In Appreciation of My Breasts

I'm home now -- an event which, in of itself, is still feeling beyond comprehension. I'm here, nominally, to cook and clean and generally take care of my mother, who had a simple masectomy last Tuesday. (Simple, as opposed to radical, means they "just" removed the breast and not any of the lymph nodes and muscular tissue underneath. It still seems awfully radical to me.) Despite my best efforts, however, the caretaking is not going so well, mostly because my mother is bound and determined not to be taken care of.

I cook dinner. Instead of lying on the couch or doing something else equally invalid-like, she insists on cleaning up behind me as I go. I've tried offering to start cleaning projects - mopping the kitchen floor or organizing the desk or whatever else needs to be done, and she tells me not to bother. I get the feeling watching me clean would just stress her out more. I'm feeling, shall we say, a bit useless.

Don't get me wrong. I'm thrilled that my mother is doing so well. She's up and about, she's active, and aside from some complaints of itching where the bandages are, you wouldn't be able to tell that she just had a masectomy.

Well, except for the fact that she's missing a breast.

And there's the kicker, that missing breast. She wears baggy shirts and you can't really tell unless you stare (which I'm trying not to do), but I know she's constantly aware of that missing piece. She cracks jokes, and we all laugh -- they are funny-- but I wonder if she's actually feeling self-conscious.

Lord knows I am. All I can think about are my own breasts. I can't help but look at them and appreciate them. I like the way they look in my shirt. I like the way my baby niece nestles up against them and falls asleep. I like the shape they make when I see my reflection in the window right now.

See, the thing is this. My grandmother developed breast cancer in her early 40's. My mother got it in her late 40's. It's looking like the chance of me getting breast cancer by the age of 50 or so is ridiculously high. I figure I've got about 25 years left before I, too, lose my breasts. So I think I'd better appreciate 'em while I've got 'em.

I like my breasts. The girls and I are friends, you know? We get along just great. I've had issues with just about every other inch of my body throughout the years, at one point or another, but never with my breasts. They've never been too big or too small for me. They've always bounced just the way I'd like them to. They really work for me. I'd rather not lose them.

Every time I see my mother, down to one breast, all I can think is "I had better get some good use out of these babies while I've still got them." All I want to do is cup them in my hands and say "Hey, now. These are mine. You can't take them." I sort of want to run around town topless.

My mother works in retail. She told me that one day, a few weeks before the surgery, a girl came out of the dressing room and asked for Mom's opinion on the shirt she was trying on. "Do you think it shows too much cleavage?" she asked. My Mom replied, "Sweetie I'm about to lose my cleavage in a few weeks. If you've got it, you'd better flaunt it."

So if you see me bouncing around in a low-cut top one of these days, just remember -- I'm doing it because my mother told me to. I'm just following her advice. Better use 'em before you lose 'em.

Who Needs Sleep? (Well You're Never Gonna Get It...)

My life – which has been pretty crazy lately as it is – has taken a turn into the surreal over the past few days.

Tuesday night, for better or for worse, win or lose, our campaign was supposed to end…yeah, not so much. Instead we spent the night tabulating precinct counts, making projects, and hearing strange tales of ballot and poll irregularities across the district. Well, other people on the campaign did that. I spent the night greeting guests at our victory party, schmoozing press, spinning stories, managing expectations, ordering pizzas (and more pizzas), talking constantly on my cell phone and, eventually, sort of losing it. Just a little. Sometimes that happens when you’ve been up for 42 hours straight, I suppose.

By the end of the night, it was still too close to call. (Not that that stopped our opponent from prematurely declaring victory, of course.)

Ironically enough, Wednesday and Thursday have been the busiest campaign days yet, at least for me. My phone started ringing with reporters around 11, and it literally did not stop for more than five minutes until 4 pm or so. I ate through a quarter of a month’s minutes in one afternoon.

Today at the vote count was the biggest media circus I’ve ever personally witnessed. Cameras from every station, radio, four – four! – reporters from the Globe, more from the Herald and all sorts of other papers, including a strange contingent of little old Chinese ladies from the Asian press. They were adorable.

Oh, it’s lots of fun… and certainly great experience. As I wrote a few posts ago, I really love this sort of thing. Getting to spend the afternoon chatting up reporters at all the major outlets is like Christmas in April for me. But really, how fricking surreal is your life when you come back to your real job, open up Boston.com, and see your pictures on the opening splash page? How weird is it to see yourself (in the background, granted) and your campaign on every channel? At what point does making the front page of the Globe stop being so exciting? (I hope not anytime soon.)

I came home tonight and, on a whim, decided to check on my herb garden. I have carefully tended this herb garden all summer. I planted it with love, I watered it faithfully, I read up on the best way to care for each variety and pruned it carefully. I’ve killed every plant I’ve ever had, so the success of my herb garden this summer is, or was, a point of great pride.

My herb garden is dead. Wilted, withered, gone. That’s what happens when you don’t water it for two weeks. When you stop pruning. When you neglect.

I’m wondering if this is a metaphor. I’m seeing a point, somewhere, in the somewhat near future, when I might get to go back to the rest of my normal life. Where I get to sleep normal hours and cook elaborate dinners and go dancing in stupid clubs and actually see my friends and pick up the paper without looking for my name. Normal life is going to happen again – I know it, even if I don’t quite yet believe it.

And when I get back to that normal life one of these days, I can’t help wondering just a little bit what I’ll also find dead. What bills I’ve forgotten to pay, what calls I’ve entirely neglected to return, what clean clothes I will possibly have left to wear. What relationships I’ve left unwatered for far too long.

This has been a whirlwind of a month. If nothing else, it’ll be fascinating to see where I’m dropped when this tornado eventually ends.

Instant Karma's Gonna Get You

Okay, okay, ye gods of karma. I get it. Lying is bad. Making up excuses is wrong. I apologize.

Now, please, won't you let me get some sleep?

I faked a headache last week to try to buy some extra hours of sleep. Around 5am Wed night/Thursday morning, when I was finally crawling into bed, it occurred to me that getting up in two hours for work was a really bad idea. Going on the logic that I would get more done in four hours (if I had slept some) than I would in eight hours (if I had not slept), I decided to cop a headache that "kept me up all night," take a few hours sick time, sleep in, and go to work late.

In fact, it was the right decision. I got a ton of work done in the four hours I was at work. I was a better and more productive employee. I was able to get through the next evening of campaigning without falling asleep. I absolutely made the right choice.

Except, of course, that little thing that involved lying about a headache. I guess that was probably a morally 'wrong' thing to do.

We'll leave aside my long diatribe on why my time should be my time, and if I have a certain amount of sick time a year and want to take part of it to sleep in because I know I will not feel well if I don't (sort of like preventive sick time), and if taking a few hours sick time will actually make me a better worker during the time I am at work, then why shouldn't I do it? I won't get too deeply into the fact that I am deeply bitter about this corporate mindset that not only condones but encourages employees to lie if they want to be able to use their earned time off. Regardless of my philosophical problems with the sick-time system, fact is I abused it just a little bit last week.

And now I can't sleep. Friday night, I figured my sleep schedule was still off from Wednesday night's lack of sleep. Saturday night, I blamed it on the mild case of sun poisoning I think I got that day. I tossed and turned and felt truly awful and nauseous all night, but there seemed to be a valid cause behind it.

But last night? I went to bed at a highly reasonable 1am after a long and exhausting weekend. I was more than ready to crash. I needed to sleep. And yet I lay there, wide awake. 2am. 3am. 4am. 5am. Unable to fall asleep, unable to quell the four thousand thoughts racing through my mind, unable to relax. Finally, around 6am, I think I managed to doze off...for a whole hour before I had to be up again.

Karma's a bitch.

And if I don't get some sleep soon....I will be, too.

A Little Shameless Bragging

It's days like today that I know I'm in the right profession. (Not with the right employer, perhaps, but definitely in the right profession.)

I'm a media addict. To me, there is absolutely nothing like the thrill of the hit...nothing like seeing a story you pitched (or worked to get your quote into, or worked to push the angle in a certain direction) make it into the paper.

I get all worked up and excited over what I know are relatively minor matters: placement on a page, column inches, days a story ran, making the lead quote, setting the tone of the story. Who won today's media cycle? Whose message is the story going with? Whose picture did they run with, and what does the headline say?

So for a news-junky like me, today was an awfully good day.

It started off this morning with a 6 minute WBUR (Boston's NPR station) story on my candidate. 5:49am & 7:49am, prime drive time. The story was perfect: repeated our message a zillion times, great quotes from the candidate, and great 'man on the street' interviews that sounded like they were reading our talking points (and they weren't...really!).

In the hierarchy of news media, NPR to me sits right up there with the NY Times. It's certainly equal, at least in my mind, to a Boston Globe story. They're hard to pitch, difficult to get onto, and can be a little unpredictable at times. Scoring this one is a HUGE excitement to me.

After that, there were articles in the Boston Herald. Their endorsement (or lack thereof) was less than thrilling, but we made the lead quote and set the tone for their coverage of last night's debate. I'll take it.

Plus endorsements from the Phoenix and Beacon Hill Times. Lots of positive chatter on the blogs. And a few requests for comments -- more stories tomorrow!

This is shameless bragging, I know. But I am riding awfully high today and feel like sharing.

Anatomy of a Bad Idea

I just finished Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, one of those books where I find myself folding down page corners every few minutes because it’s filled with thoughts I want to return to. Here’s the one that caught me up this morning, the passage that feels like it was aimed right at me:

“Involved happened over a long period of time, pulling you in like quicksand…Involved is neither good nor bad. It is just a consequence of living, a consequence of occupation and immigration, of empires and expansion, of living in each other’s pockets…one becomes involved, and it is a long trek back to being uninvolved…and one didn’t do it for one’s health. Nothing this late in the century was done with health in mind. Alsana was no dummy when it came to the Modern Condition. She watched the talk shows, all day long she watched the talk shows – my wife slept with my brother. My mother won’t say out of my boyfriend’s life – and the microphone holder…always asked the same damn silly questions: But why do you feel the need…? Wrong! Alsana had to explain it to them through the screen. You blockhead; they are not wanting this, they are not willing it – they are just involved, see? They walk IN and they get trapped between the revolving doors of those two v’s. Involved. The years pass, and the mess accumulates and here we are. Your brother’s sleeping with my ex-wife’s niece’s second cousin. Involved. Just a tired, inevitable fact. Something in the way Joyce said it, involved – wearied, slightly acid – suggested to Alsana that the word meant the same thing to her. And enormous web you spin to catch yourself.”

What is so entrancing, so entrapping, about a bad idea? What is it that pulls us, magnetic-like, against our own good sense, against our own logical arguments, against our own better judgment? How do we become involved in precisely those situations from which we know we should turn and run 180 degrees in the opposite direction? I don’t know if it’s a longing for self-destruction, an obsession with the fire so deep that we can’t help but step into it….or if it’s the ultimate mark of ego, this belief that we, and we alone, can play around in this situation without becoming involved. That we and we alone can make this work. That we and we alone can pull water from this rock.

Do we always know right away that it is a bad idea? Do we know from the beginning and simply look the other way (or look right at it, knowing it and even embracing it for the poor decision that it is), or are we fooled? Tricked into thinking “well maybe it’s not so…” and “yes, but…” until we can’t see the good from the bad, the right from the wrong, until there is no one right course of action, until everything is muddled and messed and any movement we make inevitably results in unbearable consequences.

This, in my mind, is the calling card of a bad idea. When the inevitable progression of events springing from an idea leads you to a situation where your ability to choose a good outcome in hampered. When you are backed into an alley from which you cannot possibly escape unwounded. When, as Smith writes, you are trapped between the revolving doors of those two v’s, and there is no getting out without a few scrapes to your soul.

I sometimes think I am so fascinated by shades of gray that I lose myself in them. I bury myself so deep into the infinite grayness that I’m left without a black or a white to cling to. No up, no down. And of course no blame – for when right and wrong are constantly shifting things, when any conceivable action leads to both pain and pleasure, when there is no scale that can measure one action against another and come up with a quantifiable difference, how can you be blamed for choosing one path over another? How can I be blamed for making the “wrong choice” when there is no objective criteria by which to judge wrong choices from right? There is no need to face your own weaknesses when it’s clear that no one else, regardless of what strengths or weaknesses they may posses, could find a better way out – because there is no good way out.

It’s such a postmodern thing, almost clichéd, really, this refusal to believe in immutable truths and unshakeable values. This obsession with seeing the gray in every situation.

And so we don’t make decisions, per se. We don’t acknowledge the choices we make along the way, rather choosing to believe in circumstance, in situation, in uncontrollable forces. In a lack of culpability. And we become involved, without realizing it, without knowing it, without definitively choosing it, until it is far too late in the game to back out now. Involvement becomes both the anchor we cling to and the tangled web we wish to escape.

D-Day

I spent most of today in a real funk. I was cranky when I woke up, less than pleased when I arrived to work, only to find out the elevators in our building were broken, irritable at the endless list things on my to do list that absolutely had to be done today, even more irritable at the other things on my list that really should have been done yesterday but totally need to get done by early next week, upset and self-righteously angered by perceived slights in emails, deeply depressed over the state of my afternoon, weekend, and life, and generally not in such a great mood.

It wasn’t until I was riding the bus home, watching the fifteenth UHaul in 5 minutes go by, that I realized….today was the first of September.

Is there any date (except, perhaps, the day after Christmas) more depressing than September 1st? Especially a cool, cloudy September 1st that holds that glimmer of fall in the air? Is there any better reason to be in a funk all day than the simple fact that today is September 1st?

As a kid, there was something nice about September 1st. Sure, the summer was ending and school, with all its attendant homework and lack of free time, was starting. But there was a first-day-of-school outfit to be picked out, new notebooks waiting to be filled with new pens, old friends to be seen and new friends to be made. New classes and new teachers, still to be viewed through the starry-eyes of the honeymoon period, new people to crush on, a new beginning to be made. September 1st used to be about new beginnings.

No more. To me, now, September 1st only signals the end. The end of warm days spent lying in the sunshine (not that I did nearly enough of that), the end of al fresco lunches and outdoor concerts. The end of summer flirtations and Summer Fridays.

September 1st is an end to indulgence. To laziness, to “next weekend,” to “I won’t decide just yet.” It’s an end to frivolity and a beginning to responsibility. September 1st is a time for decisions.

The to-apply-or-not-to-apply question has been laying heavily on me of late, as it seems to do every September. I change my mind daily. Two weeks ago, I was definitely applying to PhD programs. It was time; I was ready. I wanted to get my PhD in Political Science. I wanted that life. Last week, there was not a chance in hell I was applying this year. The thought of leaving Boston ripped me apart. The thought of spending the next 5 to 7 years of my life in a library made me weep. I did not want to get my PhD in Political Science, or anything else. Two days ago, I started to think about law school. Hey, maybe that would be a good idea, right? I started to get excited over Harvard’s loan program (which seems to help you out financially if you decide to forgo the $125,000+ a year firm job for some low paid public service position, though I’m sure there must be some fine print you can’t understand until you’ve already signed up for law school.) I started to think that was really what I’ve always wanted to do. Don’t get me wrong – I doubt I actually want to go law school. It’s probably just the decision-of-the-week.

But, see, it’s September 1st, and it’s about damn time to make a decision. Summer’s over, kids. Oh, the weather might get warm again. (Hell, with global warming, it might stay warm all winter.) You might fool yourself into thinking we’ve got a few weeks left. But it’s September 1st, and the time for foolishness has ended.

At least for another nine months.