nevver:

Bill Murray, Cannes

today i had surgery.

a patch of skin had to be removed from my abdomen for biopsy for cancer cells.  originally we were supposed to get the results right away but they decided to send it out instead.  i will know next week.  i am trying not to worry.  but we all know how good i am at that.

the worst part was this past week, during which sleep was very troubled and my stomach refused food for a few days.  i had pre-admissions testing on friday.  poking and prodding and all that.  mom came into town last night, which helped a ton.  she took me to the hospital at 6am this morning for the surgery and promptly ambushed every single person in scrubs with 9 million questions.  she loves me a lot.

i am happy to report that i managed to fit in 2 stargate jokes during my walk with the physician’s assistant from the pre-screening office to the operating room.  the operating room, by the way, is the most terrifying place on earth.  i hope to never go back there ever again.  and why do so many dudes need to be in there for the surgery?  does it take 9 people to cut out a piece of skin?  (they all saw my boobs.  every single one of them.)

general anesthesia is pretty sweet.   one second this guy is rubbing my forehead telling me to think about a beach vacation and the next second i am waking up in the recovery room as my mom interrogates the nurse about why my heartrate was so high.

now i am home in my bed, waiting for pain meds to kick in.

maybe next year for mother’s day i will get my mom something other than an ulcer as a gift.

love, LR

today is a lesson in how the beginnings of things can be just as painful as the ends of things.  i am sitting at the seattle airport wondering about how it is that today is the day my heart has decided to mourn the loss of this life i gave myself to for 4 years and gave up in one month of planning and packing and goodbye-ing.

i’ve known for some time that destruction gives way to new growth.  4 years ago i stood out front of this very same airport and learned that lesson in the hardest way possible, watching someone i loved depart from my life, understanding for the first time that our paths would not and could not intertwine.  and in that excruciatingly painful moment, a new part (a better part) of my life began.

i am so good at the destruction part.

it is maybe even the thing that i do best.  it is in my blood and it’s who i am and it’s what i wish i could shed like an old dead skin.

i left this existence behind 6 months ago.  i watched the lights of the city skyline disappear in my rearview mirror and pointed my thoughts forward, eastward.  i am good at the leaving part. 

but now the leaving is over and i am still neck-deep in the trappings of a new beginning and today i am drowning in those neck-deep trappings.  i wish i understood why the universe chose for destruction to proceed new life and why every good thing comes with 900 painful things and why i can’t just shed that pesky need to leave like an old dead skin but today is not for understanding but rather just for mourning.

there is something to be said for a good long cry.  i can feel the sadness escaping out of every pore of my body in this moment and i am powerless beneath the weight of it.

it is a huge heavy sadness and i wish i could choose not to mourn like i have been choosing not to mourn for 6 blissful months, but today is for mourning.

here beside these familiar big windows looking out on a familiar view, my unfamiliar new self is mourning the loss of the familiar.

i am exactly where i need to be at this exact point in time, and i am euphorically happy with my decisions that lead me to this necessary place but every good thing comes with 900 painful things.

i have to willfully choose to believe that the best things are worth the losses that are required beforehand, alongside, between and after.

life is an ever-grueling exchange of this sort.  in its most fluid moments, it requires every bit of sadness my heart can muster.  it requires this soul-aching mourning for every large and every small and previously unidentified loss in order to clear out space for every new and potentially revolutionary good thing.

we must be water and stone at the same time and what could be more painful than that?

for now i will sit here near familiar views from familiar windows with a familiar soul-deep ache in my chest, pointing my thoughts forward, eastward.

eventually everything disappears in the great expanse behind, destroyed by my own hands and upturned like so much dry soil.

i am water and stone and i am going home.

love, LR

(via ghostwood)

the words that professionals will use to describe you to yourself are so potent you will wake up with a hangover the next day.

as it turns out, everything in life is about attachments.  it begins at birth.  if your earliest attachments were non-ideal, then most of the succeeding ones will be as well.  and guess what’s more!  it’s going to be by your own doing!  you will unwittingly seek out people that fulfill your need to consistently recreate your deeply ingrained neuroses.  you will not even know you are finding them but they will always be around.  

i am reading about these things in my textbooks but these things are already in my brain and heart and every cell of my body.

i’m going through this process of separation.  i have to take a whole class about this process in the fall.  it’s a methodical way of deciphering what is and isn’t your own voice in the matter.  it’s extreme self-knowledge.  it’s compartmentalization.  it’s the admittance that all of those things i just listed are impossible and every time you try to help out another human being, you are going to bring your own neuroses and identity and filters and prejudices and anger and hopes into the room with you because you are only human and this is what it means to be a human.

for example: this whole Kony 2012 thing is exactly that.  the agency that made the film is taking a lot of flack for being white dudes in their 20’s/30’s trying to “save africa.”  the world has seen its fair share of paternalistic, self-serving, ethnocentric (western, mostly) and ignorant movements in the past.  of course everyone is going to jump to that conclusion immediately.  i’m not taking a side.  i’m just saying that to leave our own identity out of an equation is not an easy task.  

more importantly: i think that questioning motives is a great thing.  i think if we don’t do that, we are denying our own humanity.  and that is how dictatorships and imperialism are born.  

today i had a conversation about this with a professional.  she said that separating your voice from the voices of all the people/places/events that have a voice in your history is a lifelong battle.  

we are not just sum totals of thousands of small and large disappointments and unmet needs.  that is not all we are.  

i think we have to fight to be more than that.  and what’s more: fight for each other to be more than that.

people are always slipping through the cracks.  heck, i am reading two 600-page textbooks about how easy it is for people to slip through society’s cracks because their lives have taught them to feel like nothing more the sum total of its many disappointments.  but i believe in fighting for those people, in fighting for them to be more than statistics in my textbooks.  

i believe that i have lived to see year 27 because i have always had people fighting for me.  and though i have oftentimes (read: always) been incapable of expressing the depth of my gratitude in the face of that, i am overwhelmingly grateful.  

what i know about is detachments.  that is my specialty.  i will bring that into every therapy session i ever conduct with a future client.  i bring it into every new relationship with anyone i ever meet.  it is my darling neurosis that i recreate every day but so many people have fought for me to be more than that, and i am.

i am working on separating that voice out from my own voice.  it is not my own voice.

being a human is an alarmingly complex business, and so many of us are making a mockery of the whole thing but i think we’re worth fighting for anyway.  i don’t even believe in bad seeds.  shit you try avoiding those pesky cracks in society when they’re the size of the grand canyon in your neighborhood.

love, LR

naive-kids:

picalla:

Chinese farmer Hao Xianzhang has perfected the process of growing pears inside Buddha shaped plastic molds. They are sold at 50 yuan (about $7.32 USD) in the village of Hexia, China and are thought to bring good luck.

(via imgTumble)

(via cognacandcoffee)

discoverynews:

First Test-Tube Hamburger Ready This Fall

The world’s first “test-tube” meat, a hamburger made from a cow’s stem cells, will be produced this fall, Dutch scientist Mark Post told a major science conference on Sunday.

Post’s aim is to invent an efficient way to produce skeletal muscle tissue in a laboratory that exactly mimics meat, and eventually replace the entire meat-animal industry.

keep reading

You know those sorts of days that are so bad that you come home and realize you’re out of frozen waffles and it feels like the most devastating event in the history of humankind?  

Well, that is what my day has been like.  And now I am sitting here not eating waffles and I am about to fall apart.

This morning during my 5-block walk to the gym I got into 2 shouting/shoving matches with strangers, ran 6 miles at the gym, and then was still aggressive enough to get into yet another verbal altercation with another stranger on the walk home.  Most days I can let it go when someone tries to start something with me out there in the urban jungle.  BUT NOT TODAY.  Today I was like: “you want to start something?  Ok, I’ll bite.”  

I decided on the walk home from work tonight (pre-waffle-realization) that it’s ok to still need time to process the transition of being in NYC and being in school again and trying to juggle a personal life and work and class and writing huge papers and trying to plan out the future at the same time.  My head is a jumble of SO MUCH information right now, and I feel like I can’t even begin to process it all until I can sort out how I feel about the fact that I once again did the thing where I pack up and leave without admitting to myself how sad I’d need to feel before I could let go of that chapter of my life.  

And I am so lonely in this city.  This is a very lonely place.

I have met some really great people but I keep on thinking back to what I had before and nothing could come close.  I miss you guys so much, I am breaking into one million tiny pieces of sentimental mush.

And that is precisely what I did not plan to allow myself to feel.  But I guess if there’s one thing my entire dysfunctional life experience has taught me so far, it’s that you can’t shut yourself down.  Your feelings will find you!  And always at the worst times, when you are just way too busy to be feeling so many feelings.

I am hurting big time, missing you all and daydreaming about bike rides to Golden Gardens in the summer and shows at the Funhouse and nights laughing at Street Bean with the world’s most amazing kiddos and about how the cherry tree outside my old bedroom window in the house on West Republican Street will be blooming soon and I even miss squishing all the cherries under my shoes as I walked up those creaky wooden porch steps every day.  

SIGH.

I just need to fall apart over this, to lay around and mourn what I chose to lose and mourn my inability to stay very long in any place and what that will always mean for me.  I will always find myself once again in this spot: trapped between homes without one of my own and with my heart so deeply withdrawn, I don’t feel my own feelings until many months have melted away its defenses.

This is who I am, who I was born to be.  I am aching to hold still.  

Love, LR

(via thingssheloves)