Contemplating My Navel (Personal Blog)

Tindering My Dating Resignation (December 24, 2014)

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For most of 2014, I’ve lived in self-imposed romantic exile. What began as a logical recovery period from an early December 2013 breakup, became a determination to reroute the dark serial monogamy patterns that left me lurching from one co-dependent mistake to the next.

Once I grew comfortable saying “No, thank you” or “Not now,” I was mortified to discover that while the decline ratio was up, my natural tendencies hadn’t changed a whit. Left to my own devices I was still drawn to the alcoholic, the emotional cripple or the one who could never understand or appreciate me. Without fail. Apparently some psychologically diseased part of me still loved to be hated, but I made the choice to stop indulging it.

As the year progressed, I recognized that my own company, or the community of friends and family, was infinitely preferable to awkward small talk with another strange man who would surely lead to some form of ruin (based on a near perfectly disastrous 35-year record). As the painfully funny comic, writer and actor Louis C.K. once observed: “How do women still go out with guys, when you consider that there is no greater threat to women than men? We’re the number one threat to women! Globally and historically, we’re the number one cause of injury and mayhem to women.”

It’s not that I’ve been a nun. There was a short fling with an informed Libertarian who inflamed my passions with a staunch belief in marriage equality. There was a brief interlude with a co-worker’s brother. But mostly, there was just me and the merry band of misfits I call my nearest and dearest. For the first time ever, that was enough.

In November, a relatively new friend of mine in her mid-20s asked me to give online dating one final shot. I had barely processed the offer, “Let me set you up with a Tinder profile,” before I found myself numbly agreeing. After all, 2014 has been the unofficial “Year of Yes.” What’s new and scary must be sampled, especially if it means cutting another tie with a repetitively agonizing past.

But Tinder? The notorious hookup app that bills itself as “How people meet. It’s like real life, but better.” Doesn’t that just sound like bullshit? Aisha did her best to reassure me. She vouched that the extra level of vetting provided by the application’s mutual “swipe” requirements would distill a better brand of suitor. In hindsight, I think the sweet girl was so invested in seeing me coupled, she would have said anything. She has a future in marketing – and a long tenure ahead as another one of my partners-in-crime.

I lasted 24 hours on Tinder, halfheartedly ignoring the New York Times and my treasured books to “play” the game. As I’m 36 years old, I didn’t need to be told to avoid the profiles featuring shirtless douchebags, inspirational quotes from Don Draper and other obvious rif-raff. Yet those offensive maneuvers were not nearly enough. My inbox became crammed with ingenious conversation starters such as:

“Hey sexy.”

“You’re hot. You don’t have kids, do you?”

“Oh I see. You’re into hot chocolate.”

The following morning, my Tinder experiment concluded, as did any lingering idea of meeting someone this calendar year. I was hardly pining for it, busy with holiday plans, work, theater, weight loss and the unfailingly satisfying time spent with loved ones. I preferred evenings in front of the Christmas tree with a glass of champagne and Frank Sinatra carols to the chase. I was done. See you in 2015 dating world – maybe.

It’s strange how important, game changing people can walk into our lives when least expected, or even desired. I was in the middle of a loud happy hour conversation (as though I’m capable of any other kind) with my colleague Duane when I felt the tap on my shoulder in a crowded bar. I wheeled around and found myself staring into the earnest, nervous face of an adorable young man with a soft looking beard. Wearily skeptical and more than a little intoxicated, I accepted Kurt’s offer to buy me a drink, figuring I could check momentary courtship from a recent college grad off my bucket list.

Instead the last few weeks have been one surprise after another. But this time, the amazements are pleasant and welcome: a synthesis between words and actions, physical chemistry and a growing mutual disregard for the generation that separates us in age. There is nothing recognizable about the unself-conscious honesty that has recently permeated my world, and as Martha Stewart famously said, “That’s a good thing.”

Maybe I was a bit hasty concluding there’s no one kind and interesting for me. Perhaps I haven’t let all the good ones slip my notice through a firm, lifelong commitment to self-defeat. Kurt recently gifted me with a book, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. It’s the memoir of a woman who survived a complicated and tough childhood. The inscription on the inside of the jacket read:

“Becky,

I know this is a little different than your normal literature, but the book reminded me of you. Let it be an inspiration to writing your own story.”

I’d come to believe that the romantic section of my autobiography had been figuratively copy edited and typeset. But maybe it’s just getting started, because I’ve finally fixed my compass so it points toward promise and away from learned helplessness. I think I’ll hold onto that resignation a little while longer.

Holiday Conflict Resolution (November 28, 2014)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

Growing up in an unstable home, the holidays produced conflicting feelings. On the one hand, a special, universal break from the norm, the community bonding over rituals, was thoroughly enjoyable. All of the hoopla was neat, and no matter to what faith (or lack thereof) my friends and acquaintances adhered, Halloween through January first was exciting. A frenzy of candy and goodies, toy commercials, visits to the mall, pageant rehearsals and energetic speculation.

At the same time, the order and structure afforded by the school year and regular activities were a reason to be away from home, as well as a refreshing oasis of predictability in an otherwise chaotic world. In that way, the holiday season was scary. There were long breaks from routine, time that felt extended by a child’s lack of perspective. Long stretches when my sister and I were subject to the moody whims and neglectful care of our troubled parents. Tensions simmering and erupting from too much togetherness and lots of other influences I couldn’t yet understand.

The first time I ruined Christmas, I was shaken awake by my red-faced mother at 8 am on a Sunday morning. She was smoking her standard Virginia Slim Ultra Light, blowing the carcinogens in my 10 year-old face as ashes scattered on top of the newspaper piles surrounding the twin bed. My father a hoarder. My mom a chain smoker. In literal and metaphorical ways, our house was a combustion waiting to happen.

As Gloria shook my groggy form, she yelled. I cried. I’d deliberately sabotaged everyone’s holiday by informing an eight year-old Jenny that Santa Claus was just a figment. I remembered the conversation of the day before well. I’d just been sloppy. I was kind of shocked we’d made it to eight with her faith still intact. She was upset, but I consoled her and shook it off. We’d had a good run, right (it was always “we” when it came to my baby sister and I)? How could I explain? I hadn’t meant to hurt anyone.

Moments prior I’d been dead asleep, and I was 10. I didn’t have words accessible to try to for balance and calm. Instead I was hysterical and ashamed. I’d disappointed my mother and I knew over a week ahead of time that Christmas morning would be awful. No more Santa ritual and I couldn’t fix it. Constant needling about what I’d done at best, silence and knowing, angry glares at worst. Jenny would be made to know it was my fault. I had to sit in the penalty box.

I couldn’t wait to go back to school. No one seemed to know how bad and unlovable I was there. I got good grades. I had friends. I was involved in everything. I was a Lutheran parochial school star.

Seven years later, at 17 years old, neurotically preparing for an independent future, holiday isolation took a young adult turn. By this time my parents had separated, and added to a long list of supremely terrible parenting decisions by splitting custody of my sister and I. Gregg kept me. Gloria took Jenny. It wasn’t even like there was a fight about it. It was somehow understood that this is how it should be.

I got to stay in the unheated family manor, sleeping on piles of trash and getting up every morning at 4 am to go my grandmother’s for a shower before school – because my mother didn’t really want me, and I was afraid my father wouldn’t survive if I left. Meanwhile Jenny relocated to our grandmother’s apartment with mom and enjoyed the clean, privileged world of an only child. I was bitter and relieved for her at the same time. What would happen to daddy next year when I wasn’t around?

As it turned out, my anxiety was needless. Gregg wrote me off entirely that Christmas after finding out I’d lost my virginity to a long-time, super wonderful high school sweetheart. I didn’t get how, but it was clear this was an act of personal aggression against my father. I was a liar, a slut and yes once again, a crusher of holiday dreams. I remember sitting in my grandfather’s old bedroom, secluded and weeping while my estranged parents found something over which to bond in front of Nanni’s Christmas tree. Their oldest child was lost of course, but at least they had one good one left. Becky was destined to be a huge, rogue disappointment.

When you live on the edge of people’s shifting morals and expectations, the pressure and strain is internalized. You grow to hate the holidays because you feel segregated from the warmth and love of the season. You’ve heard for so long that this supposedly special time of year brings out the worst in you, that you start to believe it. By choice you tell yourself, you’ll spend holidays alone, watching movies and drinking wine. Because lonely quiet is better than roaring failure. If you don’t try, you can’t make any more mistakes.

And then finally, after years of therapy, hard internal work and healthier relationship decision making, all the ugliness falls away. You are the grown atheist woman freely dancing around a spotless apartment, in front of a lit Christmas tree. The name on the mailbox is yours. Period. There’s a glass of champagne in your hand and you’re bopping to the sounds of a Frank Sinatra Pandora holiday station. You’ve just returned from a miraculous, symbiotic Thanksgiving Day with that beautiful baby sister, the in-law that’s become a real brother, and the two nieces who fill the heart to bursting.

Those two voices of shame you used to hear in your head during the holidays, the ones that self-selected themselves out of your life, are finally silent.

The Voracity of Death (November 16, 2014)

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Early this week, a former colleague from the American Dental Association died suddenly. He went in his sleep after telling his wife in the evening that he didn’t feel well. The cause of death has not been made public, but it’s presumed to be some variation of heart attack/aneurysm/stroke. The arbitrary kind of turn that the story of life and its ending takes everyday.

Ed was in his late 50s. A few years ago, my friends and co-workers Diane and Jimmy volunteered for an Association charitable activity with me, as a change of civic pace from our usual happy hour/sushi bonding. Ed gave us all a ride in his car, which was just coated in dog hair, evidence of his pet devotion. He wasn’t the least bit concerned that we’d show up for duty at a food dispensary matted with health code violations. Ed was a weird, smart dude who loved a good debate and really didn’t worry about what people thought. I like weird, smart dudes. The world will be a little less interesting without him.

Later in the week, semi-famous reality TV star Diem Brown died at age 32 after a nine-year battle with ovarian cancer. This was on my radar in part because of a long and somewhat embarrassing love affair with MTV’s The Challenge, a competition series featuring former cast members from reality groundbreakers The Real World and Road Rules. I have a ceaseless appetite for frenemy tropes and the drunken, televised antics of my generation (and slightly younger people). It has a way of reinforcing that my own life choices are imperfectly acceptable.

There have been a bevy of seasons over the last decade with absurd “storylines,” fights and stomach churning behavior. What can I say? I traffic in highbrow and lowbrow in equal parts. But one narrative elicited no schadenfreude from viewers: the ongoing health battles of Diem Brown and her touching on again, off again relationship with ultimate sexy bad boy, CT Tamburello. Diem was always a competitor first, a conflicted lover second and a cancer patient third. CT brought out the best in Diem and never allowed her to hide her feelings or her chemo-induced baldness, even as he continued to make mistakes that drove them apart. They were an easy and beautiful pair for whom to root, and I always believed that once they finished sewing their respective wild oats, these two crazy kids would figure it out.

As of Friday, it is clear they’ll never have the opportunity. After her third battle with ovarian cancer, Diem succumbed to the disease, after devoting the best years of her young life to fighting it.

Of course all of this made me think of Jesika. Of ovarian cancer and how I might hate this killer above all others. The silent, hungry assassin sneaks up on the body, even the most carefully monitored and healthy ones, eating them slowly until it’s too late. All the while, the host feels just fine…until she doesn’t. And in too many cases, as the disease’s average age of onset continues to decline, she doesn’t get to marry the love of her life, or reach the full height of her cultivated career, or make a huge mess of it all and start over. She doesn’t get to do anything at all.

Ovarian cancer also claimed my paternal grandmother June, when she was in her 60s. I was there in her Wisconsin home-turned-hospice staging area in the summer of 1991. I was 12 years old watching her waste away, struggle to breathe. Grandma Crowley had six full-grown children and numerous grandkids. She’d been a great beauty who loved a good Manhattan. She’d lived. But that didn’t make it any easier to bear the live and needless suffering of one of the few adults who really gave a damn about my sister and I.

So much pain and death this week – for the living and those who experienced a karmic fluke or lost a war. So much futile anger and fervent wishing with no outlet. Such an inability to pull out a more profound lesson than the trite and oft-repeated warning to make every moment count.

Planning for the future is important. Some of us excel in the exercise, obsess about it. It’s a comforting illusion of control, a ritual we must repeat instead of scanning our environment fearfully or repeatedly rushing to the exam table. We will make our imprint. We will not be forgotten. We will not succumb to panic.

But the acts of living, of building, of wanting and working can, and often will be interrupted, painfully and prematurely. And there’s nothing we can do about it. That’s the truth. And it hurts.

Wedding #5 (October 31, 2014)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

Vieques, Puerto Rico; Coralville, Iowa; Omaha, Nebraska; Chicago, Illinois; Peoria, Illinois

At first glance, as the old Sesame Street tune goes, “One of these things is not like the others.” The freak entry in my 2014 wedding travel log is a sunny paradise full of clear waters, scenic cliffs and exotic wild animals (in this Midwesterner’s defense, frogs and iguanas qualify as otherworldly in a landscape rife with pigeons, rats and squirrels). The other four stops are…flat and full of corn.

There’s a cute new television commercial airing courtesy of Southwest Airlines. In it, a perennial wedding guest is shown rocking a succession of attractive frocks, while throwing down some infectiously committed, if spastic, dance moves. In one scene, she is forced to adjust the overeager hands of a juvenile suitor. I am not saying this happened to me at the Iowa wedding, but if I did, would you be surprised? Basically, change the protagonist’s hair color to a deep red and put a few more years on her, and this advertisement tells my story.

When the invitations started rolling in around the New Year, I had a few concerns about my ability to rise to the occasions, above and beyond the ample financial and time investment required. A jam-packed wedding season is not normally the favored prospect of a two-time divorcee. Also, as regular readers of this blog know, I limped into 2014 fresh from the latest incapacitating romantic disappointment. I was emotionally bankrupt and attending up to six personal and group therapy sessions a month when the first invite was extended.

One must be comatose to find a summons to Eden unappealing, especially when it comes from a dear friend who’s become part of the family. And when that sister’s betrothed flatters a battered ego with a request to sing the wedding song, “Besame Mucho,” only a real fool rejects such an opportunity. I wrote about the experience earlier this year as a transformative one in many ways. It left me with the ability to envision myself, for the first time, as a contented retiree. Personal vistas expanded with time and freedom to celebrate life, committed love and a raw, achingly beautiful, undeveloped part of the world I rarely experience.

I kind of assumed Puerto Rico would be an anomaly. Upon a mid-April return, I tried to fortify myself for the coming onslaught of other people’s dreams coming true, and the bitterness I expected to wear as an accessory. The level of adoration I feel for these people would take priority over self-indulgent pouting of course, but no way could I just sail through a matrimony parade feeling fine, right?

As it turns out, once I got it right in my head that I have zero interest in a third husband, and am not totally sure there’s a commitment of any type in my future (at 36, the small talk associated with a first date feels like too much labor better invested elsewhere), I became a veritable reception MACHINE. I’ve clapped along because I felt like a room without a roof. I have done the Cupid Shuffle after drinking enough champagne to believe myself a channel for Eartha Kitt levels of sexiness. I have hit the buffet, asked for cake seconds and encouraged intoxicated men to do the Worm. Because why not?

One thing I have not done? Get in line to catch the bouquet. Let the other ladies take their superstitious turn. In my 20s, I caught myself a grand total of three castoff flower bunches and guess what? Didn’t up the odds of matrimonial success one whit.

So this weekend is wedding number 5. And I’m ready to Electric Side myself back onto the dance floor. Upon reflection, the coveted, raucous guest is where I always should have left it.

Cheers!

Uncle Yee and the Erhu (October 23, 2014)

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I paused before deciding whether or not to share a picture I took of Uncle Yee last Saturday on social media. I remembered he’s not courting a low profile and the debate was superfluous. How do I know Uncle Yee enjoys attention? Just stop for a moment to listen to him play the erhu, a two-stringed bowed musical instrument resembling a fiddle, and he’ll proudly point to a sign boasting his film and television appearances. He co-starred with Will Smith in 2006’s The Pursuit of Happyness, and I use the term “co-star” purposefully. However brief his scene, Uncle Yee is an attention grabber. Just look at the spring he puts in this little girl’s step.

The ancient narrow San Franciscan street where Uncle Yee plays his erhu has a violent history: indentured teenaged prostitutes in “cribs” (cages), Tong war battles and Gold Rush-related crime. When one grasps the chronicled backdrop against which Uncle Yee entertains Chinatown crowds, his peaceful aura seems almost ironic. Yet Uncle Yee doesn’t have a sardonic bone in his body.

My friend Andrea and I encountered Uncle Yee as a stop on a Drag Me Along Tour of the former Barbary Coast area, which includes the ethnic neighborhood. The tour is hosted by the “infamous Countess Lola Montez” (Bay Area resident Rick Shelton in fabulous period dress). It’s a journey into the past – stories of lurid sex, pirating and blood lust – that can’t be experienced online or in primary school textbooks. As sort of a history and experience junkie by nature, it was the perfect union. The untold tales of San Francisco shared by a drag queen with encyclopedic knowledge of the city, as we traipsed through the recesses of Chinatown. Though we tend to brand Asian cultures as conservative ones, my heart delighted in the reception the Countess received wherever she walked. She is a C-town treasure and she knows it.

Over the course of two hours and 40 minutes (and truthfully, the Countess could have gone on all day – indefatigable of foot and tongue, that one) there was so much to enjoy: the inside of the nation’s oldest Buddhist temple with its burning incense, a traditional Chinese funeral procession with full marching band, the sights and smells and delicacies of all kinds. But it was Uncle Yee who burrowed a hole in my spirit.

It started with the cuddly moon pie face, continued in the skilled precision with which he played an instrument I’d never heard of or seen before, and ended with the simple joy that emanates from Uncle Yee when he has a captive audience of any size. Have you ever experienced something so beautiful that it’s almost painful? There was a stretch during Uncle Yee’s rendition of “Oh My Darling, Clementine,” a tune that sounded so mournful as he expertly moved the bow across the strings, that I literally had to shut my eyes. I couldn’t keep my gaze trained on him. There was only one sensory overload to be coped with at a time, and it was sound.

As Uncle Yee wrapped his mini-concert, and the tour resumed walking, I sidled up to Andrea, tears still streaming from under my sunglasses. I tried to whisper a thought that was only beginning to formulate. Without words, just a smile and some perfect musical notes, Uncle Yee shared his love for life – his own and those surrounding the makeshift stage. The ultimate paradox – achieving such a complicated pursuit by means so deceptively easy in appearance.

I make the world convoluted. Not sure I have it in me to be satisfied with just instruments (a pen and paper or laptop in this case) and a beatific smile. But I love that Uncle Yee does. It’s hopeful and comforting – almost shatteringly so. Is his a wisdom that comes with the maturity and experience etched in the lines of his sweet face? Is it hiding inside the erhu, released incrementally when Uncle Yee touches the strings? This is a rare moment when I don’t need the answers. Satisfaction is found in tears of wonderment, in the mystical magnetism of his song.