I just finished yet another 13-hour day, but a little something makes it all better.  A little something called the Back to Basics TEM500.  

What is it?  Ladies and gentlemen, it is a combination egg poacher and toaster.  I hear tell there is also a “meat warmer”, but not being a bacon person, I’ve yet to try out that feature.  This beautiful, precious little machine times the poaching and toasting to your liking- so you can tell it you want hard-poached eggs and lightly toasted toast and it does it all, flawlessly.

I have a jacuzzi tub.  It’s one of the top, oh, fifteen or sixteen reasons I pay the rent that I do- so that whenever I darn well please, I can have a jacuzzi bath.  Tonight was one of those times.  I do my best to relax in the bath, not let that quiet time be interrupted with all of my ongoing anxieties, so one of my tricks is to listen to meditation tapes, or, like tonight, put my iPod on random and see what it comes up with.

I’ve recently started participating in a pilot program about “Leading Teams” for a possible new Master’s program in Organizational Development.  And while I crave being in a learning space, crave being coached, and crave the feeling of my learning curve stretching ever upwards, at one point in tonight’s session, I put my head in my hands and said, “I think I’m seeing the bliss in the ignorance.”  My work situation is so broken, and even though I have the power and the means to fix it, I feel utterly overwhelmed by what it will take, and I feel paralyzed.  I could say this of my whole life, which is why it’s really important that I pay attention to this, and find a means to work through it.

“HELLO?”

Ahem. Sorry about yesterday’s blog. Sometimes my fantasy life simply has to take over my factual life, and in that fantasy life, Viggo Mortensen comes riding in on Hidalgo (but as Aragorn) and whisks me away to fight very clear bad guys so we can save the world. Instead… well. My life is slightly different than that.

This blog goes out to my dear friend Stacey.

I met Stacey (although she no longer goes by that name) when I was 10 months old and her mom started babysitting me. I don’t remember life without her. Growing up, I was always stunned by her smarts and her beauty, and I think she enjoyed my rebelliousness and the fact that I had so many boyfriends from such an early age that we were always walking down to the Hy-Vee so I could call them on the payphone. As a child, she stayed in Iowa, where I was born, as my family trapsed around and out of the country. We always tried to find ways for her to come visit me, but it never worked out; instead, I kept coming “home” to Iowa to see her. Her parents’ house in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is truly the only childhood home I know. They still live there, and the fruit trees that Stacey’s dad planted when each of his children were born now tower over all of us when I visit.

But as soon as she grew a little older, Stacey’s travels far exceeded my own, as she first visited Europe and then Africa, Indonesia, the South Pacific, and a thousand places in between. She’s been to places I can’t pronounce, and has a PhD on a subject my small brain can only begin to understand. She’s brilliant, and a scholar, completely down to earth, and can drink me way under the table. She’s totally pragmatic, but talk about ghosts and she’ll get nervous since she doesn’t want to tempt them, just in case.

Stacey and I made a pact last June as we were flying, together, to Peru.

Our stopover in El Salvador…

Every five years, we decided, we’d go on a major international trip. We planned our trip to Peru for about three years, so that would put us on a pretty good schedule. She has a family and a baby and a very full life; I have, well, umm, a very full life too, but it seemed to both of us that we could fit in an awesome overseas (or exotic) trip at least that often. Since Peru, we’ve been emailing each other about where to go next, and I think we haven’t had enough of ancient cultures and ruins just yet, so it looks like we are headed to Central America, and perhaps as early as 2009 (since our five year plan just felt like too long).

Stacey has been my best friend my entire life. She is an extraordinary travel partner, patient with my low blood sugar grumpiness, game for any kind of fun, excited about the small stuff, and gets “museum head” about as quickly as I do. But I don’t know that I’ve yet thanked her for what she did for me in Peru.

Our main reason for going to Peru was to climb Machu Picchu. It was going to be an arduous hike, to say the least: four days of mountain climbing, three major peaks, starting at 11,000 feet and climbing to well over 14,000 feet. Sleeping, of course, in tents, carrying a decent amount of gear. Both of us trained as best we could, which is to say, not as much as either of us wanted to, but we felt reasonably prepared and ridiculously excited.

The first day, I was feeling superb. I’d gotten over most of the altitude sickness I’d experienced the day before, and I get a pretty mad rush from pushing my body to extremes. We had some serious hiking that day, but none of it unmanageable, and both Stace and I, I think, were feeling pretty good. To climb the trail, you have to go with a tour group, and we chose our based on how they treated their porters, their friendliness towards vegetarians, and their (comparatively reasonable) price point. We were hiking with a team of 12, and all of them seemed engaging and interesting. Very promising first day.

Me, still under the mistaken impression that I was a badass.
That night, we hunkered down in our tent, layered with every last piece of clothing we’d brought with us; we hadn’t really considered that it was Peruvian winter. It was freezing cold, but our tent overlooked the mountains and I remember watching the sun go down and seeing the stars come out and feeling really happy and lucky to be there.

A few hours later, I was wrenched out of sleep, woken by the sickness in my belly. To this day, I don’t know if it was the water, the food, the altitude, or some dreadful combination of the above, but I knew I was in trouble. I gingerly zipped open the tent- which is the loudest noise in the world on the side of a mountain at 3 AM, and launched myself out so I wouldn’t soil all that was holy on the inside of the tent. I was burning up, and the frigid air felt both wonderful and horrible. I was almost delirious. I looked at the stars, and the mists in the sky, and felt the cold, crunchy, frosty grass beneath my knees, and I begged for release. Nothing came.

For three hours I rolled in and out of the tent, hoping to vacate this illness from my body in any way possible, but no go. At one point I wandered up to the “toilet”- a glorified hole in the ground that smelled worse than bathrooms on the NY subway- and prayed. Not to anyone in particular, just to the powers that be, to be able to throw up. I stayed there for an hour, until I heard a very loud and scary rustling coming quickly toward me, and rather than meet unexpected Peruvian wildlife, I crawled back down to my tent and tossed and turned until dawn.

That next morning, I knew I was in trouble. I was in massive pain, horrible stomach cramps, and I couldn’t eat. And this was the most difficult day of the hike. The soreness in my legs from yesterday’s hike was nothing compared to the agony in my belly, and I quickly started falling behind the group. The team leader was at first worried, then annoyed, and then alternately annoyed and worried as I got worse and worse. At one point, I was literally crawling from rock to rock. I couldn’t eat, so I had no fuel; I could barely drink, so I was quickly getting very dehydrated, and I had to take frequent breaks because the pain in my abdomen would sear through me every time I took a step up. And that was the other thing: I was climbing not just a mountain, but the most difficult pass of the trek, known as, if you can believe it, “Dead Woman’s Pass”.

Finally, the whole team was sent ahead, save for the trek leader, and a porter, who carried my meager pack since I couldn’t even manage to carry a bottle of water. And, Stacey. Who stayed with me every single step of that day. She hiked about ten paces ahead of me, taking breaks when I did, talking me throu
gh the worst bouts of pain, and from her words, thoroughly enjoying herself because rather than thinking about her pace, or keeping up with the team, she could take her time and look around and really enjoy the beauty of the hike.

The last steps up to Dead Woman’s Pass were some of the most painful of my life. We did, however, get to witness herds of llamas, and scores of ancient ruins, as we made our way, and I learned just what my body is capable of when it is pushed beyond all endurance. Several times, the trek leader asked if I was going to make it, or if they needed to call a helicopter to medivac me out of there. And I didn’t answer, I don’t think, I just kept pushing, crawling, scraping my way to the top. And when I finally did, Stace was there with me. We took pictures of each other at the sign that designated just how high were were- over 14,000 feet. I don’t recommend spending any major time at that elevation.

Going down on the other side of that pass was almost as hard as going up- the pain in your knees is shocking, and the Inca steps are huge. But by the time I got to the other side, I knew, at least, I was gonna live. That night, I’ll spare you the details of my body violently ridding itself of what ailed me, but the next morning I was able to eat a little breakfast and completed the last two days of the hike. I was incredibly weak, but in comparatively little pain.

Both Stace and I managed to be really ill the rest of the time we were in Peru, but it just became a thing we had to deal with. We both had birthdays on that trip. Hers was on an island in Lake Titicaca; mine was in Lima. We decided to splurge for a fancy hotel in Lima, and although it wasn’t fancy by American standards, it was utterly luxurious at the time, and had a little hot plate for cooking. Neither of us could still eat much, but Stace went to a local store and bought fixins to make me one of my favorite comfort foods: mac and cheese. We ate buckets of the stuff, and paid dearly for it later, but it was delicious.

Indeed, it took me a couple of months to return to normal once I got back. But return I did. And I don’t know how I got so lucky to be partly brought up in Stacey’s family, and to have Stace as a friend for my entire life. Machu Picchu was a humbling experience, both in the breadth of Stacey’s patience, and in the limits of a body that you think can handle just about anything. I only got up that mountain because Stace was there with me, pointing out llamas, telling me I wasn’t missing much being hunched over a path of rocks for an entire day. I hope to be able to return the favor some day. I *don’t* want Stace to ever be that ill again, but if the situation is ever reversed, man, I will *carry* her up that mountain if need be.

*sigh*

I had the lucky fortune of experiencing a truly transcendent massage today. Not all massages are created equal, and this was one for the ages. I’m usually pretty picky about the massage therapists I’ll use, but I was feeling a little desperate and my usual choices were all booked up. But I climbed on the heated table, placed my face in that crazy cozy toilet-bowl-looking ring, and almost fell asleep waiting for my woman to come in. When she finally did, she asked me what needed work (shoulders, low back, glutes, well, everything). And then she launched into my upper back and the minute she pressed into my shoulders, I knew I was in for a beautiful hour. It’s kind of like that feeling when you first talk to a man, that very first conversation, and you realize quite quickly that you don’t want that conversation to end. That moment of feeling like you are in truly good hands. Lucky for me, that happened quite literally to me today, and I’m all the better for it. I know some people are freaked out by being rubbed by a stranger; and maybe it’s because I’m rubbed by strangers more often than, well, hmm. That last sentence could be construed a number of ways. Suffice to say that I am happy- nay, ecstatic- to fork over cash to pay an expert on the human body to rub the bejesus out of me.

The thing is, massage therapy is called therapy for a reason. A few times, she dug deeper than I expected, and found tightness I was unaware of, pain I didn’t realize was there.

I recently read about that company in Japan that is giving “heartache leave”: time off if your heart is broken. Apparently, the older you get, the more time off you get, since breakups seem to get harder as you age. I’ve only ever had to take “heartache leave” once: Valentine’s Day, 2001 when my boyfriend told me he was in love with his grade school sweetheart. (Hard as that was to hear, phew! What a dodged bullet.) I had just started a new job, but I couldn’t function, so I called in heartbroken, and my bestest brother in the whole wide world with the bestest then-girlfriend in the whole wide world left the side of said bestest girlfriend and came and got me and took me out and got me drunk and played pool with me all night at my favorite bar in the East Village. On Valentine’s Day. That, friends, is brotherly love. Needless to say, it’s not really my favorite holiday.

Anyhoodle, I think that even more progressive than heartache leave would be a stipend for massage. Maybe some companies do this, like, well, Google, but it shouldn’t be so revolutionary. Massage promotes wellness on so many levels, and I truly believe that if I could afford a massage every other week, I’d be a far more productive member of society. And, well, I’m pretty damn productive as is, so maybe I could even save the world. Or, someone could. But I guarantee, if all of us could afford to be rubbed by professionals on a regular basis, the world would be a sunnier place.

I just made an embarrassingly elaborate dinner for… myself. I won’t go into details, since that is NOT going to be the topic of my blog, but I will say that I also opened an embarrassingly expensive bottle of wine (given to me at a fundraiser) and I’m well into the deep of the bottle. “War Games” is on the tele and I’ve, in my usual form, forsaken all Saturday night invites to do zorky things at home.

However, I was not home last night.

Instead, I was at an Alliance for Justice meeting up in St Helena. Now, I consider myself to be reasonably politically active, aware, and awake, but somehow some of the recent Supreme Court decisions- and horrific track records of Roberts and Alito- escaped my radar. I remember being stunned and disgusted when both Roberts and Alito were confirmed, but somehow, with every last little thing I have to worry about, I managed to stop freaking out about it. Last night I realized that I should be still freaking out about it- especially since these guys are in reasonably good shape, and will be justices until they resign- or until they are dead. I’m thinking about sending them daily gift boxes filled with hamburgers and cigars.

Even more embarrassing than my elaborate dinner was the real thing that got me to go to an event a half hour away after a 12-hour day:

Oh, Brad Whitford. You are dorky and smart and handsome and unassuming. You work for reproductive rights for women, against the death penalty, and you had the good grace to come speak to a group of devotees last night, here in this tiny corner of the world. You narrated “Supreme Injustices”, a most disturbing film that details two utterly terrible decisions of the Roberts court. You hung out in the same room as me all night, as I wistfully and contentedly (and probably disturbingly) stared at you from not so much of a distance.

“It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much.” These were the words of Justice Stephen Breyer, in regards to some of the decisions made by the Roberts court. In just two rulings, those on the radical right- including Alito and Roberts- made major decisions in favor of big business, sexual discrimination, and against racial diversity in schools. It’s enough to make you throw up. I realize that these days, there is too much information coming at all of us, too much bad news, but if we don’t lean on our elected officials to make sure that freak-wad nutballs like Roberts do NOT get confirmed, then we are screwing our children and ourselves out of basic human rights.

I know we all have to pick our battles. And I know that the Alliance for Justice website at www.afj.org sucks. But check it out anyway, and order the film “Supreme Injustices”. Not only will you be far better informed; you’ll get to see Brad Whitford strut his stuff. Whatever it takes.

I’m realizing I could keep a blog about any number of enthralling subjects: yoga, knitting, baking, cooking, sewing, baths, etc. but I think the market has been cornered by people who only knit, or only bake, or only take baths. Actually, maybe there is some room left in the “bath” blogs. Maybe that could be my focus. But when you realize you have a gift- for instance, truly, deeply understanding when the perfect relation of tackiness vs. firmness vs. moistness has been reached for your pizza dough- isn’t that worthy of shouting from the rooftops? No? Well, okay. But damn I made some good pizza dough today. I’ll spare you the recipe. Just- really- think about it: pears, ricotta, roasted garlic, roasted mushrooms, fried sage, sea salt, and fresh baked pizza dough. Bottle of fat Zinfandel. Good company. Fresh flowers, good music. Not a bad Saturday. If only I could quiet my daydreams.