Why I am meditating
I am a beginner at shamatha practice and as such, I feel as if I have just dipped my toes into the water surging at the edge of a vast ocean. When I take my cushion and focus on my breath, my thoughts are so voluminous that it seems like a losing battle to label each one as “thinking” and let it go, for the moment I notice my thoughts another group of them becomes visible and I feel as if I am racing along a whitewater river without a raft, trying to keep my head above water, thoughts threatening to submerge me. I hear snatches of music and rhythm in my head, and sometimes the thoughts collect into pain and I can feel my despair rising. I am starting to learn how my mind works, and sometimes, just at the end of my practice time, I feel a warmth and peace with my mind, my body and my self, such that I don't feel any division between them - I am me at this age and this time in this life.
These are baby steps, so small, but I can feel that universe, that ocean, as within my reach, and before I arise from my cushion I know that I can become an integrated person – someone who is alive in the present and can put the past away where it belongs, and stop waiting for the future. That’s who I want to be. Someone who is alive in the now, and not waiting for my life to happen anymore.
meditation
Queen of Pain
I have had a tumultous week, and most of it has been while sitting still. I have been racked with abodominal pain that is at times so severe I want to scream. I saw another doctor at my PCP Monday and had some bloodwork done to check for infection, and finally came home for good Tuesday after yet another abdominal ultrasound, which failed to find anything. Wednesday I pressed Capital Surgical to see me and after talking back and forth with the nurse most of the day they pushed me into Rex again for a HIDA scan, which checked me for a leakage from my common bile duct into my intestine – a possible complication from my cholecystectomy; it was normal. Thursday I had a consult with them, and they told me they had done everything they could do for me and that they were sending me back to my PCP and recommending a gastroenterologist, who might want to do a “scope (ECRP)” as well as check for other things going on like gastritis, which I think is the generic gastrointestinal condition you are diagnosed with when no one knows what’s wrong with you, kind of like that mysterious “pharyngitis.”
Friday I went back to my PCP and spent a long few hours there. He asked me a lot of questions and we went into detail about my pain, my other symptoms like constipation and nausea, and my history of abdominal complications especially my surgery for fibroids. They gave me a pelvic X-ray and found that there was excess stool in my bowel, and after a post-void catheterization (doesn’t all of this sound lovely? I mean, talk about the thing you don’t ever want to go through in your life, having some one climb through your bowels to find out what’s wrong with you has to be on the top of the list) which was normal, the doc decided to send me for a pelvic ultrasound to check for the possibility of endometrial tissue complicating matters. When I had my myomectomy, the fibroid had grown through my uterus into my abdomen, and most women who have grown fibroids grow them again. Since that conversation, I can’t get this image out of my head: fibrous growths rearing out of my uterus and digging through my intestines, wrapping themselves around my colon and taking root like some alien invaders out of a horror movie. He also gave me some industrial-strength laxatives and Ultram for pain – hallelujah. It doesn’t take it totally away but it takes the edge off it enough that I can think a little. A very little though. I get so tired. I’m getting tired now, writing this. I want to curl up in a ball and die.
More answers, more questions
I received a thought-provoking email from Rick Kissiah today about staying in the program, and it led me to understand that I'm being rigid, and that rigidity is a knee-jerk defensive posture of mine, something I bring to bear in situations when I'm upset that things are not going the way I thought they would. This rigidity pushes me into a childish mentality that insists on being a pain in the ass if she can't get her way, just to prove she exists. It's a child's reaction to having adults run the world. On the one hand, this attitude has helped me, because it helps me figure out ways to get to the goal when the paths I've come to count on become blocked. But it gets disguised as Zen acceptance when the paths are blocked and I'm just too tired or petulant to find another path; I'm saying "alright, this must be the universe's way of telling me to stay put," what used to be "God's will," something I don't believe in anymore, when really all I'm doing is saying, damn it, I wanted my way and I can't get my way so I'll just get in everyone else's way by sitting here right in the middle of the damned path. It's just selfish and stubborn. It needs to be let go.
Rick told me 518 wasn't proving to be that taxing for him because it's really designed for the kids who haven't worked before who make up the bulk of the students, so the prospect of doing 515 and 675 in one semester might not be so bad. But he also pointed out that graduate school is about building more options for one's future, which is what I started this for in the first place. I don't want to be a technical writer, and neither does, he so our paths are similar although not the same. While where I am is pretty good right now, it's not where I want to be in ten years, and the higher-up options in marketing (Marketing Director positions) are definitely not where I want to be, either. So I took this all with me and went for a walk this morning, and stewed and chewed on it, and then later, while I was reading a Hayden White article for ENG 514 it hit me: what I need to do is figure out if I want to join one or several of the existing conversations in technical communication, which will not only inform my 675 project, it will inform my decision to get a PhD in the field, too. If not, then the search will just continue on.
Back to my cushion.
Media day is here, basketball is right around the corner,
and that makes losing football that much easier to take. I was thrilled to listen to
Herb Sendek's press conference this afternoon: no mention of chopping wood, not even one time; surfing right past the "who is the new leader on the team" question; had to laugh when Coach mentioned Julius' new-found publicity on the NBA network. Hubby and I watched Jules in training camp the other day, and Julius is still out there representing NC State. Jules' debut on the "Real Training Camp" show was when the general manager pointed him out and said "Julius Hodge - first guy here every day." It's just a little bit longer to wait, right?
Go Wolfpack!
Something of an answer
Dr. Dicks doesn't know if 675 will be offered in the spring but should know by January. I've decided to enroll for the spring and see what happens. Dr. Dicks thinks I may have to take 515 and 675 in the fall and take 518 in the spring, but I won't be doing that. 515 and 518 will be offered in the fall as far as he knows. All this is very nebulous. The reason 675 may not be offered in the spring of '07 is that there may be only 3 students who want to do 675, and the people "upstairs" (administration) won't let Dr. Dicks offer the course. This is where the rubber meets the road, and gets stuck, at NC State and where I get so bloody frustrated. It's such a frustration, but the bureaucracy always wins. But I'm not fighting it, and I'm not waiting it out, either. I'm just not going to enroll, and I'm going to leave that path behind. I'm going to take it as a sign that I belong somewhere else, and that's it. The more I think about it, I just have to breathe it out, and let it go. I thought hard about going back to the CTU webmaster program, but that's not me either. I just don't have the patience for the programming/software side of it. I like the writing, and figuring out the architecture and the story of what I want to say, and I like figuring out the projects. I like marketing. Perhaps graduate school is just not meant to be for me, and that's it. I've done okay without it so far. I always felt like it was the missing piece in my life, but maybe that's all just bullshit. Maybe my life is just fine the way it is. Maybe I am already where I am supposed to be.
Not an answer, but the next step in the path
Right as I was finishing up my last post this afternoon, I received an email from E-Ching that the MSTC program had made the decision to allow some MS students to do their 675 project in the fall of '06, but that this means that 675 will not be offered in the spring of '07. To say that this made me upset would be a gross understatement. I was unable to get into ENG 515, a required course, this past semester despite wanting very much to take advantage of the fact that Stephen Katz was teaching it, because I will not be graduating in the spring of '06. I could have taken 518, but given my work load, the desire to also take 514, another rhetoric course, and the fact that 518 was listed in the course catalog as being available in the spring semester as well as the fall, I made the decision not to take 518 this semester and only take 514, planning on taking 518 this spring. Not being able to take a required course this semester meant by default that I was not going to graduate before spring of '07, another major factor that I took into account. Given the stress of my workload and my subsequent surgery last week, I feel that I made the best decision I could at the time, which entailed a considerable financial burden of another two semesters of school. Now, however, not only is 518 not going to be offered in the spring, but I'm not going to be able to graduate with a degree before fall of '07 at the earliest, if this is in fact the decision the program has made, because I cannot take 675 before taking all of my other required courses, and even if I could, there is no way in hell I would take three required courses in one semester, one of which is my capstone project,
and work full-time.
One of the main reasons I chose NC State University is because of the flexibility of the part-time program, and this "flexibility" is the thing that has continually failed me time and time again over these past four sessions. Many of the courses that I might have been very interested to take given my chosen track of study, website design and development, are not offered in the evening, including most of the juicy computer design and development courses like Visual Thinking (would love to take it, but unfortunately marketing needs to take place in the daytime when people, um,
work). In place of offering any other required course, my department is offering 519 again (everyone, take Jason's class, it's great) and 508 (usability) - okay, perhaps, but nearly redundant given the fact I have already taken 519. Granted, we didn't go in-depth into usability factors, but it could be argued that most of what we did in 519 centered around whether or not websites actually
worked.
Advising sessions are usually only offered during one evening session and, oddly enough, always seem to get filled up by TAs who don't have real jobs and could easily get to campus during the daytime. So every semester, I have to take nearly two and a half hours off of work to come see Dr. Dicks for ten fucking minutes during the day. During the day, it usually takes me 45 minutes to get from RTP to NC State and find a place to park. If I'm lucky. One semester it took me nearly 75 minutes. Can I get a
humina humina??? To essentially get from him a piece of paper with a number on it that he could easily have delivered to me via email, which is a form of communication invented about, oh, thirty years ago and which most civilized people employ for necessary communications, so I can bloody register for the classes I can't fucking take.
Jesus wept, as they say in theology circles.
So now, essentially, the MS TC program is making it impossible for me to get a degree in anything like time. Well, this upsets me mightily. I got very mad, then, very depressed, then mad again, then depressed, and now, well I have an appointment with Dr. Dicks tomorrow at which he will either confirm or deny whether or not I can take 675 in the spring of '07. And if I cannot, I'm dropping out of the program. I was at a loss for what to do, but now I'm thinking I will go back to my original idea which was to take the webmaster classes at the computer training unit and fuck all this noise altogether. Because otherwise there would be no way, even if I did get into the PhD program, for me to finish said program before 2010. It would be more like 2012.
No wonder there aren't enough technical communication professors. STC doesn't seem to want any student members, and NC State doesn't seem to want any technical communicators.
I think I'd rather find someplace that wants me around.
Home, with staples
Home, and feeling somewhat better althought not nearly at 100%. I'd say I'm officially at 50%, with reservations. I have four incisions, one in the center of my torso, two on the right-side of my upper abdomen, and one at my navel. The one at my navel and the one at the center of my torso each have three haphazardly-placed staples.
I feel like a leftover office memo. My surgery went very well, started earlier than scheduled and was over with within an hour. I suppose I'm happy things went so efficiently. $13,000 later . . . staying at Rex overnight was fine, but of course, I had drugs. Being home has been fine, too. I have not yet experienced cabin fever. I am actually enjoying the time to myself, time to think, time to meditate on my new meditation cushion, time to think about the changes I've been through this year, about where I'm going, where I want to be.
About three months ago I spoke with my shrink about dealing with the part of my PTSD that brings me up against horror and despair by trying to live in the moment when it happens, instead of trying to push it away. I told him that since my suicide attempt in 1999, I had found great strength and courage in reading Rilke's Duino Elegies, and others of his poems when he talks about pain being a gift because it is one of the few times when we as humans live fully in the present. The other, of course, is joy. Pain, physical pain especially, refuses to allow us to consider the future or the past. It just is, and it takes over, relentless, and fearing that total control, that relentless present, we seek refuge from it. It's why pain medications are our number one addiction . . . we want to avoid pain more than anything in the world. Anyway, since studying the Duino Elegies I began to approach the episodes of my life when my memories returned - often in the middle of the night, often dressed as monsters but most often just nakedly themselves, awful all on their own - by refusing to run away from the pain. I just sat in it, I let it come in to me and wash into me and over me and through me.
I will face my fear. And by facing it, and letting it come, I found that the episodes were much shorter, and I could survive them much easier if I just let them come, and then go.
After that discussion, my doctor gave me a cd of a talk by
Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun who (I have learned) has been successful at translating Buddhist thought for Westerners. The cd was about tonglen meditation, which seeks to heal pain by accepting it and transforming it with our own health. Since listening to that cd a few times, I have begun an interesting journey. I've bought a few of Ms. Chodron's books, a book on breathing meditation, and a book by
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche called
Turning the Mind into an Ally. I've also purchased
a set which includes a zabuton, which is a square mat, and a zafu, which is a round cushion, on which to sit and meditate comfortably, and I've been trying to do it. So far it has been an interesting exercise. When I first started thinking about meditation, I thought my goal of mine would be to become more at peace with myself, but now I don't think I have a goal per se. I just want to see where all this goes. Yesterday I found myself digging around the Shambala website and finding out more about the Durham center. I think I will find an instructor there to help me.
I don't know if this means I'm going to become a Buddhist. I don't know what it means. I only know that I think I can break through to the other side of PTSD. I believe I am what my doctor would call a "highly functioning PTSD subject." I believe I am someone who is not in danger of ever getting back to the suicide watch ward at what used to be North Raleigh Community Hospital. But what else am I? One of the things that I've already found out via meditation is that I really need to achieve two things in my life before I die, or I won't be happy with myself: I really want to have a house, and I want to learn to sing. Neither of which have a damned thing to do with my current course of action at NC State.
As much as I have been "studying" meditation and peace, I find myself just as ready to slip into frustration, thanks to NC State. There are no required courses in my program being offered in the spring other than the capstone course, which I'm not taking. Dr. Dicks also sent out an email to the MS students the other day that said that not everyone who wanted to take 675 in the spring was going to get to do it. I can only imagine I am not the only one who wants to knock something over. Because none of the other required courses are being offered in the spring, I'm going to have to take two required courses together next fall, 518 and 515. (If they are offered, that is. Who knows at this point?) As I do every time another advising period comes back up, I go back to the MS Tech Comms website and re-think what I'm doing.
I'm really not a technical communicator; I just communicate via technology. However, I do want to continue to develop websites. I wonder if I should switch to the MBA program, or the MS in Communications, instead. I still love working in marketing. I like tinkering with the farrin website, and I like writing marketing collateral and working on marketing projects. But I'm still intrigued with this communicating via technology
thing. If I keep going forward, and managed to get into the PhD program, I could probably finish by the time I'm 46 years old, leaving me with a decent 20-years to have a teaching career. But I still can't decide, and I still don't know why. And unfortunately, I'm not going to get to take another required course in my major program which will help me decide, until next fall, when I'll practically be done. Even though it's over a year away, I still don't have the foggiest idea what I would do with my 675 project and quite frankly, as much as I like websites, building another one doesn't seem like much of a challenge. It seems downright boring. I've already proved I can do that professionally. Doing it for a degree seems beside the point. Taking ENG 514 (History of Rhetoric) has been interesting, fascinating, and great, but I definitely don't want to be an English teacher. I always thought I belonged in words, but maybe that's just one of the many places I belong. Perhaps I can meditate my way to an answer.
What we have here is . . .
The Raleigh News & Observer published the first in a five-part series today on regional rail in the Triangle, entitled “Triangle Trains: Off Track?” The gist of today’s article was that the project is under threat from increasing federal scrutiny of it’s ridership forecasts. It’s easy to see why this project is going “off the rails” when one looks at the proposed map of the trains. What we have here is an utter failure of imagination. It makes me sadder than I can say. Because the trains are being built right where the riders aren’t.
The Triangle is well on its way to becoming Atlanta. When 540 is completed, it will already be too late. The suburban sprawl will be crowding the borders of that freeway before all its asphalt is down and we’ll have to plan another loop. Next stop: annexation. Hell, ESPN anchors already mistakenly call this area “Raleigh-Durham.” What’s to stop the cities from merging? (Besides, as a State fan, I can’t help but feel the world can do without Chapel Hill, but I digress).
Only a blithering idiot can fail to see that the growth of our area is happening in South and East Wake County, Northeast Wake County, Johnston County, Wake Forest, and Creedmoor, and that the bulk of these developments are lower-to-middle class income settlements where the houses are actually affordable for real people. It’s also swelling south of Cary down Fuquay way. Just where 540 is going. Why didn’t the planners of the freeway get together with the planners of the railway? The railway planners planned a downtown-as-center model taking advantage of existing rail. I’m sure they congratulated themselves for doing so. They completed ignored the suburban-to-urban commuter model in which people park-and-ride. Part of the new system is supposed to be an upgrade of what I believe are five separate bus systems serving the greater metro area which makes getting from one part of this sprawl to another an exercise in absolute futility. I looked into taking the bus from home to class, until I found out it would take me over an hour and a half to get from Six Forks and Millbrook to NC State by bus. As my grandmother used to say, these are the same kind of people that put Christ on a cross.
Obviously the railway planners took the path of least resistance: existing rail lines, which run between the downtown centers of Raleigh and Durham, where richer people now live and continue to gentrify. If the cities manage to stop it I’ll eat my Durham Bulls hat, but I’m digressing yet again. There are few to no train stations planned where poorer people live and are moving in ever-increasing numbers. The rail is going straight through RTP, in order to take advantage of existing rail lines. It’s going to be a commuter rail for people who live in the nicer suburban areas (Cary, let’s just be blunt about it, shall we?). Instead of making a railline for probable users, the TTA designed a railline of least resistance, and is going to let the poorer people fend for themselves. They plan, apparently, to take the harder route of preaching to people who live close to RTP to abandon their cars and take the trains, while people who live in Northeast, Southeast and Eastern Wake who are more likely NOT TO HAVE CARS AND USE RAIL will have to continue to take a bewildering and time-sucking route on buses if they want to save money (or have to use public transport because they don’t have a car). I imagine most of the TTA budget will be used to market to the richer people the advantages of giving up their cars instead of to the poorer people the advantages of using public transport to get around: the poorer people who actually need the trains.
I believe the ridership estimates will sink the TTA project because they have to be based on the existing bus routes in the area of the rail, which SUCK and are practically non-existent because people there don't want or need the bus; they drive Lexuses and Hummers, for God's sake. Surely they did not take into account the bus routes in Northeast and Southeast Wake nor the commuters who live in Wake Forest, Wilson, Johnston county, etc., etc., etc., who might be persuaded to give up their cars if there were convenient stations NEAR 540 where they could park their cars, get on trains safely, and get to work. Somebody failed to see this among the trees and the land where 540 would go, and looked at the existing rail roping through the pricey land in Cary instead. Somebody saw today’s dimes, getting money out of the federal government by "taking advantage of existing resources" and left tomorrow’s dollars. Somebody had no imagination, and our reward will be concrete. I’m sad, because I liked taking the train to work in Chicago. It had benefits that I could go on about for several paragraphs: it was safer, easier, more convenient, cheaper, and brought me more of the city of Chicago than I would have ever seen had I gotten around it in a car. It had its downsides: there are always members of the public one would rather not get up close and personal with. But I think about how I miss it sometimes when I go to work at a personal injury law firm that deals with car accidents. There are an average of 600 car accidents a week in our metro area. Imagine a world without that to worry about. TTA didn’t, and now rail is going to fail. Imagine that.
