Moojinorbit

My most consistent challenge in the last few weeks–aside from, but related to, not losing my mind–has been getting to sleep and staying that way for enough hours to do the job. Insomnia has been a lifelong struggle, but I’ve developed some skills over the years to minimize it: meditation, catching thoughts, reading before bed, masturbating, getting enough exercise, doing affirmative prayer. Frankly, the best skill of all is taking Ambien, but I can’t always get my hands on it–like now, when Kaiser makes you pay for it out of pocket at about $70 a pop, so I have to settle for Xanax, but it’s not the same. (Anyone want to put some Ambien in the mail for Mama?)

Insomnia comes for me in bouts, and they usually have to do with worrying over something. I get in bed and, no matter how tired I am, my brain will start puttering, then running, then spinning and looping and having a rip-roaring time. Stopping it is like trying to halt a locomotive at full speed. A locomotive that is not only obsessing about something but with song lyrics relentlessly cycling in its head, and fears, and checkbook calculations and half-dreams, all competing for attention from an extremely exhausted engine. (Ok, I know; weird metaphor.) The worst combination of factors for my insomnia is:

worrying

+ having to get up early

+ hot summer nights with no air conditioning.

I can think of two summers in particular when circumstances were such that I don’t think I slept a full eight hours the whole summer. Good times. (c.f., the wrinkles under my eyes.)

So I found my cat Paco back in 1999, and he’s been with me through thick and thin–road trips across the country, five houses, as many girlfriends. He looks a little like a black, fat Oscar the grouch, but he’s my longest committed relationship. This picture doesn’t do justice to his beautiful green eyes:

Paco’s a wonderful companion, but he has one MAJOR drawback: He’s a morning person. And when I say morning, I’m talking early fucking morning. Morning that isn’t even morning yet. That’s when he begins these neurotic, inside, outside, eat, jump on the bed, back outside rounds that steal years of my life in lost sleep. And this is a cat who refuses to use the cat door I put in the basement, unlike my perfect-child cat, Rico.

All this is context for appreciatiing the morning I had a couple of days ago.

It was Thursday morning. I was recovering from a cold, so I was snotty and coughy and not myself. I had a huge day ahead of me in teaching and meetings, and since I was also worrying over some things the night before, it had taken me a long time to fall asleep.

3:45. I hear the first meow. The first meow typically means, “Mommy, look at my bowl in the kitchen. Is there food in it? Will you double-check?”

You may wonder why I do this. The only answer I have is that I’ve learned over the years that I can deal with it better than the incessant meowing.

3:59. “MrrrrEEEP.” This means, “Ok, I ate. Now, will you let me outside?” So I get up again and open the front door. Paco exits. Back to sleep, no problem.

4:45. Scratching in my skull. No, that’s scratching at the front door. I get up and let him back in. It’s easier than dealing with the scratching, which I can hear through two pillows squeezed over my head. I always have this fantasy that he’ll go back to sleep when I let him back in, which sometimes–rarely–he does, although all this is early, even for him.

5:01. “MrrrrOW. MrrrOWW?!” Now the bastard decides he’s on the wrong side of the door after all. I toss the covers off and heave his hairy ass out. Okay, now I can sleep for an hour and a half before the alarm goes off. I burrow into the covers.

5:23. “Beep.”

I peel my eyelids back open. This is not a cat sound, but an electric sound. A familiar sound that my cells seem to remember has unraveled me in previous years, previous houses. I peer up at my ceiling just in time to see a tiny red light flash. The fire alarm. No, can’t be. Maybe I imagined it. I lie there for eighteen long minutes.

“Beep.”

“FUCK!!!” It sucks to get out of bed angry, though I’m sure all parents do on a routine basis. I’m walking around the cold floors in my bare feet in a blind rage, trying to figure out if I have one of those goddamned square batteries somewhere. I fumble through a tupperware box filled with miscellanea, and–miracle of all bloody miracles–find said battery. Of course, the alarm itself is directly over the head of my bed; to reach it I would have to put a step stool directly on the mattress and hope I don’t kill myself. Ain’t going to happen.

5:54. I’m in a t-shirt, no underwear, balancing on five regular pillows and a doubled-over body pillow stacked high enough for me to barely reach the bastard beeping fire alarm, cursing a steady stream of filth. I yank on the plastic round thing from hell, manage to get it open, toss the old battery on the floor and by some act of divine grace get the new battery in and stop the insanity.

6:01. Back in bed.

6:03. Scratching at the front door. “MrrrOW?!”

6:04. Forget it, I might as well get up.

Mooj advice: Give your neurotic cat some of the Xanax (seriously, I’m making an appointment w/ the Vet), know how to replace your fire alarm battery, and always have extra batteries in the house. Alternately, as my friend Grandpa says, “You can sleep when you’re dead.”

So, in conceptualizing what Mooj in Orbit is all about, I’m thinking the more personal I let it be, the fewer people I’ll probably be willing to tell about it, and then I’ll have to leave the question of audience completely up to the mysteries of cyberspace. I realize a blog is not a journal per se. On the other hand, I want it to be real. What’s a good web-log if it doesn’t nag at you to find out what’s the latest. And I figure I’ve usually got more than enough drama to keep others feeling like they’re watching a soap opera. I know; I’m working on it.

But what the hell. There’s only the two of you so far, and I know you bitches don’t care that I’m a bit of a basket case right now. (Hey Juje, Hey Grandpa.) Besides, I can always delete it. So here’s the deal, in case anyone’s listening:

Cried out my soul this morning.

Cried down the dark hole

control be undammed,

sold and unrolled, truth be told. 

And maybe it was premenstrual

and maybe it was post-parting, ex post facto

but when I felt it swell

I put a towel on a pillow right there

on the dining room table 

and folded onto it, pouring out

roaring rain. 

When the water receded

and the wind finally died down

I took a deep breath and began writing my prayer

to that most infernally silent of silent gods, that wee voice

I strain to hear just about every night,

every morning when I open my eyes to the blue,

whose whisper I can sometimes almost catch. 

(“Hey, can you speak up?!”) 

Of course, I couldn’t hear anything, so I begged it to speak

through the pen, and I was choking

over the first part, about It being in me already

and me being an expression of It, because it

was so hard to believe

at first. But as the blue ribbon moved across the vacant

white I had this little flash: that healing is an immune system 

and there is an ocean of tiny emotional antibodies

always coursing through to mend scars

and coax us back

into hopefulness. A plankton-like baseline

we can call into action, but sometimes we have to

awaken to it. And so I did.

It wasn’t a thunder clap, just a tap-tap.

The rest of my day was kosher. Nothing like a good cry on an April morning. You should have seen the quantity of snot, given the recent cold. And this afternoon I noticed my lilacs opening up…know what I mean? 

“Rehab is for quitters.” -t-shirt

QUITTING has an interesting place in our cultural parlance. Maybe especially in the United States. We love it, and we hate it. So do I.

On one dimension, quitting is about everything we Americans–who are all about winning–hate. Quitting’s about giving up (say, The Dream), stopping something short, being spineless, not having any balls. In American culture, it’s the losers that quit. Our Protestant Ethic, long infused even in our Jewish and Muslim-immigrant DNA, tells us that working hard and getting ahead is equivalent to virtue. If you quit little league baseball as a little boy, you raise your parents’ “uh oh” antennae. If you don’t quit being a tomboy, little girl, boys are never going to like you. Only losers quit college. We say we care, but deep down I think most of us hate poor and homeless people because we figure they’ve obviously quit somewhere along the line; they’re just quitters. And God help her if an American woman quits shaving her arm pits. Bring on the Apocalypse!

But on the flipside, Americans are perpetually pressuring ourselves, and each other, to quit–bad stuff. This is the Puritan streak in us, the part that’s obsessed with our sins (the easier ones; not things like suffocating economic dominance, arrogant war mongering, and catastrophic environmental policies). How about that commercial that’s running right now, where all these sympathetic people are confessing how hard it was for them to quit smoking (before they started the new patch program or whatever it is)? I feel so bad for each one of them; the sweet mechanic guy, the warm-hearted motherly waitress lady, the nice black man. Gosh, maybe we shouldn’t be so harsh on the smokers, maybe we shouldn’t bombard them with those other ads that make them look like Nazis taping body outlines all over the pavement. It’s HARD to quit, dammit!

We really want people to quit smoking, drinking to excess, eating like ravenous boars, shooting heroin, gambling, beating their wives, being anorexic, obsesively exercising, being workaholics, staying with their bastard husbands, being gay (Ted Haggard), self-medicating, banging their heads against the wall, chewing their shoes, whatever. But we also want them to quit being sad, depressed, afraid, angry, suicidal, apathetic, bored, frustrated, and self-absorbed. Oh, and we’re also supposed to quit a whole other category of things previously associated with normal biological processes: getting acne, having wrinkles, aging, entering menopause, growing grey. Nevermind that if you subtracted all the Americans not engaged in these kinds of behaviors you’d pretty much have evacuated the country.

So let’s get this straight: we’re not allowed to indulge too much in those feelings or natural processes, but we’re also not allowed to self-medicate or act out to deal with them. But Botox and cancer-causing menopausal meds are okay. And don’t even THINK about us collectively addressing the underlying systemic problems that feed our individual dysfunctions. Why it doesn’t say, “Just Suck It Up” instead of “In God We Trust” on our dollar bills, I’ll never know.

I get invested in wanting people to quit, too. I’m a little codependent that way, though I’ve tried to rein it in over the last few years. I want a few of my friends to quit being alcoholics. I feel invested in seeing a few people I know lose weight. I justify this on the basis of wanting them to be healthier/happier, but I realize that’s partly an arrogant presumption on my part. Mostly, I think I selfishly want my good friends and family around for a long time. But I also get hooked into the charge of seeing someone “change for the better,” go through an epiphanal transformation, and that typically involves quitting something. That’s one of my addictions, something I need to quit: waiting for people to change. Yeah, me and the entire Oprah, self-help generation. We’re addicted to the miracle of quitting bad habits.

On other quitting fronts:

“I’m not the one who quit when it got hard,” I say to my ex-girlfriend.

“But you never quit,” she retorts.

Suddenly I realize I’m being criticized for being too committment-oriented by the woman who said she wanted to marry me. And she’s right; I have this “problem” (I must be still addicted if I can’t take the word out of quotations) of not quitting very easily when I really love someone. I must have suffered more in a past life than I ever could imagine in this lifetime, because I have this Hollywood movie/warbride/midwest farmer’s wife capacity for hanging in there in situations when everyone else I know would have said, “fuck this.” I’m just not good at quitting once I make a commitment.

The bright side of this is that such refusal to quit made me finish my Ph.D. The dark side is too many relationships I should have dropped at early critical junctures when there were signs. It’s an addiction to believing change is possible–or more accurately, that it is possible that someone will change for me. My therapist tells me it’s also about a destructive belief (addiction) that things need to be a lot harder than they have to in order for me to have love. As if I have to earn it through enduring a non-stop parade of overwhelming obstacles.

Ok, I’m back. I just had to go vomit.

That brings me to one more dimension of quitting (or maybe it’s just another facet of the second dimension above): the Liberatory Quit. This is not the kind of addiction-quitting you do because you don’t want to be buried in a grand piano case or your kidneys are killing you. It’s the kind you do because you’re hit by a lightning bolt from the sky, or you finally hear some clear inner voice, and you just know it’s time. It’s the “Take this job and shove it!” Johnny Paycheck kind, the “I Will Survive” kind.

So here it is: I quit. I quit not quitting.

Having said all that about moojes, my vision for this blog is that it is also about how hard it is, sometimes, to be a strong and independent and badass woman.

I wonder, for example, if all the moojes I so admire and am inspired by in the world, heroines like Ani DiFranco, Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, the amazons on the Denver Roller Dolls, ever have melancholy Sunday evenings like I do. I know that sounds stupid; they must. But sometimes I get this nervous feeling that I’m the only moderately successful person I know who sometimes crawls into my bed on a Saturday and hides for a few hours or feels fairly routinely blue on Sunday nights.

It’s not that I don’t have a lot going on. I teach political science at a good university–a job that I’m proud of and invested in, and not just because it took me so much longer to land a tenure-track spot after getting my doctorate than I ever thought. I feel called to teaching, and am inspired by it. I live in a sweet little duplex that I was able to buy last year, and tonight the floors are clean and there is a beautiful pot of chicken soup that I made on the stove. I have at least three creative projects I could work on–a collage made of credit cards; an iMovie about a trip to Dollywood I made with several of my friends a few years ago; a quilt from my niece who will one day arrive from China. But none of it is inspiring me at the moment. (Thus, these musings instead.)

Maybe it’s the sore throat/cold thing I seem to have caught. I haven’t been sick in more than a year (I feat which I basically attribute to Airborne and to snorting saline solution up my nose whenever I think of it before bed), but last night some nasty virus settled in and grabbed me by the neck with metal claws. So there’s that.

And there’s the whole being-single-when-I-thought-for-sure-I’d-basically-be-married-by-now thing. I consider myself a person who really thrives in and has a lot to offer committed relationships, so, although I can handle being alone better than most people I know, Sunday nights can be depressing for a person who’d rather be snuggling in with her sweetheart getting ready for a new week. Why I haven’t found the right person is fodder for at least a billion words, but for now suffice to say that it’s been a combination of perpetually choosing the wrong person or circumstances (let’s call that judgement), and luck, and timing. At any rate, it can make for long weekends (and not always in the good way). This is a phenomenon that I think people in good relationships forget, and which keeps others in bad relationships rather than face that kind of hollow aloneness.

So as I soak in my blistering hot bath tonight I’m going to believe that even the moojiest moojes have blue Sunday nights sometimes, or have wondered in their quiet soul places whether they’d ever be met by an equal partner. And I’m going to set my vision for the highest of possibilities.

Funny, I started my blog and then, the next day, got a call from my friend, let’s call her Ronald, who works for the WNBA. (She tells me I can’t use her real name because it might get her in trouble. For that reason I’m torturing her with the alternate moniker.) She called to tell me what a mooj Jennifer Azzi is. Apparently Ronald was spending a work-related day with all these basketball madwomen, includng the league MVP for multiple years, Cynthia Cooper. But Azzi apparently made an impression on her over and above everyone else. I don’t know what she did or said (she didn’t leave the details on the message) but I’m not surprised. She’s a total badass independent woman. Check her out: http://www.jenniferazzi.com/AboutJennifer.aspx .

It’s worth mentioning that Ronald’s a mooj too. Way back in 1997, I believe it was, I dragged her and a bunch of my non-sports ffan NYC girlfriends to the inaugural game of the New York Liberty for the newly birthed WNBA. I thought it was going to be a significant historical moment, which it was, and that we could support the team, which we did. They were playing the Phoenix Mercury; I’ll never forget because the Mercury was loaded with moojes, but the one that made the biggest impression on me was Cheryl Miller. She was Reggie Miller’s sister and a star in her own right back in the day–played in the Olympics and early women’s pro ball, changed the game itself. And she showed up coaching her Mercury in a tuxedo, this tall, gorgeous, confident African American woman, striding around the sidelines, effectively saying, “I’m not going to show up in a skirt suit, not even for this. I’m wearing a tux!” All of us twentysomething lesbians were in awe. A few seconds after the game started, though, we all fell in love with Liberty point guard Teresa Weatherspoon, but that’s another story.

Ronald really knew nothing about basketball that first day, but she obsessed with it and within a few years was flying down to Houston for finals games. Then she quit her life in another industry and, with virtually no related experience, landed a job representing female basketball players in their advertising and team contracts. Now, almost 10 years later she works for the league itself and knows all of the women who became her heroes. Not just knows them but hangs out with them. Women’s pro-basketball is her life now and these players are part of her world.

So while Ronald may think Jennifer Azzi’s a mooj, I think Ronald is. Even though she won’t let me use her real name, which loses her a couple of mooj points.

MOOJ

Origin: Spanglish, circa 1988.

def:  Strong, independent woman; not just an ordinary mujer. A woman to be dealt with. A woman who can deal.

alt: M.T.B.D. (Mooj To Be Dealt with).  

The term was born a long time ago, almost 20 years now. I was 20 years old, living in Madrid, Spain. I was having the time of my life (what does that term mean anyway? is this not, too, a time of my life?) Anyway, I fell in love with another girl for the first time. It was the universe cracking open and showing me a gorgeous explosion of epiphanies. I was in head-over-heels with everything. Let’s call it emblissed.

My first love and I made up a word for something we didn’t see a lot of among Spanish women, but when we did, we had a huge appreciation for it: A woman who did her own thing, her own way, for her own reasons, without apologizing. I remember we once saw a woman worker come out of a manhole in the street; something extraordinarily rare in this Catholic patriarchal bastion where women were sisters, moms, nuns, good girls, grandmothers–but not construction workers, not girls in hard hats fixing stuff in manholes, not–except in a few very interesting corners of the city–lesbians. Anyway, we knew when we saw that one that she was a MOOJ. And the term stuck.

So, me. Well, almost twenty years later I feel I’ve earned the term and it’s the first thing that came to mind when I had to come up with a name for this blog. And I like the concept of mooj in orbit. Connotations of circling around, on some unknown path, learning something different in each cycle. But also kind of floating out there, in space.