I mostly lost the ability to cry in the 90's (side-effect of Prozac, or just coincidence I don't know), but in the last couple of months I've shed a lot of tears while sitting in meditation. I get really opened up, and eventually I start feeling deep loving compassion for myself. That makes tears. Or I have a momentary glimpse of how much *everyone* is suffering due to the conditions of their mindbodies, and that makes tears. Or I see how strong and loving they are in the face of their suffering, and *that* makes tears.

They aren't exactly tears of sadness, and sometimes they are tears of love. When I do metta meditation ("may I be happy, strong, full of effort & compassion. May I find ways to share my happiness with others...") tears of beauty can fall.

Meditation is a strange practice. I sit on a cushion for an hour, and my mind parades its carnival-like garishness for 55 minutes. For 5 minutes the spectacle might slow down a bit and I become engrossed in watching the breath or bodily sensations. Perhaps for 5 or 10 seconds, if I'm lucky, all mental verbalization stops and it's just profoundly quiet. In short, I'm not particularly good at one-pointed concentration.

And yet the practice works. The ugly cognitive distortions of depression and anxiety lose a little force. Instead of the harsh language I sometimes use to address myself ("cunt, faggot": words I don't use on others even in extreme anger), I start addressing myself with love ("darling, I'm here for you"). I don't really do this consciously, and it's certainly not some kind of self-improvement trick. After trying to sit equanimously with my body sensation for long enough, love arises. My internal voice gentles.

For the most part, that love is still primarily self-directed. I have inklings of compassion towards others, but it's not easy for me yet to follow through on them. But I do recognize that my happiness is contingent on learning the dilligence to be strong and centered for others.

I cried during my August meditation retreat to think that I'd spend the next year and a half learning to skillfully touch people who are in pain. Learning to let the very flesh of my hands press down through skin and muscle and connective tissue, and help bring back circulation, un-set adhesions, stimulate hormones, and all the other physiological and emotional benefits of skilled touch. I started getting kindof attached to that idea of myself-as-healer till I saw the folly of it.

It's strange getting attached to the idea of being a massage therapist while practicing a meditative discipline that trains one to be cool towards bodily sensation. Much of the pain and fatigue I experienced while sitting up to 11 hours a day in meditation was due mental restlessness, and once I recognized this, the pain and fatigue transmuted into mild annoyances at worst.

Massage only treats at most an inch deep into the physical body (plus physiological after-effects), while the root/radical solution for alleviating physical and emotional pain seems to me neurological or psychological. Massage is a band-aid, and sometimes the wounds we try to cover require the mental equivalent of arterial cauterization. If not heart transplant.

Still, there is need for band-aids too, and there is need for feel-good touch. A lot of people don't get touched at all, let alone skillfully. It's fanciful egotism on my part to want to have deep healing impacts on people. It will suffice to merely touch them.

I've deferred massage school for a semester. I need to do more deep healing of myself first. I need to shed more tears on the meditation cushion, and learn to cultivate ardent habits of mindfulness and compassion. I will be spending the semester working at two meditation centers: one of SN Goenka's Vipassana centers and Stone Circles, a center for social justice activism and spiritual training.

I can feel so beautiful and empowered and full of potential when I sit in meditation with regularity. It's a wonder that I let my practice die these past two weeks, but I'm back. With a lot of help from a lot of people (authors I haven't met, one author I did meet, a meditation teacher who called me today, friends who themselves sit or have provided space for me to sit, the list is long...) I'm back on the cushion.

Even though it was wet for most of the race, and the rain really came down hard for a few laps, I had a really fun race. Doing the full 100K actually felt easier (and was actually faster) than the 70K training skate that I'd done a week prior to the race.

I guess I don't feel like I accomplished much though. Last year I trained *really* hard for the San Fransisco 100K, but wasn't able to raise the travel expenses to go to the race. I really impressed myself that year with my discipline and focus in training for the race. I felt like I could accomplish pretty much anything, that my willpower was sufficient to take me through to whatever ends I honestly wanted to achieve.

This year, in contrast, I was much busier with work, and trained far less than I did last year. If I felt tired in the morning, I'd just sleep in and skip my skate for the day. I did that more often than not. It was a half-assed training regimen. My technique is apparently a lot better than it was last year though, and so even though I'm not as physically strong as in 2007, I'm faster and more efficient.

That's not the worst part though. OK, so I trained less hard and had an easy first-time 100K. Gives me a goal to beat for next year.

The worst part, the dirty fucking secret that I don't tell people, is that I almost missed the NYC 100K & Skate marathon for the third year in a row. In 2006 I trained for the 21K half marathon, and since it was raining on race-day and I'd never skated in the rain, I went to the race without my skates to cheer and support the others and to hand-out water and bananas. In 2007, I trained for the 42K marathon, and although it was a really nice day, I fucking overslept and go to the course after the race had started. Once again I was handing out water and bannanas. This year I ended up going to sleep at around 4:00am (before a 7:30 check-in time). Basically I was going to blow it off and not even go to the race. But for some reason I took an Adderall just before sleeping, and I managed to wake up at 5:30 or so, and make it in time for the race.

I'm happy I made it. I'm happy I finished the race with energy to spare. I'm happy to be a skater. I'm unreasonably happy when I skate.

I'm *not* happy that I'm such a fucking flake that I can decide to blow of three years worth of training for the sake of getting some sleep. I missed many a flight and a few job interviews too because of that kind of behavior.

In the American Dream ethic where working hard is a pre-condition for human dignity, I probably ought to be incarcerated if not outright euthanized.

In the face of my character deficiencies, the 100K skate seems like a hollow, trivial thing to count as an achievement.

I love skating, but I despise myself when I'm not actually doing it.

Lap Times:

Pos	Bib	Lap 1	Lap 2	Lap 3	Lap 4	Lap 5	Lap 6	Lap 7	Lap 8	Lap 9	Lap 10	Lap 11	Lap 12	Lap 13	Lap 14	Lap 15	Lap 16	Lap 17	Lap 18	Lap 19	Total
3	7	12:24	12:45	13:19	13:29	13:51	13:13	13:33	14:02	13:43	14:58	16:48	15:30	14:18	15:01	15:10	16:13	18:02	15:30	15:50	4:37:41

Body image: The way I feel about my body's aesthetic depends a lot on what I'm doing with it. I hadn't trained athletically much between may and September, and as a consequence, I started feeling pretty icky about my body. It felt (and looked) frail and too thin. To add a strange bit of insult to that injury, I don't have much body fat (usually a good thing right?) so when I see myself wearing a dress, my arms look spindly but also all too obviously mannish. I wanted to have more muscle mass, and yet the cross-dressing corner of my brain wanted to cover up what little muscle tone and definition I had with fat (it's all imperfect subjectinve perception; many athletic women have far more muscular and defined arms than me, and they look absolutely fine in a dress -- in fact I really like that look. on other people at least). blah.

Well, I've been training for a few weeks now, and while it really hasn't changed my body's physical appearance, I feel a whole lot better about how I look. My legs are as skinny as ever, but instead of perceiving them as merely weak and ugly, I see them as skater's legs, with hundreds of kilometers of exertion etched into them, defining a snaking sartorius and beautiful brown clefts between the superficial quads.

On Tuesday I did my first group training since early in the summer, and although I've been feeling like my technique barely even qualifies as speedskating, at least one of the other guys who's seen my skate since last year, thought I was looking a lot less sloppy. Good to know.

Yesterday I skated my first 70K of the season. There was construction in the park, forcing me to walk for a bit each lap, so I'm not sure if a 70K with no rest would be a lot harder. It took me 4hrs 41 minutes, and it was close to mindight when I ended. Started getting kind of cold and lonely. I feel like I can probably do 80K or even 90K this weekend, and with the 100K next Saturday, that means that I'm probably actually going to be able to finish the race!!

( Training details: )

I think I was way harsh on myself in my last post. My thinking is closely tracking what I'm reading in Serano's book, and my previous post was motivated by her chapter on the transexual dissonance between the sex one's brain expects one's body to be, and the actuality of one's body. (Serano theorizes a biological basis for subconscious sex, because it helps her make sense of her own experience, even though she wisely stops short of claiming that this theory actually reflects reality). Reading about her gender dissonance made me cry (and mind you she only gives two or three personal anectdotes, all presented matter-of-factly with a minimum of sentimentality, in a book that is about ideas, and not at all a memoir). She explains that her lived experience of gender dissonance "most of all... felt like sadness... a sort of gender sadness -- a chronic and persistent grief over the fact that I felt so wrong in my body". When she decided to transition, the dissonance had escalated: "it hurt more than any pain, physical or emotional, that I had ever experienced".

So in the face of something that severe, my own seemingly elective gender-playing seemed gauche and rather callous of both transexual and transvestite experience. Strangely, though, I didn't think to ask why the phrase "gender sadness" seems to echo in my own soul, different as my experience is from Serano's, or why exactly I was crying reading about her wrapping a lacy curtain around herself (in the body of a then 11 year old boy with long hair), and staring at herself stunned for over an hour. It's a pretty fucking deep empathy on my part for an experience she relates in a less than one third of a page of straightforward decription. I suspect that my "seemingly elective gender-playing" of today indeed stems from something prickly about gender that's been bothering me since my own childhood.

I should have kept reading, for Serano's very next chapter focuses on what she calls "oppositional sexism": ideas about gender that not only essentialize two binary genders, but that underlie homophobia and transphobia, and that create false heirarchies even within movements of queer activists: gay trumping bisexuality; transexuality being more 'real' than variant non-binary gender expression; or queergendered people being more radical than transexuals.

Ultimately, Serano concludes, lived experience trumps any theory: "an impenetrable wall.. exists between our own *experiential gender*, which we live,... and the genders of others, which we merely percieve or make presumptions about.... It is time... to move beyond the insolent rhetiric of gender entitlement and one-size-fits-all gender theories".

In other words, Serano gives my felt experience of gender far more leeway than I was giving it myself. Binary gender prescriptions have hurt me plenty. It doesn't matter if it's due to my reacting against social prescriptions or due to something innate to my gender identity. What matters is that I don't assume that what makes sense for me gives me any right to invalidate, project upon, or prescribe for someone else's gender identity.

While cross-dressing in certain safe contexts may give me some kind of unearned privilege, and that's one motivation for me to do it, it's not the important thing. What's important is to not self-invalidate my own hate for singular, binary prescriptions of gender expression. Yeah, I'm not transsexual, but that doesn't mean that US mainstream society's definition of 'male' doesn't fuck with me and wear me down every day of my life.

It's about time I started fighting back.

I've noticed in myself lately a tendency to not identify with any of my interests or activities. At its best, this grants me a certain amount of freedom to try new things and continually self-define myself, but most often it just reflects fear and lack of commitment.

Here's a list of things that are deeply important to me that I nonetheless tell myself "I'm not", for lack of sufficient skill or experience: a figure skater, a sex-worker, a scientist, bi-sexual, a feminist, a speed-skater, a martial-artist, an activist, a meditator, kinky, a blogger, a computer programmer, a naturalist.

And some things I do feel I have sufficient experience to claim the labels of: Homo sapien, masculine (though not exclusive of potential femininity), heterosexual (though definitely not exclusive of being bi), queer (that which explains the caveats in the preceding items), educated, empathetic, Bluestockings volunteer.

Perhaps it's because I feel I don't have parents. Seriously, even though I was brought up by both parents until they divorced when I was 12, and was raised by my dad after that, I feel like *I* emotionally divorced them both in reprisal for their bitter divorce. And so other things in my life are easily discardable. Nothing is precious enough to me that I need to suffer being defined by it, or risk the possibility of losing it.

However, I think my dabbling in many things and committing to none pre-dates my parents' divorce. I remember quitting childhood activities like judo or soccer (not to mention being utterly uncommited to doing homework) even though I was OK or even good at them (I won trophies in each of my first three judo tournaments, and yet since I was very lightweight and easily bullied both in Judo class and out of it, I allowed myself to be defined as a wimp and quit the sport).

I'm emotionally high-maintenance. I require a tremendous amount of affirmation and acceptance from someone before I'm willing to commit myself to being mentored by them. Mentorships, I think, are what can most easily make the difference for me. I'm very hesitant to commit myself to activities, but I will gladly do it in order to preserve or nurture a friendship.

Instead of the all too ready cognitive excuse of "I suck at this", I'd profit from reminding myself that "I love someone".

Sadly though, muses, mentors, friends and lovers are hard to come by and keep, especially for someone with as diffuse an identity as mine. Hence my search for communities. Hence my love of and for Bluestockings as a collective entity.

In One City: A Declaration of Interdependance (kindof a Meditation 101, for the iPod generation), Ethan Nichtern confesses: Sometimes I have to mindfully watch myself fall into the damaging rut of a particular habit around twenty million times before I begin to not crash into it so easily. That's a potent demonstration of free will, if you ask me. Making a decision between soda A or soda B might be the working of free will, or of random chance, or of ribonucleic pre-destiny. Who knows? But if one can watch a habit that's so ingrained that one continually falls prey to it despite wanting desperately to change, and over the course of so many failiures that any reasonable empiricist would declare defeat, notice an inkling of change, well that my friend, is the power of will prevailing over habit, destiny, or hard-wiring.

There are many ways in which I fail to change myself. Reminding myself of them just might make a difference on the twenty-millionth iteration:

1. I'd rather sit at a bench as a pipette-monkey, potentially helping a lab learn something new, than be a code-jockey
2. I'd rather clean droppings out of the Baboon exhibit at the zoo (that's a reference to David Brin's Earth by the way), in the company of (and with access to) vets, wildlife biologists, conservationists, scientists, and general students and lovers of The Creation, than be a pipette-monkey.
3. Meditation is a powerful agent of both change and acceptance for me. It is demonstrably, for me, The Answer. I hardly ever practice it with the zeal that I apply to physical training like skating or martial arts though. That's bass-ackward.
4. Mind matters most.
5. connecting with others is deeply important to me. I find it easiest to connect through writing. So why the fuck am I not making my writing more important in my life than just leaving behind a trail of throw-away blog postings?
6. much more to come

After several translations, it still makes sense:

Mind proceeds all phenomena,
Mind matters most,
Everything is mind made.


If within an impure mind,
You speak or act,
Suffering follows you,
As the cartwheel follows,
The foot of the draft animal.

If with a pure mind,
You speak or act,
Then happiness follows you,
As a shadow that never departs.

- First words of Dhammapada

When I read that as a kid it sounded frightening: "follow moral authority, or karma will punish you". When I read it as a college student, it sounded simplistic: "don't drink, don't fuck, don't masturbate, or else. Or else what? Or else some force that doesn't exist will punish you using mechanisms that are physically impossible and for reasons that are psychologically suspect". I hadn't discovered meditation yet. As a meditor, it reads like "Just observe: your possibilities are far far beyond anything you can concieve, and so keep watch on your own limitations, moment to moment, welcoming them with love, till they fucking dissolve. Momentarilly. Or perhaps not at all, this time. Just Observe".

I'm posting a link to this video again, since I think it's sooo good. Really well edited to U2's "Beautiful Day", and the combination of the lyrics and the visuals are especially meaningful to me right now. Among other things, it perfectly expresses the idea: "this is why I skate", for whatever kinds of skating I do, and indeed the larger metaphor of working so incredibly hard at falling and getting up, and falling again, in order to learn to fly and to somehow become beautiful for a moment.
( what you don't have, you don't need it now / what you dont know, you can feel it somehow )

Andrew Love's video here: It's a Beautiful Day, to Speedskate

I'll make a full post about her soon, but Meaghan Buisson is an amazing woman. Achieved national level in something like 6 HS sports, and world-class level in inline speedskating while suffering from an eating disorder. Suffered a potentially career-ending injury, went to rehab, got her body eating healthy again, and now she's making a bid for the 2010 winter olympics, along with speaking out and being an activist about eating disorders. Yes, in 2006 she set Canadian national records for the shortest (300m) and longest (42Km marathon) inline races. While sweeping first place in all the distances at Nationals that year, she went on an off-day to set the world record for the solo marathon.

something freeing about polyamory is that you don't feel that your partner has to be everything you could possibly want from someone. and this lets you open up to a lot more people.

does this help at all with the awful, bitter, and salty-sweet waves of crushing over a certain someone that I'm going through right now? no.

thing is, it's not even *her* that's causing it. she's hot alright, and i'm well more than casually interested in her. but the feelings i'm being drenched-in have more to do with damned-up loneliness from the past few years. maybe even insecurities dredged-up from high-school days.

*relax*. *breathe*. *be present*.

yeah, right.

I like this serendipidous juxtoposition of soft dance shoes hanging next to a couple of collars. It's just where I hang things that need hanging, but quite an interesting and provocative combination of ideas no? After taking this pic, i ran out the door to my 1st (yes, *FIRST*) ballet class, only to run back in, since i'd left my shoes hanging right where you see them.

As it turned out, i didn't need them in class: class had been shifted an hour earlier for July, so I was right on time to just miss it! This was just as well though, since "beginner ballet", it turns out, really means something like "beginner class for people who can already dance ballet". Kindof like how "pre-preliminary" in figure skating is the level at which you can do at least two single jumps and a one-foot spin.

So I shall have to wait for tomorrow's "introduction to ballet" class which, I'm promised, really is for beginners. I don't mind being challenged, but the reason I'm taking ballet in the first place is to learn technique, and so blindly doing sloppy jumps and pirrouttes in a "beginner" class won't do me much good; i can already do the equivalent level of technical butchery on ice, where it's a whole lot more fun. I'd rather spend the whole class at the barre and focus on posture and arms and isolating the movement of body-parts from the core.

Part of me is a technique-slut: whether it's Jiu-jitsu, skating, computer programming, or entomology, i get-off on learning *how* precicely to do things. Another, equally strong, part of me is an undisciplined slob that likes to leave my room in a utterly chaotic mess; allow myself to fiscally hemorrhage in strip clubs in the hope of feeding my loneliness; and -- with far more productive results -- go with the flow on the ice, just enjoying the beingness of liquid motion, to hell with anyone watching, and to hell with honing technique.

Combining these two forces -- the anal retentive and the anal expulsive; the OCD beachcomber who gets lost in the details of a single sandgrain, and the ADD snowflake who's overwhelmed in a white-noise snowstorm of information -- and having them productively support and guide each other is a riddle i must struggle to explore. True freedom, for me, lies in the creativity of disciplined fun.

Sometimes skating makes me feel so effing hot! Not in the sense that I think I'm terribly good at it, but rather it just makes me feel so strong and competent and fast. When this happens, it's a consequence of how my body experiences the thrilling interaction of gravity, momentum and curved-steel cutting through ice. I don't have to be "on" as a skater, and indeed tonight I was rather shaky after a two-week layoff. But it felt like being incarnated as the searing voice of a powerful singer sliding and twirling through the harmonies of her backing instruments. (Out of left field metaphor? Not really, I just bought and am listening to "Yes, Virginia" *grin*).

Should I choose a noble occupation?
If I did I'd only show up late and sick
And they would stare at me with hatred
Plus, my only natural talent's wasted on
My alcoholic friends

~ "My Alchoholic Friends", The Dresden Dolls

I'm not yet sure what Amanda's singing about there, but OMFG(oddess) I love her for it!

peace out, my lovelies.

(originally posted as a comment in dbt_support ). for me, something that seems to get in the way of acting healthy is the feeling that being healthy is somehow a way of conforming to other people's invalidating ideas of what or who i should be. i'm discovering that certain rebellious, but also constructive -- or at least not self-destructive, acts help me get over this.

Rebellion is very much a personal thing. Figure skating, for example, feels rebellious to me, because it's something that men aren't conventionally supposed to do. Other things, like flirting with bdsm, may or may not be healthy for all people at all times, but they seem to end up helping me. it's good to be able to do things that i *can't* talk to my parents about, and that they *wouldn't* get. all too often I let myself feel that my parents have co-opted my own successes, so having things that they *can't* co-opt, help me feel alive and self-motivated.

like many things, it's a balancing act.

grumpygirl tries to smile Brought to you by www.grumpy-girl.com

^^girl's in need of emergency ice-skating therapy even worse than I am!

Something now??
Through life no fun
I want to feel
I want to run
I'm gonna keep catching that butterfly
In that dream of mine ~ "catching the butterfly", the verve

</div>

Cute video of a Chopin Mazurka on youTube. Well the pedalboard part is cute. The rest of it is just good playing (10 years old!!?). According to the comments she's playing it too much like a waltz and not enough like a muzurka, but I'm too musically illiterate to know the difference. Sad, actually, that I know the difference between black metal and death metal, but not that between a waltz and a mazurka. :( I even know to do the skating jumps named after each of these dances (they are the easiest jumps in skating), and don't know what their musical origins are.

I shall have to edumacate myself on this in short order.

It is quite amazing though, that a 10 year old can film herself playing Chopin, and then have people intelligintely critique her. It's almost something out of Science Fiction. Except that it's just everyday youTube. No wonder Google bought them!

In other news, my therapist rocks. She's "the One" (metaphysical Gong-fu and all) as far as therapists go. We had to stop a few years ago since sho got pregnant, but we're back in business. All hail the power of cognitive-behavioral compassion!!

Today is one of those days, rare among those of the last few months, on which I managed to wake up not just physically, but cognitively as well. I've temporarily staked the psychic vampire (sensu LaVey) that i've been, and after a yawn and a cup of coffee, opened the shades and readied to assert myself in the world. Tomorrow's my birthday and I have a job interview. Let's hope this energy lasts, although as we all know, hope has nothing to do with it.

Give me songs and freedom
Give me love in every sense
Raise me up so high with you
All the cavemen fade away away
--It could be sunshine, Love and Rockets.

Today I really experienced a "depressed mood". It was a mild one, a zephyr, but it definitely made me want to drag. The only thing I did drag, however, was the outside-edge of my right skate, as I taught myself a proper T-stop. Even my first half-hour on the ice felt icky, and I had two near-collisions since I was spacing out. An aquaintance said to me "there's no such thing as a good-day or a bad-day on the ice. There's just on the ice, and off the ice". I thought about this and replied that I'd probably manage to feel like that by the end of the session. He remarked that "as long as you're not on the couch channel-surfing, and you are trying something, it's good". You'd think he knew that I'd watched TV for a good six hours last night.

Anyway, the magical, Prozac-like qualities of the ice prevailed, and while I didn't completely shake my mood, I managed to add some color to it. Incidentally my inside mohawks got a lot better, and I started experimenting with outside mohawks, and rockers.

On returning to campus and writing a cover letter explaining why someone with graduate school would appply for a job requiring an associates degreee, I unearthed some facts about my career that make it more likely for me to be a science journalist: I really have seen a wide range of science from physics to ecology and even their applications in the operating theater. Now if only I could get that pesky thing called "writing" under at least as much control as I have over an ice-skate, I might yet come out on top!

( cover-letter )

The CSS HTML on my site seems to be broken is now fixed. I changed my theme, and on my default page i'm getting old entries rendered in a full-page-width column above the proper 2-column layout with the most recent entries.

I am also depressed and wanting of being fallen in love with.

Mitigating these two states of affairs is the fact that I will learn something about CSS in trying to fix the layout, and I know that antidepressants work for my "depression". Said depression seems to be manifesting not as a depressed mood but as a lack of energy, poor organization, and an unwillingness to cope with potential difficulty.

An excellently written article in the Washington Post on the Ladies Figure Skate paints a picture of Sasha Cohen that brings out the attributes I really like about her. Yeah she can skate, but so can others. Athletic excellence is often an inspiration; it's one of the more potent demonstrations one sees of how dedication and hard work can transcend its own fruit and soar into being a celebration of human ability: the four minute mile, eric heiden's five golds, michael johnson's near-perfect 200m, michael (yeah, that michael), bruce lee, and many more. It's rare that such feats make me into a fanboi though, because a moment of physical perfection, or even a career woven of such moments, say little about an athlete's personality.

The '06 winter games, for me, will be identified with Sasha Cohen. This is certainly not to take away from Shizuka's grace and seemingly effortless jumps. What really gets me, and lights a fire in my heart is how Sasha skated an excellent program after a fall and stumble that surely would have denied her a medal. It's a key metaphor for me, because I fuck-up a lot, but would do some really good things if I just stayed focussed and kept going forward.

Figure skating is a dramatic sport: the area where skaters await their results is called the kiss and cry; there are primadonnas like Johnny Weir, and media darlings like Michelle Kwan. It's an athletic soap opera, blown out of all proportion by the media. It's easy and fun to get caught up in all this, and I have to admit I did so.

It's good to have heroes who can stoke emotional fire. I had a very intense yoga session yesterday, and I became aware if this fire again. I am so much more. So much more than a guy who lives to blog his life; who always avoids eye contact with strangers; who lets the world distract him from his purpose. It's not perfection I need, but a relentless rededication of the type that can win a silver medal after a huge mistake.

So far, so OK as far as the day, and my resolution goes. :-)

Jonathon Schwartz played Dylan's "If you see her, say hello", which was an unexpected surprise for a show that concentrates on Sinatra, Big Band, Jazz Vocal, oh and Sinatra. Could've sworn Schwartz announced the song as being from "Blood on the Rocks". A lil too much New Year's cheer on his or my part I guess.

What I want to know is how did Dylan get away writing a lyric like "She still lives inside of me, we've never been apart"?

Yes, in rhythm and sound it works spine-tinglingly well to complete the beautifully evocative:

"We had a falling-out, like lovers often will
And to think of how she left that night, it still brings me a chill
And though our separation, it pierced me to the heart
She still lives inside of me, we've never been apart"

Still, it's, well, maybe the weakest line of the song, let's leave it at that.

I really should stfu, cuz it says what it says, and there's no need to dress up a cliche if the cliche is real -- it's up to the context to reclaim the meaning, and up to the audience to actually *listen* to what it says and not the tired overplayed sound of it.

It's a cliched thing itself to cite the line "Cliches Happen" from the nineties TV show, My So-Called Life (mscl), but it comes to mind for a couple of reasons.

( the appeal of MSCL... )

I never got to see thirtysomething or relativity, two of Bedford Fall's other three productions on ABC besides MSCL. I did watch the third Once & Again quite intensely ( the best show on TV you are not watching ... )

I think it was the portrayal of divorce and remarriage, from the point of views of parents, children, Exes, and even grand-parents that hit me with eye-tearing aptness. I'm not saying it was transformative art or anything (and on that note I really should see Squid & the Whale). But it was relevant.

The course of my growing up was ( abruptly wrenched at a faultline ... )

As for my Mom, I really can't say we've never been apart, or even that we're all too connected now, but she always *has* been a part of me. Fleshing that cliche out into skillful thought and action is my biggest challenge.

*)( footnote ... ) back

2)( casualties of emotional warfare ... )