pronoia

Ennui

It is Friday afternoon, and I've gotten very little accomplished today. I updated the school's website (teaching myself Adobe's GoLive in the process), I've been cleaning my office, I did some minor paperwork. I've read my email, I've read blogs, I've checked all my usual celebrity-gossip sites, which have languished mostly abandoned this week, what with the endless meetings and evening obligations. I'm listless and bored.

Ms. P is gone this weekend, and she's taken R and S with her. J is also going, and I've got a bruch date with his wife N, but that is the extent of my social obligation/opportunity this weekend. Yesterday I was excited to have the whole weekend to myself. Yesterday I was busy planning meditation time and bike rides and book time in coffee shops. Today the prospect of unfettered, unencumbered time is oppressive.

Lately I've felt like I'm spinning my wheels. I haven't felt motivated or energized or excited by things, but it's not felt like depression. It's felt like boredom--endless, soul-deep boredom. Around everyone else's excitements and moments I've been like the proverbial teenager: bored, bored, bored.

On Wednesday I had dinner with the high priest of the coven I am likely to dedicate to later this summer. We talked for so long and so energetically that I didn't notice that the clock had crept to 11:30 and Ms. P was calling, frantic that I'd been in an accident because I never stay out that late on school nights. It's much more common for me to hit a wall around 9:30, be tired and want to go home even when I'm talking to people I quite like.

It was an amazing feeling. I came home buzzed and excited and ready to use Scrabble as a divinatory tool. I came home feeling like myself. I came home feeling sexual and open and as if things are possible.

I want to feel like that more often. I want to feel creative and interesting and powerful. I want to feel engaged and interested and absorbed.

It's been too long since I reminded myself of one of my favorite quotes from Atlas Shrugged: "When nothing seems worth the effort, said a small voice in her mind, it's a screen to hide a wish that's worth too much. What do you want?"

What do I want, indeed?

Bullseye!

I plug data into Fertility Friend every day--it gives me a pretty graph of my temps with notations as to cervical mucus, insemination, menstruation, etc. It also does advanced analysis of that data to determine when you ovulated.

Today, I got the crosshairs that denote ovulation, and the crosshairs centered on Tuesday, right in the middle of our attempts.

So whether or not I get pregnant, we have at least achieved inseminating around ovulation! Woo hoo! Go us!

Back to my regularly scheduled work headaches.

Math is Hard

Okay, no, math isn't hard, but figuring out how to knock me up most definitely is.

On the day I most recently found spin, I logged onto Fertility Friend to add that to my data and found a helpful tip box telling me that women can have more than once incidence of fertile mucus in their cycle even if they only ovulate once.

Now they tell me.

I was clearly not ovulating--several days worth of temps after that stayed stubbornly in the low 97s and high 96s, right where I always am pre-ovulation--but one can only know that in retrospect, and if I hadn't called for the swim team, you know damn well I would have popped out an egg. So we had yet another two days of ill-timed swim meets.

I appear to be approaching spin again, so we've got the swim team on call. One of these times I've got to get it right. Forget about an actual pregnancy; at this point I'd be happy inseminating when there's a biological chance it could possibly-if-the-stars-aligned lead to pregnancy.

I keep looking longingly at the envelope of OPKs I bought online, but the directions tell you very specifically that you should test between 11 and 2 and between 3 and 5. And, um, I'm at work then, and I don't fancy 1) carrying the OPK and a disposable cup around the office; 2) balancing everything in a room with no actual countertops; 3) taking up the most commonly used bathroom in the building for 10-15 minutes at a time. And really, with my body's track record, I'm likely to get wonky results that way as well.

I'm making light of this, but trying to coordinate three different signs to come up with when we should inseminate is much more complicated than I thought, even knowing that my body tends to be a little unpredictable. This is where being married to another woman and using a known donor makes things stressful--R is doing us a favor, a huge favor, and I'm conscious of this fact. I'm conscious that every time we call for the swim team, he's taking time out of his day and coordinating with our schedules and doing something highly personal for us. I'm conscious that this huge favor he's doing for us necessarily colors his relationship and interactions with S. I'm worried that our struggles to predict correctly will alienate him from the whole process because it's hard and it's intense and it's nervewracking, even for him, and the payoff for him is very different than it is for us. I'm envious of my straight (or in opposite-sex relationship) friends because they can just have sex every other or every third day throughout their cycles and be relatively confident they had sperm hanging out when the egg decided to appear. We don't have that option, and so we have to inconvenience everyone.

When I can stay at the level of the big picture, I'm confident and excited and positive. Down here at the level of predicting events based on very little available data, I'm nervous and pessimistic, because I've never been good at this kind of thing.

Over!

Well, the visit with the parents went surprisingly well. My mother appears to have gotten over her anxiety about my relationship and now dives in wholeheartedly to conversations. My father is still unsuited to visits and chitchat and has a tendency to be irritable because he's bored. Saturday involved a bit too much together time with far too much surfacy-ness, and by the end of it we were exhausted and bored ourselves. But if that's the worst a parental visit has to offer, I'm happy.

So, all in all, a perfectly acceptable weekend. Phew!

The Visit Cometh

We've been in a little bit of denial about the fact that my family is visiting our house tomorrow. Make no mistake, we've been anxious about it all week. But somehow that hasn't translated into actually cleaning the house.

Tonight we're going to the art opening of a new acquaintance we're hoping to befriend, then stopping by Whole Foods for some cheese and other hostess-like noshables, then running home to clean until the swim team drops by. It puts a definite end point on our evening.

I'm hoping we can get enough done tonight that we can have breakfast at the diner tomorrow morning. Ms. P will need her coffee fix, after all.

I'm thinking of the art opening and breakfast both as antidotes, little pieces of our life that we can sink into before we dive into the surreal experience of spending time with my parents. I always return with vertigo.

It used to be that I'd play Hole, very loudly, on the way to see my parents. I've found a better theme song: Dar Williams' Your Fire Your Soul.

Button up that shirt you're s'posed to wear,
don't forget your airline ticket or to brush your hair,
show that family that you care.

Could you wear something that celebrates
everything you love and maybe what your family hates,
cause that might be what it takes.

Cause that's your fire, that's your soul,
you shouldn't have to go.
That's your fire, that's your soul,
you shouldn't have to go.

First thing they say's "take off your shoes,"
and they'll say they want your story but they get confused,
by all those words you use.

A year ago your car went off a cliff,
and you saw an angel in midair, who said you'd live,
well that's a story you can give.

Cause that's your fire, that's your soul,
you shouldn't have to go.
That's your fire, that's your soul,
you shouldn't have to go.

And they say "you're family, you belong to us.
You can stay at home and have our love and trust.
Any day now one of us could die,
if we make you suffer don't you want to find out why,
cause we love to watch you try."

With your fire, your soul, your soul.
It's your fire, it's your fire,
it's your fire, it's your fire, it's your fire.

Then you'll fly home and get the flu,
and you'll keep staring at the ground you always do,
when they get their time with you.

You are not a punching bag my dear,
i think your darkest days should have some light this year,
oh i think you should stay right here.

With your fire and your soul you shouldn't have to go.
It's your fire, that's your soul, you shouldn't have to go.
That's your fire, that's your soul, you shouldn't have to go.
that's your fire, it's your fire, it's your fire, it's your fire.

This is what will be playing on the stereo, very loudly, as we pull into my sister's parking lot, mark my words.

Dear Body,

The last time we started a menstrual cycle together, you took somewhere on the order of 45 days to ovulate, making my predictions (and insemination attempts) totally useless.

Today is day 7. I appear to have spin.

Thank you ever so much for not making me wait 45 days again, but something on the order of 10-14 days might be nice for next time. Calling R at the last minute isn't how we like to do these things.

Love,
Me

Perspective

I think my week is trying to lend me some perspective about this visit from my parents. First, R's dear friend S, who was recently diagnosed with non-Hodgekins lymphoma, found out yesterday that it's Stage I and has a 95% survival rate over ten years. That completely rocks. Working from home to deal with the plumber meant that I essentially got to lay around, despite my best intentions, because I got sucker-punched by a head cold. And then our grocery delivery sent only about 1/5 of our actual groceries. Water and pretzels do not a week's meals make. All hail the daily dramas that keep my brain occupied.

I'm spending this morning on a tour of local high school gymnasiums. The second phase of our school's construction involves a new gymnasium, and we're seeing what other people have done. I'm not entirely sure what my role in this is, but hey, it could be interesting.

So, my distress level is much better, my cold has settled into a vaguely stuffy head and weird hearing, and I get to drive around the city with my colleagues. Not bad.

Visit

I'm so anxious right now I couldn't sleep, and I've been on the verge of crying for days. My parents are coming to visit this weekend, and I haven't seen them since our wedding, nearly two years ago. They haven't been in my house in nearly five years. I have preferred it this way.

I keep my life separate from them. They are critical of every decision I make, no matter how momentous or minute, and I do not wish to engage such things. So we talk on the phone about the exploits of our animals and what's happened with various family members and what we're doing to the outsides of our houses. We remain on the surface.

For them, criticism is not an act but a world-view. They engage the world by disparaging it. They do this happily, cheerfully. I didn't understand how destructive this was until I moved away, until I was able to relax into a different way of being.

Their criticism is not helpful or considered or informed. It merely is. They criticize the breed of dog I chose, the size of dogs I have, the fact that we have cats, getting a PhD, going into academia, leaving academia, working in grants, the house I bought in UniversityTown, my hair short, my hair long, BigCity, the choices my cousins make, the performance of my first surgeon, having groceries delivered, our choice of lawn mowers, marrying a woman, etc. They talk about me with my sister and criticize me to her. They criticize our other family members to me. They do not see that this criticism is what has separated us, what continues to separate us, why I do not trust them.

There are many things about our life that they do not know, even apart from topics parents shouldn't know anything about, like sex. They do not know Ms. P is bipolar or that she was severely depressed last autumn. They do not know about the baby plan. They do not know about our credit cards or our 401(k) plans or what we make. They do not know about R as other than a friend. They will learn only the basic information about these things as they become necessary, no more.

Even though they won't be staying with us, we will see them for several days in a row. They will come to our house, which I am already seeing through their eyes. They want to see where I work. We will eat meals with them, play games with them (the better to take up time with), have conversations. I will be me and not-me, at the same time. It will break my heart.

This is the one context in which I am deliberately, choicefully, non-authentic. Being inauthentic feels terrible, but so does revealing the most important, vulnerable parts of my life to their careless critique.

Ms. P is suggesting we focus on being hostesses rather than daughter/daughter-out-law. It's an easier role to play, with an easier switch into distance and expected good behavior from guests. It's a good idea, and one that will likely work. In the meantime, though, we have to hide the flogger, shelve our pile of queer parenting books, clean, clean, and oh, did I mention clean?

I'm working at home today because the plumber couldn't come yesterday, when I was actually off of work, so perhaps I can intersperse working and cleaning. We need to set some protection spells, work on personal shielding, maybe throw a glamour or two. The goal, as always with my parents, is to get out with as little collatoral damage as possible while satisfying their need for family time. It's a delicate balance.

Old Joke, New Punchline

This weekend, we were driving to breakfast with our friend A2, who was visiting from UniversityTown, and we spotted something in the road up ahead. Ever worried about roadkilled cats, I was reassured that it was a plastic bag inflated by the wind. As we turned just next to it (it was exactly in the center of the intersection), I realized it was not a bag but a large, white, dead chicken, feathers and feet and head still on.

We must have some Santera/os in the neighborhood, because that was an offering to Ellegua at a crossroads. Have I mentioned I love my neighborhood?

Naming

In the coven to which I will soon dedicate myself, every dedicant takes a name. Sometimes it's the name of a deity, sometimes an aspect, sometimes a part of the natural world. There are any number of angles to take in the naming: things you want to draw to yourself, strengths you already have, deities you want to work with, deities who clocked you on the head with the clue-by-four years ago, things you are drawn to.

I'm not doing very well.

In the eclectic community most of my friends are part of, people are given names by the other members of the community. These names are usually funny or ironic or pointed, and part of their value is that they reflect you back to yourself in the eyes of your people. In that community, people who name themselves are usually made fun of, but that's usually because when people name themselves in a pagan context the names are uniformly dreadful and pretentious. We joke about RainbowHunterMoonLizard, but I've met people who named themselves HeartSeer and Kether, and I've heard tell of one Crescent DragonWagon. I kid you not.

I've never gotten a name. I've never taken a name. I've always just been Pronoia (okay, my real first name). I've been bemused by this course of things, but one does not demand a name. Given this context, having to actually name myself is a really hard task.

I started out with the only recurring dream I've ever had: a very short dream in which I watch an alligator/crocodile swim towards me. It's either late/early in the day or very shaded by trees; everything is in shades of green and grey and brown. I've looked up crocodile goddesses, and the only one I can find is Tiamat, the Babylonian deity who preceeded the making of the world. She's fantastic, but very cthonic, and we've been told we can't name ourselves after either cthonic or underworld deities. Too much is likely to kick our asses if we try, and we're really not ready for that.

So then I tried reading tarot cards. That didn't lead to much clarity, although it might be that I don't have a lot of connection to the deck we were using.

I tried thinking about what I'm drawn to, which is mostly the moon and water and stars. Luna, Selene, Diana, Artemis, the list of moon goddesses can go on and on, and they all have about fifty other names they've been known by. I like several--Luna, Daphnaea--but they're feeling like wish-fulfillment rather than my name. I've tried going with R's intuition (Tethys) and following attributions from there to Themis, but nothing is feeling right.

I tried meditating, I've tried prayer, and I tried doing dreamwork myself, and all I came up with was a pygmy goat, which I can't figure out. Anyone know what deity has a pygmy goat for a symbol or totem?

So far, it feels like it did before Ms. P and I found/chose our NewLastName--lots of pretty, lovely options, but none of them mine. At least then we had some guidelines that felt right--we wanted a name that symbolically reflected the things that were important to us: light, water, movement, poetry, etc. I had also felt for years that my last name was supposed to start with a C. (Why, I can't explain.) But now, trying to name myself for this new/old context, I got nothing. I have no leads, no clues, no ways in.

Naming myself has been so much harder than naming hypothetical children.

I'm going to keep dreaming and meditating and praying and reading and talking and asking, but if any of you have any suggestions, I'm really open to hearing them.