On billboards here and there on buses and other parts of the city, you see them. Advertisements for the show Dirty Dancing. Two black silhouettes suggestive of a male and female against a burgundy background, the female silhouette has "big hair" the male silhouette has a "mullet" suggesting that the story takes place in the 1980's. I saw such an advertisement the other day this week on the Blue Line train heading home from work, and all of the sudden my mind flooded with memories of my life back during my first marriage.
I recalled an incident where after my ex and I had been living together for about a year, and he openly told me of a date he had with some other girl from class. He had taken her to see a movie and then they had dinner at some Greek restaurant on Lincoln Avenue. It was one of the first restaurants in the city to sport an "old fashioned" brick oven, and I had always wanted to go. I love Greek food. He told me what he ordered and how interesting the girl was. She was from Israel, he said, she was an exchange student. It was her birthday, he had drawn her a card. He showed me. I decided not to be jealous, but I was hurt and I said so. I said, "You are living with me, why haven't you taken me to the Greek restaurant? Why couldn't I have gone with you?" And he answered, "Because she is interesting and you are not." As we had this conversation (because we never really argued until the very end), I could hear the soundtrack from the moving Dirty Dancing coming through the floorboards from the apartment.
That was over twenty years ago, and I had long pushed such unpleasant and painful memories of my horrible first marriage out of my mind, but a visual cue like that billboard on the L train and I was back in 1988, back in that apartment on Whipple Street in Albany park, with the hard wood floors and the lovely sunshine, as if it were yesterday, not two decades ago.
It took me a day to recover from that memory.
Years later when I finally had enough money to afford a therapist, she often told me that I could get insurance to pay for therapy if I allowed her to put down on my record recovering from "post traumatic stress disorder" and "depression." I laughed at her. "No way," I said, "It's not like I went to Viet Nam. For you to diagnose my with PTSD would be an insult to men and women who suffered true combat." After this latest incident of recollection, however, I wonder if perhaps I do have some attenuated form of PTSD, and I wonder if she had a correct diagnosis for my condition. And I wonder if I will ever completely recover from those years of suffering and abuse, not only from my former marriage, but also from the numerous painful experiences I had before and after my marriage.
Still, I had to give myself some credit for getting out of the marriage as soon as I found my own voice and started to think for myself. Again. I had to give myself credit for finding women to care and support me while I did it. I cannot thank Nancy and Marsha enough for the help they gave me, they and Suzette Elgin Hagin, who wrote the book The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense. All of them gave me the support and the strength to leave. They validated my perceptions. They gave me enough strength to leave that horrible situation. A lot of women are too shamed into leaving their ex husbands, some have no place to go. I was lucky. I had more than enough people encouraging me to leave him, and I had a lot of open doors.
So anyway, I moved on to new adventures, not any less painful, but at least a lot more fun and there isn't a day that I don't thank God in heaven that I am no longer married to that man.
And, I have healed enough to say that while I have forgiven him for being who he was at the time, and I have forgiven myself for making such an ill fated choice, when my gut instinct told me to run.
But I have not forgotten and I suppose I never will.
5Top: Most annoying Oprah Winfrey disciples - Celebrities- msnbc.com
Today, I heard on NPR that the government of Myanmar finally has allowed NGO's to enter their country to distribute aid to the victims and survivors of the cyclone that happened nearly two weeks ago. And also, I woke up to the story of the earthquake in China that just killed 9,000 people. Later in the day, as the death tolls of both disasters mounted, I found this ditty on the MSNBC website and I thought to myself, to what level of triviality had we come to? Is it really that important to dis Oprah's "friends?" What virtue can be gained by dissing the divine Ms. O's friends? If you don't like Oprah and her "friends" then don't pay attention to them. Personally, I love the Oprah show, I listen to her on XM and subscribe to her online newsletters. The only thing I don't like about her empire is her magazine, so okay, I don't subscribe to it.
I won't say that Oprah saved my life or even that I like her, but her shows have encouraged me to update my look, improve my diet and get my fatt butt out of debt. Yeah, sure some of her shows are over the top. Yeah, she's Oprah, not Aristotle, so I don't expect intellectual depth and sophistication from her discussions with her guests. She, like everyone else in these United States is in it for the marketing and the money.
Why are we so critical of Oprah, when she has done so much good in her role as a talk show host? She has, as Bono stated once in an interview with Bill Hybels of Willowcreek Church a couple of years ago,"leveraged her celebrity, to use it to promote good in the world."
And her shows on the soul are wonderful. Honestly, folks, Oprah is respectful of her guests and not manipulative at all. So far, I have found that the shows of her annoying friends that I have been able to listen to on XM are really very good entertainment (I listen to XM online, I chose not to get a radio). Also, I don't have a problem with Oprah being the popular spokeswoman of the New Thought Movement, promoting books like The Secret, etc. I may have some issues with the New Thought movement, but essentially, they are mostly doctrinal and philosophical pinpricks. I don't expect the host of a talk show to be able to discuss transubstantiation, or Plato's concept of the forms because that is what is not required on an internationally syndicated program such as Oprah's.
I like to think that I'm moving up the ladder of evolutionary consciousness, as described by Don Beck (author of Spiral Dynamics, et al.). Maybe someday, this green memer (yours truly) will make it into the ranks of the second tier. In the meantime, I'm down on the first tier, along with housewives in Wilmette having their refrigerator's cleaned by Dr. Oz. Yep, Oprah and her friends are definitely first tier thinkers (I doubt if I'll ever get to see my beloved Philosopher guide, Ken Wilber on her show, or that any one his books like, A Brief History of Everything, would ever make it on the reading list of Opraph's book club), but she and her "friends" are definitely inspiring millions to at least start ascending the evolutionary ladder.
Anyway, that's how petty we've become. Hopefully, if my day job hasn't drained me too much, I'll be able to post more of my thoughts on the scourge of pettiness over the course of the few days and weeks. It's a subject that I've been thinking about for awhile now and I want to give it some play.
In the meantime, let us keep the people of Myanmar and China, and everywhere else there has been a disaster in the world, in our thoughts and prayers.
A few years ago I started a blog, but it cost a lot of money to maintain the site, and so I gave it up. The other aspect of blogging is that it required me to stay in front of a computer to write. I have to sit in front of a computer all day for my job, so why would I want to come home and sit in front of a computer all night?
Then, I downloaded i-tunes to my computer and started to search for podcasts. I found the TED Talks podcast. I had never heard of TED talks, but I downloaded a few episodes and wow, I found some pure inspirational thought candy.
Well, anyway, a couple of months ago I watched the talk that Mena Trott gave about blogging, and it gave me second thoughts about the whole process of blogging and its social usefulness. What seemed to me to be a narcissistic activity, deserving of a wee bit of derision and contempt from my Puritanical side, now became an activity of a wee bit of personal significance and importance.
What I glommed onto in Mena's talk, was the idea that I could keep a record of my life and experiences for my descendants. Not that I plan on having children anytime soon (I am 47 years old, so too late now!) but the thought that I could leave something to those who follow me, gave me pause. So, that is the main reason I decided to specifically blog at this particular service because of the inspiration of Mena's talk at the TED conference.
I also had other reasons for blogging. I found that it would be a great way to personally write to my friends about what is going on in my life, as well as make new friends who share similar interests. My blog could serve as my own life newsletter directed to my personal network. Of course, I plan on adding links to other sites that gave me inspiration and more oxygen to breathe. Hopefully you will click on them and be as enriched by them as I have been over the years.
Yep. That's why I am starting this blog.
Now, let me tell you about the title of my blog.
This is a picture I took on my recent trip to Buenos Aires, Argentina.
This church is the one that General Belgrano (b. 1770, d. 1820) had attended, and the statue in front of the church commemorates the life and "battles victorious" of this famous general.
If you zoom in to the tower on the left (facing you, the viewer) you will see canon balls embedded in the tower. It turns out that these canon balls were put there after the church was built to remind the church goers of the the time that ordinary portenos, singlehandedly repelled the British "pirates" from the city.
I found the whole idea hysterical, but poignant as well.
