Love is.

 

He slipped out of bed, shuffled on slippers, and disappeared downstairs. I figured he had an early appointment. I only had thirty minutes myself to get up and out the door for a meeting, having wrung every last drop of sleep from the night. But when I hit the bottom of the steps I saw him walk in the door, shivering off the cold.

He'd gotten up early just to start my car, so it would be warm and ready for me to jump in and go...

This is what love is.

I'd been so sick for so long... I needed to take a nap before the movie. He kissed me and said he was running to the store. While I slept, he stood at the counter and opened the bag of popcorn. He took the small paring knife in hand, and cut out the kernels from every piece, because I couldn't eat them and he didn't want me to have to go to the movies and think about the fact that I couldn't have popcorn.

This is what love is. 

The first gift he ever gave me was a silicon soup ladle. I was puzzled momentarily until he explained,

"I was in the grocery store, and I saw this and thought of you - you have these nice pots but you only have a metal ladle, and I didn't want you to scratch up your nice cookwear."

We'd been dating maybe two months. Imagining him in the grocery store, thinking of me, made my heart happy. 

This is what love is. (And we still use the ladle!)

They say you don't know what love is till you know. The idea that something so fundamental and important to our happiness can remain undefined, unexplained, and unable to be conjured or controlled is maddening - but makes it so much sweeter when you do find it.

He held my hand for hours in the emergency room, while I squirmed on the gurney, delirious with pain. He wakes early to cook a hot breakfast for me on days I have an important meeting. When my new patent leather heels were being ruined by the brick sidewalk that was gobbling them up as we walked back from dinner on a freezing February night, he gave me his shoes, willing to walk the icy pavement in his socks.

This is a love that has made me a better person - a kinder, more patient person.  This is what you hope love is.

I remember when I was single how bad Valentine's Day made me feel about being single. It puts immense pressure on men to live up to an ideal created by mass media, card companies, restaurants, jewelers - even my grocery store has giant red heart balloon arches and a sea of red-packaged food products that smack you when you walk in the door!

So I swore that if I didn't celebrate it as a singleton, I would not celebrate if and when I was coupled. And that's why this is most definitively NOT a post for Valentine's Day.

What it is is a reminder that love is something that cannot be expressed in flowers, cards, chocolates, jewelry, restaurants, no matter the color, value, shape, or size.

Love is a big thing made up of a million small - sometimes microscopic - things.

It's opening a jar that's too tight. It's refilling a drink without being asked. It's singing a beautiful song off-key because the words remind you of them. It's when they pull the blanket over you when you're sleeping. It's turning your alarm down so it doesn't wake them. It's loading the dishwasher, and doing a load of laundry - and thanking them for taking the initiative - period. It's knowing sometimes they need to *not* talk about it just yet - and knowing that just because you're talking about it he doesn't have to do anything but listen. It's letting him rest his hand on your soft, fleshy hip when you are lying next to each other instead of swatting at his hand or turning away...

It's knowing there are twice as many good things as bad, and that every day he or she is in your life is better than if they weren't.

That's what love is.

***********************************************************************************************

Amanda Bynes & The Mental Illness Conundrum

She's crazy.
She's a trainwreck.
She's a stoner.

She pierced her cheeks, crashed her car - twice - while driving drunk, wears awful blond wigs, Tweets bizarre statements, and retires-un-retires-retires from acting on a regular basis. Her neighbors complain about the pot smoke and smell constantly eminating from her apartment, and finally called the police when they found her rambling and stumbling in the hallway, stoned off her butt.

Why don't her parents do something? Why doesn't someone do something?

There is no law against being mentally ill - but there is a law that prevents someone to lock up or restrain or forceably commit another person to a mental health facility unless they are a danger to themselves or others. When she was arrested most recently, she was given a psych evaluation before being booked at the police station - so they thought she may be having a mental health crisis, but once it was determined she was not going to harm herself, they had to release her.

There are very good reasons for this - there was a not-too-distant past time when it was all too easy to commit a mentally ill person to a mental health facility - an "asylum" in antiquated terms - when they were not deemed to be fit to live in civil society. Those so-called asylums were anything but - they were often no more than warehouses for the mentally ill and those with profound physical or emotional disabilities, or mental retardation.

Many people with mental illness do not know they are mentally ill. It slowly creeps up on them, and builds up in such a way that it's not evident to them they are ill. There are no red splotches on their foreheads that let a family member or friend say "Uh oh, Amanda, you seem to be coming down with a case of szchizophrenia or bi-polar...". I can only imagine it's worse with celebrities, who are already often eccentric by nature, or made that way by the bubble they live in.

When they feel out of control, they may  try to self-medicate.
How would you self-medicate? Alcohol and drugs....
Pot quiets the disturbing thoughts and the voices in their heads.

As someone close to several people dealing with a variety of mental illnesses, it saddens me that she will eventually be diagnosed and get help, and will have to look back at the social media trail of destruction in her wake, look around and ask herself the same thing the general public is asking every time she posts a strange selfie, or is caught rambling non-sensically on a streetcorner...

"Why didn't someone do something?"

The answer is complicated. It has to do with free will, government non-interference in our private lives, and the challenge of convincing someone with a problem that they in fact have a problem they don't think they have. It has nothing to do with how much her parents love her, or how badly she needs help.

We don't want the government dictating how we live our lives or keeping track of our medical history, but we see someone in crisis like she is, or like Britney Spears was, and our hearts want someone to do something. I feel that way too. 

The question is: Who gets to decide where the line gets drawn?

California disability rights activists in the 1960's, from what I can find, appear to be the source of the modern legislation attempting to ensure humane treatment of the mentally ill. The Conservatorship law that governs Britney Spears life was conceived and passed by California state assemblymen, and is described here: http://www.calhospital.org/overview/lanterman-petris-short-lps-act.

It seems this is also where the rumor circulating since I was a child that Reagan 'kicked people out of the mental hospitals in the 80's' comes from... He was Governor of California and passed the legislation reforming the mental health system in the 60's - not as president in the 80's. And that was bi-partisan legislation, by the way. Another example of a good idea executed poorly, to disasterous results.

It was a perfect storm. The ACLU provided the lawyers for the original cases that were the genesis of many changes and legislation - advocated that the definition of someone being able to take care of themselves should mean able to bathe, dress, and feed ones self, versus the more traditional definition of being able to obtain food and shelter and financial livlihood. But the half-way homes and community support services that were supposed to simutaneously arise to support the people who were not ill enough to be institutionalized, but were not well enough to live indepdendently, never materialized. Most of those people ended up as homeless on the streets as a result.

So Amanda Bynes bizarre behavior is very likely due to the onset of mental illness in her early 20's - the most common time for the emergence of several common mental illnesses, by the way. And the good intentions of both the Left and the Right in the 1960's to change the way mentally ill citizens interact with the healthcare system have created an impossibility to help those closest to her to help her.

In the end, it's a draw....
Should we provide support to those in crisis? Yes.
Should we protect the rights of individuals? Yes.

Meanwhile, people like Bynes are trapped in the midst of this philosophical tug of war.
I don't have an answer, but we have to keep asking the question.

On the Virtues of the (Paper) Address Book

Mead "At-a-Glance" Telephone Address Book

My computer died last week - gave-up-the-ghost died. (I'm writing this from my work laptop  - on my own time, just in case anyone's asking!)  But this is not a post about what happens if you lose your phone/computer/tablet and it contains all your addresses. And I do have a thing for paper and office supplies and wrapping paper and cards - always have. But this is not a post about how awesome paper is for paper's sake.

What this is about is the artifact we create over time when we keep a paper telephone-address book. This is about the way shifts subtle and dramatic in one's life are revealed in this simplest of devices.

I have kept a paper address book for years. I loved watching my mom keep hers, updating it with each birth, graduation, marriage, separation, divorce, move to a new house, new state, new job... and occasionally, a single solemn line through an entry marked the passing of a friend or colleague or family member. I'm sure the Franklin Planner people would advise to write everything in pencil, so it can be easily erased and updated. But that's not for me. I want to see the history etched into the pages. It's a living time capsule of your relationships. It's your past and present and it's always at your fingertips.

Much has been made of the tactile experience of reading a book that even the best e-ink on the best e-reader cannot replicate. The smell of slow decay that releases warm tobacco and vanilla notes from the paper as you turn the page will never emminate from an electronic device. And likewise, writing - and over-writing - one's contact list will never provide an equivalent experience to flipping through a paper address book. I can use different color inks to represent my family and D's. I can tuck a book of stamps into the pocket, so I'm not always searching for them in the junk drawer. I can slip business cards for the new salon I visit in the pocket, until I am sure I want to make it a permanent resident of the address book. (And when I tear the addresses off envelopes at Christmas I have a place to put them until I'm ready to update everything instead of sticking them on the fridge :-D)

I'm not advocating an 'either-or' approach, by the way - I keep both an electronic address book and a paper one. But it's the paper one that sit with when I'm writing party invitations or graduation announcements. It's the paper one that I reach for when I'm on the phone with someone and they need an address, and my computer isn't booted up. And if there's a major power outage, or I lose my phone, I will not lose access to my friends and family too...

Because ultimately, it all comes back to people. Physical addresses don't represent Facebook friends - they're real friends. Flipping through a paper address book is like flipping through a yearbook for your life - the good and the bad, by a name and address - but meaning much, much more.



Isn't this way better than a little black book? ;-)

 

At-a-Glance DayRunner 4-size Address Book from Staples

One more thing....
You always think you will remember forever the place your family lived when you were two. You think you will always remember the address where your grandparents lived when you were twelve and spent the summer with them. You think you'll always remember the address of the beach house you stayed at when you were fifteen. And chances are, you won't - but you won't realize it until it's too late. I make a habit of putting even 'obsolete' or un-used addresses in my book, as a kindof archive- addresses that I don't actually need for mailing anything, but they remind me of a time and place, and they provide fodder for a fun rainy day activity, to use Google Streetview to "revisit" places you used to frequent with your friends and family.


Tips - obvious, but true!

• If you can afford it, choose a model that allows you to add pages so you can add pockets, business card holders, and other 'add-ons' to customize the book's functions
• If you buy a refillable model, choose a brand carried by Staples, Office Depot, or another office products store or website, to increase the liklihood your style/size will not be discontinued
• Don't limit an address book to addresses: keep a list of your frequently-used websites, online accounts and passwords in the book - some, like the DayRunner, have pages just for documenting them
• A model with pockets lets you keep address labels, envelopes, cards, etc. until you have time to sit down and update your list - and keeps the fridge and junk drawer uncluttered!
• Buy an extra pack of page inserts when you buy the book and put them in it to guard against discontinuation of a specific size/style you like, even if you know it will be a long time before you need them, otherwise you'll lost the extra pack, I promise!