Is it really mid-May already? When last we left off, it was the end of February. So much for my New Year’s Resolution of maintaining this blog.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t write in an online journal in April at all, but to check in a couple of times. I took a month off from all of that, and writing in a paper journal, just to rest and see if I could regain some semblance of motivation for anything as things had become a relentless grind since January. Get up, log on, work, log off, eat, watch TV, sleep, rinse, repeat.
I’m still a bit stuck, but have concluded that I’m in that weird place Carl Jung talked about when he described how people lose motivation after their awakening, enantiodromia. I’ve stopped chasing, stopped worrying about to-do lists, stopped caring about hustle, proving myself, and achieving—all the things that keep Washington, the institution running—and now find myself thinking “How much of this really matters?”
Part of it is that I’ve made some time to refocus on Zen and Stoicism. The first “rule” of both of them is to concern yourself only with what you can control: your actions, reactions, thoughts, and perceptions. The second “rule” is to let go of what you cannot control, and oofta, there’s a LOT of stuff I cannot control, like other people’s behavior and reactions, the evil in the world, and what happens around me.
When I stopped to think of all the things I can’t control, I started bowing out.
I will not engage in political discussions beyond agreeing with strangers’ social media posts. Someone wants to think I’m wrong? Okay.
Someone didn’t respond to a text? Okay.
Someone doesn’t have time to get together? Okay.
Someone doesn’t want to reschedule after breaking plans? Okay.
Someone didn’t respond to an email or call at work? Okay.
Someone gets angry after asking me to do something for them and I set a boundary and say no? Okay.
Traffic? Okay.
Bad weather? Okay.
Number I didn’t want to see on the scale? Okay.
No one wants to join me in something I’m doing or going where I’m going? Okay.
I’m not chasing. I’m not forcing. I’m not striving to make any points, get people to agree, impress, perform, or bring people into my sphere who don’t want to be there. I welcome those who are with me, let go of those who aren’t.
At any rate, that’s why I haven’t been around. I’m in what the video below describes as the Hermit stage, the phase between death and rebirth, and it’s all swirling around with rising detachment in the Zen sense. But I’m still floundering around a bit. Although I’ve begun to say no to things that don’t resonate, I’m still learning to let go of wanting things to be the way I want them to be rather than how they are. I just have to trust the process.
Time for a Saturday 9. Hey, it’s still Saturday in California! Here’s the song:
We’re beginning the year with a song about new beginnings. What is something new you’d like to try in 2025?
That’s actually a pretty challenging question. I’ll most likely try a few new recipes. Maybe a few new restaurants. I have a set of PanPastels that I’d like to use in my coloring. I did sign up for a coloring meet-up at a local establishment for later in the month, so that will be nice. Wouldn’t mind meeting some new people who share a hobby.
The lyrics recall what was said “in the mist of the midnight hour.” Where were you when the new year dawned?
I was coming out of the Metro. It made me a little bit sad actually. The station closest to my home is also a major bus stop so it’s very well lit and there are a lot of homeless people there. One of them, a woman, was greeting people with a soft, almost childlike “Happy New Year, everyone!” I thought of how a post of mine went viral, one about an encounter with a homeless woman whom I tried to help but couldn’t, and how one person who was once homeless said “You saw her. That right there means so much.” I waited for the woman to see me and I smiled and wished her a happy new year, too, though I don’t know how it came off because seeing her there was putting tears in my eyes. All I could think was “Here this woman is, with nothing but the possessions in her cart, wishing everyone a happy new year because that’s all she has to give, and no one is acknowledging her. She’s offering something and no one will accept it.” It hurt my heart.
The Axwell of Axwell and Ingrosso is Axel Hedfors. He began as a drummer and moved on to experimenting musically on the computer, eventually mastering music sequencer software. Do you consider yourself more a technophile like Axwell, who loves technology and digital devices, or more a technophobe, anxious about learning new programs?
I love technology—when it works.
His musical partner is Sebastian Ingrosso. Sebastian became interested in dance music when he accompanied his father, a choreographer, to the studio. When you were young, did you ever go to work with either of your parents?
I was 9 or 10 and I went to work with my father, who at the time worked for an ad agency in Manhattan. It was St. Patrick’s Day so after working in the morning, he took the afternoon off and took me to the St. Patrick’s Day parade. I wish I could say it was a good experience, but it wasn’t. There was a vendor selling buttons and pins that said things like “Kiss Me, I’m Irish,” but that being New York, there were a few other pins for other ethnicities. My father winked at me and bought one that said “Italian Power.” Well, some drunk Irish-Americans saw him and began hurling slurs and epithets for Italian-Americans at us. We never went to another parade in Manhattan after that.
That feud between Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans ran deep. My father, a member of the WWII generation, grew up in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn. He had two fistfights as a kid, and one was with an Irish-American boy Danny who made it a point to antagonize him to the point where one day he dared my father to meet him outside after school. This stupid kid didn’t think my father would do it, but not only was my father already out there when Danny came out of the school, he chased Danny home and right into Danny’s own living room, where he proceeded to beat the snot out of him until Danny’s mother pulled him off.
So Danny’s mother went marching down to the school the next day complaining to the principal about this “Italian brute” who beat up her precious angel and the principal called my father down to the office. My father had to wait in the hallway while she spoke her piece, and then when she came out with her little brat in tow, it was my father’s turn to go into the office. With just my father in the room, the principal asked a few questions.
“Did you beat up Danny?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He kept calling me a guinea wop.”
“I see. Well, you’re not in trouble. Us Jews and Italians need to stick together.”
He let my father leave, and as my father walked down the hallway, he heard the principal bellow, “DANNY, GET IN HERE. No, Mrs. O’Brien. JUST DANNY.”
I suspect this was not the first time darling Danny said bigoted things to the other kids, because he got suspended and when he came back he had to stay after school every day helping teachers clean blackboards—for the rest of the school year.
Nyahh.
But that was 1930s Brooklyn for you.
Axwell & Ingrosso gave their premiere performance at the 2014 Governors Ball Music Festival in New York City and their last concert at the 2017 Ultra Music Fest in Miami. Looking back on 2024, did you attend any outdoor music or theater performances?
Freaks on Parade! I finally got to see Filter. They’re one of my favorite bands. But also Ministry, Alice Cooper, and Rob Zombie. It was awesome!
In 2017, when “Something New” was released, we lost the TV star who could “turn the world on with her smile.” Without looking it up, do you know who that is?
Absolutely. And it was a spinoff, Lou Grant, that first gave me the idea as a kid to become a journalist if I ended up not being a doctor. Well, tenth-grade biochemistry made me reconsider the whole doctor thing, but I was still fascinated with the human body so here I am, a medical journalist.
There was also that dalliance with guitar, where my instructor said I had a lot of promise and my style reminded her of Ace Frehley’s, but like Curly himself, I absolutely HATED sheet music and just wanted to do it my way, which wasn’t doing me any favors academically. And unlike Curly himself, I lacked discipline. Plus I was a girl and a pretty straight-laced one at that, so no rock-and-roll for me. At least not that way. I’ll travel halfway around the world to ride a rail, though. See, blonde center stage gawking up at Olli Tukiainen and Jaska Makinen of Poets of the Fall in a club in Warsaw, below.
Image: Glen Loit
Come to think of it, I’ve managed to interview a few rock stars in my career, too. The most famous one is Bret Michaels of Poison. I wrote a profile about him 18 years ago. Me and my stupid sense of journalistic ethics didn’t take him up on tickets to a show for his solo tour, though. It would have been fun to meet him. He seemed like a super sweet guy during the interview.
Also in 2017, Today Show anchor Hoda Kotb announced she had adopted her first child. Do you know anyone who is adding to their family in 2025?
Not that I know of. Some may be adding pets, though.
Have you made any New Year’s resolutions for 2025?
What was the first thing to make you laugh in 2025?
The wankpanzer burning in front of the Manchurian Cantaloupe’s hotel in Vegas. This was before I knew there was someone in the vehicle and he died by suicide before the explosion. Now it’s not so funny.
I’d better post this before it’s only Saturday in Hawaii.
I’ve been an atheist for about 20 years, and I don’t really believe in an afterlife, at least not one where we’re all floating around in the clouds and hanging out with deceased loved ones at some kind of giant, cosmic cocktail party. I definitely don’t believe in up or down, reward or punishment, heaven or hell. But I do believe all life is connected, and going on what astrophysicists like Neil deGrasse Tyson and theoretical physicists like Lawrence Krauss say about all of us consisting of atoms from exploded stars, I have a little theory that that when we first meet people or creatures with whom we click instantly or who already seem familiar to us, we might have a few atoms from the same star.
I’m also a bit, shall we say, “sensitive.” For example, I get “lead legs” and feel like I’m being pulled into the ground in certain places like the Alamo, Gettysburg, crime scenes, and random graves, usually the graves of those who suffered greatly in life or died violently. It’s not all bad, however. I also get “boosts,” a feeling of being uplifted. I get that at Congressional Cemetery, which is very much woven into the local community as a place to gather for various events ranging from book clubs to movie nights to 5K runs. I also got it at the non-endowed section of Spokane’s Greenwood Memorial Terrace, where people make their own memorials to mark graves and maintain the gravesites out of the goodness of their hearts. Point is, I’m not so entrenched in, and closed off by, my atheism and my work as a science-focused medical journalist that I rule out the metaphysical, the things we cannot explain with the scientific method and our physical senses. Hey, I even read tarot.
So let me share a few things with you, things that happened soon after Inigo and I said goodbye.
First, I haven’t heard Kenny Rogers’ “Through the Years” in many years. Friday night I was lying under the birdie quilt, the one I used to use to make a tent for Inigo to do his wood chipping. I was trying to find peace in the stillness, and that song popped into my head. Inigo loved country music. I’m not a fan of it, myself, but he loved twangs, banjos, and anything with a country feel to it, and Kenny Rogers was a country king.
Second, a tiny black feather from Inigo’s head was on the floor outside my bedroom door the morning after we said goodbye. I could swear it wasn’t there when I went to bed the night before. I vacuum every night, a habit begun upon getting birds because they fling food and chewed-up toy parts around, and a habit continued because I scatter seeds on my balcony for wild birds and no matter how much I wipe my shoes on a bristly mat before coming back in, I always manage to traipse some seeds back into the apartment. I would have seen that little feather and started bawling.
Third, later that same morning I decided to hook up my laptop speakers and listen to a playlist I had saved on Spotify but not yet listened to, Nordic Acoustic Guitar. I was going to listen to it when we had a decent snowfall, perhaps while doing a jigsaw puzzle or just sitting with Inigo and looking out the window, a favorite pastime of ours that also reminded me of Jimmy the Green Cheek, who used to love watching big snowflakes fall. I had no idea what was on the playlist, but “Nordic” and “snow” seemed like a good combination, and I had forgotten about it since I saved it because it has been an unusually warm winter where I live. Well, look at the first song on the list.
When I got home after our goodbye, I cleaned out Inigo’s house. It broke my heart to see his toys, his perches, his food and water bowls like he was going to come back to them. On his last two days here, he ate out of a little dipping bowl on his birdie shelf because he couldn’t get across his rope perch to his regular food bowl. There were seed husks and bird pellet powder and crumbs on his towels, reminders that he had been chowing down there just a couple of hours before we said goodbye. Looking at it all felt like I was being kicked in the chest.
Yet when I looked at his empty house the next day, it felt cold and sterile. It was like when I moved out of one of my better apartments. Inigo and I had many balcony dinners there, and many pasta nights, movie nights, and silly dances, and it was the apartment we had for the first year pandemic. Our stuff and our fun made it a home. But when I went back for the final inspection with the landlord, I was struck by how it didn’t feel like anything anymore. It had become just a collection of walls, doors, and windows.
Seeing Inigo’s empty house felt the same way, an empty shell, just cage bars and a shelf, and it was almost as unbearable as seeing the little food mess around the dipping bowl. Who was I to remove Inigo’s things? It was his house, one he had lived in for 21 years, with his bowls and his shelf and his perches. It was his.
As I stood in front of it, wondering what to do, I got the urge to put the little towels he used to sleep on back onto his birdie shelf. Then I got the sense that he was telling me he didn’t need food, water, or perches because he doesn’t have his body anymore and now he can fly from place to place and land wherever he likes, but he wanted a comfy place to hang out, a place where he had felt relaxed and cherished.
When I put the towels back, an enormous love filled the room. I struggle to describe it. It was simultaneously soft and bright, both gentle and overpowering, and so warm that it seemed almost tangible. Since then, I’ve felt Inigo’s presence. He comes and goes, but he’s still around. It appears that he has claimed the space over and around my right shoulder, the space where he would fly alongside me if I left the room without him already on me, back when he could fly, before his arthritis.
My ex-husband noticed that was were Inigo flew, actually. My ex and I used to wear our birds when we folded laundry, kind of a family chore thing, but sometimes Louise the Alexandrine (who now lives with him) wasn’t in the mood, and one night he had Inigo on his shoulder instead. I left the room for some reason, maybe to go bring up another load of laundry to dump on the bed and sort, and Inigo flew after me down a long hallway. My ex-husband said it was one of the most touching things he had ever seen, a girl and her bird.
“That little bird loves you so.”
Maybe it was Inigo’s love filling my living room when I put the towels back on the birdie shelf.
I can feel him now as I write this, actually. He’s hanging out on my right shoulder, a place he hadn’t hung out in many years because of his arthritis and because, to be honest, I’m not a fan of birds on shoulders, and neither have been most of the veterinarians I’ve known. There’s a reason pirates wear eye-patches. But Inigo is there now, watching the words as they fill the screen.
Some of my friends have said that Inigo was a soulmate to me, and that’s true. He was my constant companion for 21 years, through marriage, divorce, eight apartments, eight years of freelancing, six jobs, a few relationships or variations thereof, several deaths in the family (including that of Jimmy the Green Cheek), two major surgeries, two interstate moves, and one pandemic, and now he’s here letting me know he’s free and okay. Maybe it’s our stardust.
zenzalei 