Dear Insomnia

Dear Insomnia,

We've had a relationship for some time now. The first time you came into my life I was 14 years old. Since then you have been a dreaded companion, leaving and always returning at the worst possible moments. You take away my energy, and in exchange give me dark circles under my eyes. But I think it's time for me to reevaluate the way I see you.

Last night, as I took Melatonin, after Melatonin, after Melatonin, after Melatonin, and still sleep did not come, a thought occurred to me. Maybe it's the lack of sleep turned to delirium (it has been 5 nights since I've slept), but I think I might have had it all wrong.

You've always be there for me when times where tough. I can count on you above all others to be by my side through the most difficult periods of my life. I don't fully understand your ways, but you give me time to ponder and evaluate my own ways, and where I am.

In Chinese medicine, insomnia is a sign of a disturbance in the Heart. Insomnia does seem more prevalent when my heart is heavy.

The last 3 days I have been alone, not in a real way, but more in an intellectual(?) way. I have talked to friends on the phone, I have emailed, texted, and been on Facebook, but my real life connections have been limited to very brief conversations while checking out at a store and the like. I have spent 95% of my time alone in my apartment. For someone like me who needs face to face contact, it's a strange place to be. Insomnia, you have almost doubled that time. I must need it right now, so that I can find my way to my proper path. It's becoming more clear, slowly. For the first time in my life, I have absolutely no regrets.

I'm also thankful to my friend Wellburtin, for keeping the depression at bay. When I go to those very sad places, I can come back out of them without getting stuck in the muck. I can even listen to those sad, sad songs that I love so much, and don't listen to often enough. I am forever grateful.

So Insomnia, I'm making my peace with you. I welcome you into my life. I will patiently wait to observe where you will take me. From now on I will call you my friend, and not my enemy.

Love,

Nikki

Forgiveness

The day started out good enough. Zoe, Paige and I went to Mayfield Park for a playdate with one of Zoe's old school friends. Paige was completely taken with the peacocks and Zoe found a giant peacock feather.

After lunch I feel asleep while putting Paige down for a nap. "Falling asleep" is the wrong way to describe it. It was more like cognitive leaping from sleep to dream to consciousness and the back around the loop again, all the while serenaded by brain playing "Particle Man" by They Might Be Giants. It was one of those dreaming-with-eyes-open sleep. I "slept" for 3 hours. I can't remember the last time that happened.

When I got up it looked like rain so I hurriedly prepped the soil with fertilizer and minerals and planted the carrots and peas in the garden box that Zoe and I worked on earlier this week.

We grabbed some dinner. Put the girls to bed. Skip isn't feeling well and went to bed early. I'm the only one awake in the house right now, well actually our cat Sophie is up exploring. This is a rare moment.

That's when I realize that it's Yom Kippur. Since New Year in my space moments between changing diapers, cooking, working, cleaning, I've been going over the events of the past year, thinking about things I said or things that I didn't say. In all honesty, I owe almost everyone I know (save casual acquaintances and the like) an apology for something. I definitely owe every one of my family members an apology. I've been thinking about this a lot and yet I haven't apologized to anyone. My mistakes are abundant. I'm wondering why.

From my shortsightedness of the situation I'm in the place because I'm too wrapped up in my own shit (i.e. trying to keep the depression and anxiety at bay, trying desperately to figuring out how to manage life with 2 little ones, a house, a job, one car .....) Very recently I've gained some insight about my own issues and what it boils down to is that I'm not so good at taking care of my own needs and that makes it nearly impossible for me to be at my best. Before I had kids it wasn't a big deal. I had lots of free time to take care of myself by reading books, hanging out with friends, planning meals, getting enough sleep (sometimes), drinking enough water, organizing my space (without a small person throwing everything on the floor immediately after), mediating, practicing yoga... the list goes on. Now I have non-stop, unrelenting competition for my time and energy. I'm still learning the balancing act, but things are starting to get levelish, and I've learned so much for becoming a parent that I think things will spiral up and I'll be in a better place then where I started.

I've also been disconnected from Judaism since the girls were born. I went back to Judaism in 2001 for a couple of reasons, namely to be part of a community and to feel connected to ancient rituals. In part of me not taking care of myself like I should I've also not put energy into religion.

But none of that explains why I haven't apologized. So here it is, a little late.

If I've hurt you I'm sorry. It was done without malice or intent to cause suffering. I've made many mistakes and if you're one of the people who took some of fallout I'm lucky to have you in my life as a learning partner. I ask your forgiveness.

If it seems impersonal it is, and it doesn't completely sit right with me. But I figure it's better to get it out there in some way in the unlikely event that it brings comfort to someone where it would do nothing rambling around in my head.

A word is a leaky vessel that fails to contain it's meaning over time, which is why we must repeatedly use it. For this reason fields of philosophy based on words - i.e. linguistics and many forms of logic - are at best intellectual games.

I can't stand reading Wittgenstein. Seriously makes me what to tear my hair out more with each sentence. Noam Chomsky, on the other hand, I could read and talk about all day.

If I had time to read and think, like before there were munchkins running around, I'm sure I could figure out what is triggering my hatred of one and love of the other.

That's all for now. There's more to this post but I'm too tired to get it out of my head.

To My Daughters, My Greatest Teachers

I have learned more about myself and life in the past 4 years than I had ever imagined.

Zoe and Paige you are my greatest teachers.

You have taught me to finally love my body and appreciate the miracles that it is capable of.

You have taught me patience beyond anything I had thought possible.

You have taught me that love is not finite and keeps expanding.

You have taught me that I am a storyteller.

You have taught me what really makes me angry.

You have reminded me how to play.

You have brought me back outside and rekindled my love of nature.

You are teaching me how to live in the present moment.

Because of you, I've learned how to speak more honestly and openly.

I'm learning that whatever I want for you I have to want for myself first to make it happen.

I hope that I will be able to teach you half of what I've gained from the both of you.

Mistakes

This evening while we were cooking dinner Zoe randomly says to me, "Mommy, I'm nocturnal". Then she added, "you're nocturnal, too."

Well that certainly explains a lot. All these 15+ years I've been dealing with insomnia, I've had it all wrong. I'm not an insomniac, it's just that I need to be sleeping during the day. My mistake.

Today I've been thinking about mistakes. Being over analytical and self critical I tend to focus a good amount of energy going over mistakes that I've made. From an intellectual point of view I understand that no one is perfect and that making mistakes is what it is to be human, but I've had a difficult time applying that kind of leniency to myself. Something clicked today. Lately, I've been reading books on positive/gentle disciple and one common thread is to allow your kids to make mistakes without shaming them for it because it's part of the learning process.

It's also a major component in the creative process. Without mistakes how can we create new ideas, art, concepts, paradigms, inventions, anything?

Zoe, Paige and I were on our way to the fabric store to get some fabric for Zoe's Halloween costume; she's going to be a Monster Catcher. I decided to see if I could discover a way from point A to point B with just a general sense of where I was going. The fabric store is located just north of where two major freeways intersect so the roads are all screwy in that area. It took us about 20 turn-arounds but we finally made it there. Zoe thought it was great fun to see me making some many wrong turns, and it really was fun. My mental map of Austin has expanded.

I'm on a mission to take the "bad" out of mistakes, and keep life playful.

Picture of the amazing vegetable biryani we made tonight

The Corporation

I really had no idea. I just finished watch a movie called The Corporation.

I knew that corporations were "people" in the eyes of the laws and had all the rights therein. I had no idea that lawyers were able to establish this from the 14th amendment, which was added to the constitution to protect freed slaves.

I have some idea about the new lawsuits involving intellectual property, but I had no idea that the US patent office now allows patents on LIFE - i.e. LIVING organisms - with the only exception being a "fully born human". That means that a corporation can own a gene, an animal, a plant or microorganism.

A Texas corporation called Ricetex received a patent for basmati rice, one of the largest mainstays of India's economy.

I knew that governments gave privately held corporations contracts for public services, but I never heard that companies were trying to privatize water. I like to think that I follow the news, but I didn't realize what happened when the World Bank instructed Bolivia give the water of one of it's larger cities to have a California company, making it illegal to collect rainwater and charging up to 25% of a families income for WATER!*

I do keep up to date on all the very bad things that are happening to the planet, and to us, due to consumerism, but the movie's presentation was a stark reminder of all the work that needs to be done to get off this runaway train.

This movie makes a very strong case that if companies are people then they would be diagnosed as psychopaths by the DSM.

This is really my beef with the health care industry: health care companies are just that companies. They only reason for their existence is to make money. But the result of their bottom lines is that people don't receive needed medial care and people die or their quality of life is diminished.

I'm in shock. I feel nauseous.

I took 7 months off from working after my daughter was born, and spent my days focused completely on the most important thing in my life, my family. I didn't realize how much those months changed the way I looked at things until I went to my first day of orientation at my new job at one of the largest online travel sites.

All the new hires were required to sit through 2 days of PP presentations detailing the history of the company, the company's interests and how I can help gain market share and make more money for the company.

A new hire asked the presenter a question about all the outsourcing that had taken place in recent years, apparently she was concerned about her job security. The presenter, with a straight face, said that we have to understand the company was loosing money and that we have to understand that they need to do what's in their best interest and that we should be sympathetic. Seriously. We should have sympathy. For the large profitable company. Right. Thanks for clearing that up.

Did I mention that marketing is my profession? Shoot me.

The job didn't work out for other reasons (evil boss from hell), and I'm a stay at home mom again. At some point in the near future I will need to go back to work. I don't want to go back into marketing, but I'm not sure what to do instead. I'd like to make money on my own, but every idea I come up with feeds into the same corporate system. Trust me, I don't want to be rich, I just don't want to worry about paying for basic things - place to live, utilities, food, education, etc - and to be able to go on vacation every year. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.


Footnote
* The people of Bolivia were able to prevent it the Bechtel company from owning the water. You guys rock! I just wish that their water problems were over. They still don't have an effective system in place. Here's the Wiki about the protest.

I picked up the Unbearable Lightness of Being again. I'm about 150 pages into it now.

I've heard that this is one of those thought changing, paradigm shifting books that transforms the way you see the world like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but I don't get that at all.

I'm having difficultly caring about the characters. Tomas is an ass, and I have no sympathy for his struggle between his love for his wife and his continuing desire to have sex with lots of women. Tereza has a bit more depth, but I don't have any emotional attachment to her either. I like Sabina the best. She's strange and reminds me of some friends I knew in high school, but something is lacking.

In places I do like Kundera's writing style. I like the Dictionary of Misunderstood Words, which explains how two people have different meanings for the same words and phrases, and how this leads to miscommunication and the inability to connect. I also like that he explains some of the character's actions by saying that they have vertigo - the desire to fall or to make life fall apart, the desire to take actions that will make your life less stable and/or more painful.

Another Healthcare Post

The SkipNikZ clan has been sick. Zoe got sick last Monday. I started feeling bad a couple of days later and then Skip got sick.

Skip and Zoe are almost back to normal, except for a cough and feeling a bit tired. I, on the other hand, still feel like crap. I also have a sore throat so I went to the doctor this morning.

The strep test was negative, as was the mono test and the blood test for infection. They didn't find anything, which makes the doctor think that I have a virus. He told me to get lots of rest, drink lots of fluids and gave me a rx for an antibiotic. I didn't understand why he had given me the perscription because he had just told me that the blood work didn't show that I had an infection. When I asked him about it, he said "oh, you don't need it." This is the second time in a month that a doctor has prescribed antibiotics when there has been no evidence of infection.

These doctors are not stupid and I don't think they have some hidden agenda (after all these are generic drugs). When I question them, they all agree that the antibiotics are not necessary. They look at me like they agree with me but that's the way the system works, kind of like the response I gave people who questioned the anti-productive things I did at my job because my boss had his head up his ass.

My theory is that modern medicine doesn't know as much as people would like and when people go to the doctor they want to be fixed. If the doctor just tells them to rest and drink lots of water then the doctor didn't "help" them.

Or maybe people want to feel that they are getting something for their money. I paid $208 for my visit today. That's the discounted price because I have health insurance, even though they most likely wont pay a penny to a health care provider on my behalf this year due to my high deductible. If I didn't have insurance I would have owed them over $400.

On a side note, the nurse who saw me first thought that my birth date was a misprint because I looked to young to be 30 :)

It is soooo nice outside

The last couple of days have been so nice. It's been cool in the evening, sometimes getting cold at night, and mild and sunny during the day. I feel like Texas is having a "real" spring. I love this :)

In my mind I think of a Texas spring as that one day in April or May when you could drive with the windows down. I don't remember having ever experience a true spring growing up, but my memory is kind of spotty.

I've been in a great mood, too. I started thinking about how the weather effects so much of our day to day lives. When it's nice I spend more time outdoors; when we were living in the NE it took 10+ minutes to get bundled up every time we went outside during wintertime, and we avoided walking near the river because the winds would go right through 4 layers and chill you to the bone; when it's 105 degrees in Texas for the 30th day straight, you can't get me to leave the house before nightfall for anything; when great storms came through the area last week lots of people couldn't get around because so many large trees had fallen in the roads blocking their paths. Of course there's also the biggies that take life like hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, earthquakes and all the rest.

It's a powerful and amazing part of our everyday lives, and it's still part of nature that we have no control over. I think the reason so many people talk about the weather, check the weather sites everyday, and complain when the meteorologists get it completely wrong (again!) is to feel like we are participating in this unbiased phenomena that has such an affect on our lives.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

You have got to love a novel that begins like this -

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!

I’ve been feeling down the past few weeks. Nothing concrete, just a general sense. It’s the sense of lightness that Kundera talks about in the first chapter – a kind of “what’s the point” lightness.

For me Nihilism has two sides; it can free you from the rules you've created in your mind or it can send you into despair. Even though I’m not usually a proponent of this philosophy I have a tendency to slip into its logic games when I’m feeling down. It flows easily when you feel that there are major forces in your life that you have no control over. So I’m going to put this book back on the shelf until I can get this thought monster under control.

I'll take the high road and the low road

It's difficult for me to believe that I have been back in Dallas for a year this February. After moving to the northeast, I thought that I would never live here again. Dallas repulses me. Until today, I couldn't tell you exactly why.

I was alone in my car, which doesn't happen very often these days, and Nirvana's Aneurysm came on the radio. I haven't heard this song in a really long time, so I blasted it and screamed the lyrics as loud as I could. Then something became clear.

To me Dallas represents the part of me that is base; another way to say it would be that Dallas is where I take the low road. It reminds me of pain, and the shit that I went through growing up from external sources and my own self loathing as a depressed teenager. When I'm here I'm spiritually tapped into that fear, anxiety, and feeling of being trapped. My actions and relations with people in this city mirror those feelings. Many of my "friends" were self-destructive and would have been happy to bring everyone down with them.

When I was growing up, I felt like I had to hide what I was really about because I knew that there was judgment around every corner. I lived my pleasure from the bottom, the base, the dark side, whatever you want to call it. And somehow it's intimately intertwined with music. When ever I hear Smells like Teen Spirit (or any song from Bleach or Nevermind), Pink Floyd, or anything from NIN's Pretty Hate Machine, I can physically feel a change taking place. It get goosebumps.

The 4 years that I lived in the NYC area where among the best years of my life. I was happy. I give birth to my beautiful daughter. I felt that everything in the world was a possibility (it terms of intellectual pursuits). I might strike up a conversation with a stranger in the park and find out that they are a writer, artist, diplomat, or anything really... the list goes on endlessly. Some of the most interesting stories that I heard where told to me by people driving cabs. I felt that I could freely speak my views on any topic. To me NYC is the high road. I made friends with amazing people (I miss you guys!!), read great books, and had amazing conversations. And for the first 3 years I hardly ever listened to music. That changed when I got my iPod, but even then I didn't listen to the songs I mentioned.

Right now I feel that some kind of synergy is taking place where the high road and the low road are coming together. I think it will change me forever, but I'm not sure how.

Devil Take Him

While I was reading The Brothers Karamazov I came across this really interesting passage.

The middle brother Ivan is taken with brain fever, and experiences an extremely vivid hallucination in which the devil appears in his room and attempts to convince Ivan that he exists and is not a manifestation of himself. Here the devil explains that he doesn't destroy himself because people want him to live.

No, they say, live, because without you there would be nothing. If everything on earth were sensible, nothing would happen. Without you there would be no events, and there must be events. And so I serve grudgingly, for the sake of events, and I do the unreasonable on orders. People take this whole comedy for something serious, despite all their undeniable intelligence.

He continues about how pleasure is more sweet because of suffering. But the passage that follows is the one that caught my attention.

I suffer, and I still do not live. I am an x in an indeterminate equation. I am some sort of ghost of life who has lost all ends and beginnings, and I've finally even forgotten what to call myself.

Earlier in the story Ivan denounces the existence of God, because, like many of us, he doesn't understand how there can be evil in the world if an omnibenevolent God exists. This passage conveys a familiar feeling that I don't have a word for. I also felt this when I was struggling with the problem of evil. I was an atheist for many years. Now I've come to believe in God, but not evil. It's a long journey that I might go on to explain here in the future. What interests me most is that many people can believe in the presence of both God and evil. I can only believe in one or the other. It seems that Ivan is the same way.

Disconnect

I never in a million years would have thought that I would be a marketing professional. When I first started working in this field and someone would ask me what I did for a living I would apologize. In college, I wouldn't take marketing classes because I thought they were teaching the dark underbelly of knowledge of how to make people want to buy products they don't want/need. I did take one class called "Psychology of Advertising" that was very interesting. Learned that most ads play on people's fear of death, fear of rejection, desire to escape negative emotions, and desire to have sex/be sexy. Also learned about how some large companies will conduct psychological research to create an ad campaign that will subconsciously evoke specific thoughts in their target audience.

Marketers want to send the right message to the right people at the right time via the right medium, and do this as efficiently as possible to keep profits up. It's not a secret and it makes sense.

I've been working in marketing for the last 5 years or so, and now I get it. Marketing is a necessary evil. If you have a great product/program/charity/whatever you have to have a way of letting people know about it. In and of itself, it's not a bad thing. It can be a very good thing in fact.

My main issue with marketing that leaves me with an uneasy feeling is the disconnect between the marketing of a product and the product. There is no necessary correlation between the quality of the product and the quality of the ad. They have very little to do with each other. You can have an amazing product and a crappy marketing campaign (or vice versa). But if a person's only exposure to the product is that ad, then chances are they are going to equate the quality of the product to the effectiveness of the ad.

Marketing isn't the only field with this disconnection problem. It also affects politics, the legal system, etc. I wonder if this is something specific to Western society. Plato talks about his great dislike for the Sophists, so using rhetorical skills to convey truth has been around since at least the 5th century BCE.

Last year I went on a job interview at a large insurance company. Towards the end the director of marketing asked me how I went from a degree in philosophy/psychology to marketing. I told him that I went to the dark side of the force, and that I'm using my knowledge for evil instead of good. He just looked at me with a blank stare. As an interesting side note, I got the job, but I turned it down.

The strangest thing happened last night

Last night, I woke up in the middle of the night and had to pee (nothing strange here so far). When I got out of bed Zoë, who was in bed with us, wanted to go to the bathroom with me. She got out of bed and she held my hand as we walked to the bathroom. She stood next to me while I was on the toilet with her hand on my leg. I washed my hands. I turned around to dry my hands with a towel and Zoë wasn't there. It was dark in the bathroom. I turned on the light, and I couldn't see her. It was really strange because she's loud when she moves around and I didn't hear anything while I was washing my hands. I checked the bedroom thinking that maybe she went back to bed. Skip was in bed asleep, but no Zoë. I turned the lamp on in the living room. She wasn't there either. And she wasn't in the kitchen. I was getting worried at this point. It was like she vanished. I went back in the bathroom. I looked under the sink, in the bathtub, and in the cat's litter box. I was about to wake up Skip and call out a search party, when I realized that I hadn't looked in her room. It was dark in her room and I didn't see her at first, but there she was... fast asleep in her crib.

So what happened? Most likely I was sleep walking (or sleep peeing, whatever you call it) and woke up when I was washing my hands. It's the most logical explanation, but it felt so real. I felt her standing next to me and her little hand in mind as we walked into the bathroom.

The less likely explanation, but the one that keeps popping into my head is that Zoë was astral projecting. I know it sounds crazy, but hear me out. She is still new to being a human. She's only been in her current body (outside the womb) for 15 months. That's not very long. She's still learning how to master what we call basic skills (like getting around, communicating with others, using tools, etc). What if somewhere along the evolutionary chain humans had the ability to astral project, but we forgot how to use it. It's not that far fetched an idea. Maybe it was a skill that we used before spoken language was perfected, and once spoken language became the main way of communicating we used astral projection less and less until we forgot how to access the controls.

She had the motivation. Like all little ones, she would prefer to sleep in our bed. Skip told me that he didn't bring Zoë into our room last night and neither did I, so I'm going to assume that she never left her crib. If she was in a deep sleep and really wanted to be with mommy and daddy maybe she figured out how to do it.

Whatever happened it was a really strange experience.

Craziness

Scientists make water run uphill

The Art of Conversation

Most of the time I don't know what to say when I meet someone new. It's not that I'm shy; it's just that I don't really care about small talk. It's seems boring. Sometimes I'll drop a comment into the conversation that is just below surface level. Most of the time, it's ignored. The few people who respond usually become a friend. And I have to admit, I've found a lot more people in New York that want to have a conversation that goes deeper than what they watched on TV the night before than anywhere else I've lived.

But it's more than that. What really bothers me is that I don't get to have great conversations with my friends as often as I'd like. All of our schedules are so full that it's lucky if we see each other every few months. There is always so much to do that it seems like we don't have time to talk. Then I pay a professional counselor to listen to the things I don't talk about to my friends. I think even though I have the desire I may not have the skills at the art of conversation. I saw an article on BBC about this topic.

Or it could be that the social pendulum is swinging to the other side. It wasn't long ago that most peoples main form of entertainment was to dine together and talk. European society was founded on these types of interactions. In some ways I envy this lifestyle, but it does have some serious drawbacks. People were born into their place in society and there wasn't much they could do to improve it. And I'm sure the community gossip was like high school but worse.

I think technological advances played a role in this change. I have difficultly comprehending the extent of how technology has changed the way we live, but I feel that it's made a huge difference. We spend most of our time working (or trying to forget about work). Men and women are both pursuing careers of our own making. We have more stuff in our homes than we know what to do with.

For the first time in human society, we are facing new social dilemmas. The most prevalent in my mind is the one I'm facing right now -- how do I balance my career and family? In the past unless a woman was a widow she never had to deal with this issue, and even then it wasn't quite the same situation. I'm not sure how I got off on this tangent, but it feels like the modern issues are somehow related to our new ways of communicating with each other.

I'm not as open to new ideas as I was 10 years ago. I guess that's OK.

Hellllllllllooooooo

I think it's about time I had a blog.
I'm finding watching tv difficult lately. It's not because the shows are awful, which they are, it's the dribble logic that comes from the advertisers. If you don’t buy our product you’ll die. If you don’t watch the local news tonight you’ll die. Then there are the most non sequitur of them all – the car commercials. Do you want more friends? Do you feel sad? Are you a rebel? Then you got to have this car. I think I’m going to start a contest to see what commercial has the most non-logical argument.

In the past week or so I’ve picked up my knitting again. I put it down a few months ago when I had no energy. I’m 4 months pregnant and up until now, I’ve been using every ounce of energy I had to stay awake during the day.

Fav news story of the day: Willie Nelson releases gay cowboy song