I have had a couple of breakdowns since I have been at home in Cleveland.  Moving out of NYC and into my childhood bedroom with my boyfriend can be a lot from time to time.  It has been almost a month since we arrived in Cleveland and though I am starting to get the hang of it, today I pretty much feel like:

From the clutter in my brain to the clutter on my desk, there have been countless lessons to be learned during this wonderful experience.

1. Always take care of yourself first because when you don’t, you feel like you are drowning.

2. Make sure you aren’t just hangry (when hunger causes you to be angry) before further indulging in your breakdown.

3. When 6 people are living together, there is always going to be a mess somewhere. Learn to cope with it.

4. You for sure can’t teach old dogs, new tricks.  (Zac, our dog, is 16 years old.)

5. Sometimes you just need to be alone.

6. Sometimes you just need to go out for ice cream.

7. You can not control everything.

If anything, it is nice to reflect every once in a while what lessons are to be learned from breakdowns and how to prevent them from happening so often. I find that this tends to be pretty helpful:

I.  John Baldessari Wrong 1966-1968

“Baldessari created this work after looking at an art instruction book about how to properly compose images. He said:

‘The person that did the book had sketches of the scene, of let’s say a landscape-but there would be two. And one would be right, according to him, and one would be wrong. And I loved the idea that somebody would just say that this is right and this is wrong. So I decided I would have a painting that was wrong, a work of art that was wrong-which seemed right to me.’”
(via LACMA)

*By the way, check out “A Brief History of John Baldessari” narrated by Tom Waits – in under 6 mins.

*

II.  On Being Wrong

 “The miracle of your mind isn’t that you can see the world as it is,

it’s that you can see the world as it isn’t.

–Kathryn Schulz via Ted.com

*

Bram Vanhaeren

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”

-Sir Ken Robinson

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. Thank you for being such a wonderful inspiration to us. We love you so much!

image via mathbabe.org

I was really disheartened yesterday morning when I heard news that North Carolina had passed an amendment banning same-sex marriages and civil unions.  The old-school song lyrics of The Youngbloods’ “Get Together“ ran through my mind, “C’mon people now…”  Admittedly, I heard the phrase in a much more exasperated tone than its 1960s vibe of peace, love and understanding; but nonetheless, c’mon!

I once heard that the mostly likely factor influencing whether a person is homophobic is whether or not that individual knows an openly gay person.  While I’m not implying that individuals opposing same-sex marriage and union are thereby homophobic, the opinion certainly conveys and perpetuates a strong degree of separateness, and emphasizes difference.

The national conversation on gay marriage took quite a different focus just a few hours later in the day when President Obama affirmed his support of gay marriage, making him the first in-office U.S. President to do so.  In addition to mention of openly gay members of his staff and those serving in the military, the President spoke of the role his daughter’s, and their dinnertime conversations, played in forming his belief.  A belief that has been coined an evolution.  And isn’t that the way evolution so often happens – from one generation to the next.

As timing would have it, our openly-gay father is hosting a fundraiser this evening in his home in Columbus, Ohio for U.S. Senate candidate Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin.  If elected, Rep. Baldwin will be the first openly gay person in history to serve in the United States Senate.  

I have been thinking of the concept of home lately. Sure, home is where the heart is. Home is wherever I’m with you. Love begins at home. These are all such powerful sayings. It’s true, there IS no place like home. If you use the word home as an adverb, it means deep and to the heart. As I have just recently returned home during a time of transition, I can not stop thinking about all of the places and times that I have felt most at home.

I realized two things while making this post. The feeling of home is not really about the places themselves, yet about the experiences I shared with the people there. The second is that in all of the images above, I felt deeply and to the heart, like myself.

I got really mad at Charles Bukowski last night. Earlier in the day, I’d run across the quote below from his novel, Women.

“I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn’t have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.”

I’d only been introduced to Bukowski once before and though I got a glimpse of him them, I don’t know him well at all.

Over drinks, I told a friend who knew him better how much Bukowski had irritated me and what a poor impression he’d made. Was he just going to flaunt his simultaneous knowledge of all that lacks and offer nothing to suggest change, evolution or attempts toward improvement?!  My friend listened with understanding and then set a broader context, as we do for the ones we know and care for.  I learned more about the man behind the words.  We acknowledged the truth that he evokes. I lightened my stance and amended my position.  In truth, I know Bukowski almost only as I know Che Guevara through his face on a t-shirt.  Or, so as to say, I know more about the people who wear him than I do about the man himself.  The quote above from Bukowski’s Women is powerful and taps into things I can relate to for sure.  What remained troubling to me though is the temptation to romanticize the listlessness and resign Bukowski conveys.

I see that Bukowski taps into very real feelings through authentic conveyance of emotion.  He speaks to dark, human feelings many of us feel, so we resonate with his words.  We read and we feel.  But after the feelings have been felt, I will agree:

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” – Albert Einstein