Zen Barbie

My cats were crazy, but they weren't destructive. Now this new cat has come into our lives, and she's corrupted them. Sirocca (my gin swilling, foul-mouthed yoga teacher) left her obese, asthmatic grey tabby with me, her kid with her ex husband, and is living in Bali with her Swiss lover.

The cat has figured out where my bedroom window is. She gets on the roof at 6 am in the morning and meows constantly until I wake up and let her in. She also likes to shred things with her claws and pull curtains down. She has pulled the curtains down on every window. Neither Marlowe nor Pebbles ever showed the slightest inclination towards this sort of behavior--but now they're doing it too. She's just a bad apple. Oh--and she eats. All the time. Constantly. And she's not friendly. She's just fat and demanding. No kissing up, no purring, no leg rubbing. Nothing to endear herself. Just shredding wallpaper, eating nonstop and leading the other two down the road to ruin... She's pretty funny, actually. Her favorite place to sleep is the bathroom sink, or, if that's not available, the laundry basket.

I sat for the first time in two weeks yesterday. Good to sit. Then Seido talked. He's a good talker. I wish I could convey the sense of his talks. I thought about taking notes. He talked about taking care of his brother while he was dying of AIDS, about no-self, and modernism--which focused on answering questions, and postmodernism,which left the questions behind. He talked about Lacan. He talked about no-seeking. And while he was talking, I think I finally listened for the first time to someone. All the sudden. It hadn't been an exemplary sit. My mind raced through all these scenarios. But after, while I was listening to him, with my ass falling asleep the way it always does ever since I broke my tailbone at Wet and Wild on the giant waterslide(I was 12. The most embarassing moment of my life. My bikini fell off, descending the slide a few seconds after I landed, the water acted like an enema, and you guessed it, I pooped. They had to shut down the pool. I was on a church trip. I wanted to die. Fortunately, 3 weeks later, we moved to a different state.) I just dropped away, and his words just hung there. He was the only thing going on. And he looked very frail to me. I could see his shiny skull under his skin, and I had this sudden strange feeling that we were all in this room, bags of bones. No separation. There were actually more women there than men, this time. Then Mirta, the girl who sits with us from Burma, looked at me and smiled. I could see she really had something to tell me--it was just bubbling up inside. She's going home for a month, to visit her family. She's so happy. And I felt her need for connection and acknowledgement as strongly as if it had been my own. This went on the rest of the evening. I dropped away and sort of became everyone else. It's still going on today. Everyone seems really god damn interesting.

What will happen if this happens all the time? Where will I go? Will I remember to get dressed? Who will feed me? Will I get A's? I'm ruled by approval--what if I stop caring about that? Will everything completely fall apart? Will I have to move in with my parents? Will I slouch? Will I remember to suck in my tummy? What if I stop worrying about being pretty? Will the chin hairs grow in? Will Jay still make love to me?

One of the reasons I have backed away from sitting these past two weeks is that I am actually having periods of time where my thoughts do indeed stop. And then I worry that I have alzheimers.

I am always checking my own reflection, posing in different outfits. Like Barbie. Nurse Barbie. Mommie Barbie. Church Barbie. Administrative meeting Barbie. Library Barbie. Date Barbie. Outdoors Barbie. Zen Barbie.

I wonder what happens when everything just falls away...what if I get everything I ever wanted and I don't notice?