03.04.2012

I am at this irritatingly unendingly "in progress" stage with everything that I'm working on, including a couple knitting projects that clearly need to be ripped out for the fourth time, or ones that just don't seem to end. But on a cheerier note, what a beautiful weekend! One of those stunningly blue-skied weekends that makes the rest of the country hate California so. Yesterday I rock climbed with some colleagues and then hopped over to the Pier to get some ice cream. There is nothing so satisfying as an ice cream cone on a beautiful day after a good workout. Today I got dim sum with my parents and cousin, and biked down to the Lake where I sat and journaled and enjoyed watching the dogs chasing one another and the little children toddling about. Why are they so adorable when they can't quite walk properly?

My roommate, just now, was telling me about an upcoming Jewish holiday where you dress up, in costume, to express parts of yourself that are hidden. For her, she decided, this was anger and sex, so she was going as a dominatrix (is that how you spell it?) "I mean," she said, "I don't really feel angry a lot. But do I really not have a lot of anger? If I'm experincing the full spectrum, I should." So anyways, she's been assembling her costume: black heels a mile high, black corset, black gloves and whip, red lipstick - the red, the one spot of color on her entire body. Notice my lips. Hear me. Actually, she was originally going to go as a diva --- "But then I found the corset, and my friend - of course, my male friend - was much more into the idea of a dominatrix."



I think that's such an interesting concept. How often do we really think about those parts of ourselves that remain unexpressed, maybe neglected or maybe willfully suppressed, and give them voice, permission, to come out? I remember after a particularly draining fight with my ex-boyfriend (we were international long-distance at the time), I wrote him this email explaining that "It's not that I want to keep things from you, it's just that there are parts of my personality that I don't particularly like and try to keep from other people." And he replied that he didn't want to seem cold, but that didn't seem like a very healthy approach in his mind. If it's part of who you are, isn't it better to embrace that part of yourself and live as a whole person, than try to suppress a part of you that is just a natural part of your person? And as much as I hated him for being right, I knew he was right. What he said did make much more sense to me, and it's an idea that's stuck with me ever since.



The other night I was out on a date with a guy I met online and he commented, within the first 30 minutes of our conversation, that I seem like a happy person. Now, to me, I don't think of myself as an unusually happy person. Then again, he's recently divorced with a young daughter, but even with that grain of salt I suspect that I have a number of friends who consider me to be a happy person. It's not that I'm not happy or that I don't have frequent moments of great bubbling joy and optimism, but my interior world is also filled with plenty of fretting and worrying. But putting together these 3 anecdotes, I wonder if, for me, worrying and fretting are my "down" side to the random, hand-clappingly amused, buoyantly childlike enthusiasm that is the sunnier side of my personality. So really, not that there's nothing to be "done" about the worrying, but it's not something I ought to try to "fix" about myself. It is what it is, I am who I am, just trying to learn to manage these sides of the self instead of repress them.