with a scientist talking about parallel dimensions and etc. (it’s good to hurt your brain once in a while, go read it) and saw Deja Vu (not horrible as anticipated), which both got me going.  Time is a subject I’m fascinated by, so it really doesn’t take much.  I’d read somewhere (and I’m sorry, I don’t have a reference, you’ll just have to trust me) that it’s theoretically possible to travel to the past because it’s already happened.  It’s a place in time, so to speak.  But the future, having not happened yet, is an impossible destination.  And yet -if you buy into Einstein’s theory of relativity, time isn’t linear at all.  Time is a dimension, and everything that’s ever happened (past or future, in our minds) simply exists.  So your whole life is not moving from point A to point z, it’s all the points in between simultaneously.  By that logic, couldn’t we travel to the future?  Since it, too, is a place in time?  And, in a way, aren’t all moments in our lives happening right now?  That last bit I actually instinctively believe.  There are times that I feel time circling in on itself, repeating.  I have always gotten brief flashes of the past in my mind, several times a week.  I always chalked it up to a scent that triggered the memory, or the quality of light, or an emotion.  But what if it isn’t that?  What if it’s time thinning out somehow, becoming translucent?  What if I am, say, sitting here typing at age 35 and also, right now, six years old and drinking from the hose in my uncle’s driveway? 

And now here is Cyndi Lauper singing Time After Time to lighten the mood (but remain on topic).  I’d embed the awesome video for you, but Sony won’t let me.  Yay, Sony – fight the good fight, you bastards.  You can find the video here, though.

So, what else?  Oh, the “my mind, let me give you a piece of it” thing.  I have too much anger.  Yoga just doesn’t get it out.  Tae Bo does, but it’s been, like, 90 degrees and humid all week, so that’s been out.  I need to find another way.  I realized just how much anger I’m carrying around when I had to keep myself from getting into it with someone who, for a number of reasons, it just really wouldn’t be good to get into it with.  To my credit, this person was being incredibly irritating and, at one point, outright rude to me.  It wasn’t enough, though, to justify starting a fight (unless you’re drunk or a 16 year old boy).  I wanted to, though, good lord I did.  I need to find another way to vent.

Vent what?  I don’t know.  Stuff I can’t control.  I am very well aware that some of it I can control and the rest of it, well, I can control the way I react to it, at least.  I’m just not there right now.  Again – not a linear process.  There are times I manage this stuff just fine, but there are times it slips from my grasp and I vividly imagine punching certain people in head.  Right now we are in the imagined violence stage.  Basically, I’d say it can all be boiled down to my taking care of people and things all the time and just wanting a break.  Wanting to be taken care of and reassured and pampered and placated.  Until the kids grow up, though, I think I will never really get what I want (and then I’ll be missing them, too).  Of course, if we’re dealing with special relativity here, I’m sitting in a big, warm tub getting a shoulder massage RIGHT NOW.  That Einstein was a smart guy.

Since you’ve been so patient: breasts!  G. was a HUGE breast feeder.  I mean GIGANTIC.  She nursed pretty much all the time until she started table food, and then she nursed ever so slightly less.  Until she was around 15 or 16 months old.  And she never really took a bottle so, for her, it was all boob all the time.  She weaned (FINALLY), but she still, understandably, takes a lot of comfort and apparently joy in my breasts.  Many do, I must say, but without the vigor that my daughter does.  She still crawls up into my lap or into bed with me just to get a piece of them.  Yesterday morning she got into bed, lifted up my shirt, and clapped.  She clapped!  Then she offered my breasts her pacifier, a very high compliment, indeed.  This, I truly believe, is how everyone should always react to my breasts – applaud, then offer them your most highly prized possession.

~ by other on July 11, 2008.