Doing the (mm-mm) Pigeon

I used to hate pigeons. I thought they were ugly and stupid and shaped like footballs, which apparently made it okay to loathe them. (What the hell, younger me?)

I can't pinpoint an exact moment when that changed, although for some reason a reading of Zadie Smith's White Teeth factored in, which is odd because I recall pigeons or some other city fowl described as an object of intense hatred in that book, which I otherwise don't recall with much clarity. Maybe holding up a mirror of pointless pigeon hate was the point. At any rate, as with other paradigm shifts over the years, this little inconsequential evolution occurred slowly, subtly, and largely subconsciously so that I only noticed it six months ago upon disembarking from the bus for the first time to walk the few blocks to my new job in downtown Detroit, where, picking my way through the flow of pigeons moving in eddies and swirls around my feet, I regarded them with delight.

I read once that pigeons are among the only birds that can swallow (hold the dick jokes, please, god, what's wrong with you), an adaptation to city dwelling where the water sources consist mainly of puddles. Other birds have to capture water in their beaks and tilt their heads back. If it's true (yeah okay I'll look it up eventually), it's a surprisingly innovative attribute. Pigeons, stolid, quiet, slow, with their ungainly head-bobbing gait and such awkwardly large bright pink feet that you almost want to give them fashion advice (like seriously guys those don't go with ANYTHING), possess this unassuming, nearly unique, incredibly practical power that enables them to live their humble pigeon lives near people.

Once I realized my loathing had transmuted into respect, I began watching them as I walked among them in the mornings.  I found a calm dignity in their staring gold-ringed eyes to match the wild pride I see in seagulls. I noticed the multiplicitous diversity in their coloration -- no two alike -- delightful waddling snowflakes cast in all existing shades of gray and white and brown; I love the brown ones best. I enjoyed their unhurried wariness toward human passersby, liked seeing how closely I could approach before they edged away.  Doubtless I look a little unhinged, eyeing these flocks of winged city waste with a huge grin on my face, but god, they're so pretty.

Yesterday as I stepped off the bus and walked briskly toward the crosswalk, something in the sidewalk caught my eye.  A little self-consciously, because people in cities are supposed to be in a constant state of striding purposefully toward some important destination, not pausing to admire the scenery like tourists or weirdos, I stooped to see, impressed into the concrete, a line of pigeon tracks.

It made me unbelievably happy.  The impressions in the sidewalk there are reserved to the stamps of the manufacturers.  Handprints and initials (and faceprints, if you're Michael Scott) haven't touched them.  And yet some pigeon, at some point in the past, ignorant of the yellow tape and "sidewalk closed" signs, walked calmly across a freshly poured sidewalk and left, in a simple, humble monument to human progress, a human legacy.

In the pale light of an early autumn dawn over a city still coming back from the dead, that little line of accidental tracks was heart-stoppingly beautiful.

let me eat cake, dammit

So my birthday is Tuesday.

I realized last week that I'm almost in my mid-thirties which means I need to stop pretending and just admit that my birthday is a really big damn deal to me.  For years I've done the stiff-upper-lip I'm-so-low-maintenance-meh-to-birthdays schtick but last week I clued in to my own bullshit when I spent all of Wednesday a puddly mess of tears because my birthday is coming up and there's no one to celebrate with because I'm single and all my family and closest friends are far away.

But hey, at least this birthday won't be last year's.  Last year's pretty much has to take the cake (bwa. ha. hardy ha) because my then-boyfriend got me exactly zero presents, zero cards, zero flowers, zero balloons, zero cakes.  He did take me out to exactly one dinner at exactly one lame restaurant that he liked, wished me exactly one happy birthday, and was miffed when I expressed a wistful desire for something more, brushing off my request for even a belated present with "birthdays aren't a big deal in my family, we just go out to dinner."  The icing on the cake (HARHARHAR) came a month later when he bought his best (female) friend a birthday present and responded to my pointed "so you got her a present and not me?" with "that's just what we do."  (Never mind that the previous year for my birthday he had three dozen gorgeous roses delivered to me at work.)

So last week after mopping up my face and then dripping everywhere with tears all over again in a repeat cycle that lasted for hours, I set about determining what I could do to mitigate the harsh misery of a birthday alone (but slightly less harsh and miserable than a birthday spent alone while actually dating someone).  It's less that I'm having a birthday without a boyfriend -- after all, I've only had a handful of birthdays WITH a boyfriend, and they weren't that fabulous -- than that I'm having a birthday really really alone -- since in some ways I might as well have just moved here, and am still building a life and a social network, I don't have any close local friends yet who can participate truly naturally in a birthday bash.  But it doesn't have to be totally solitary for all that. So I'm having dinner with a couple of friends tonight, and going out to dinner with a friend on my actual birthday, and going out for lunch with some work friends on my birthday too; I just up and asked and told them why, and, people being nice, they were more than happy to accommodate me.

And today I made myself a cake.

That's the crux of birthdayness, in my mind.  Birthdays in my family constituted a Very Big Deal.  We didn't have much money, so no one received a shower of presents; but Mom hung a homemade banner on the outside of the house displaying the name and birth year of the celebrant, and on our birthdays we got to pick exactly what we wanted her to make for dinner, and exactly what kind of cake we wanted her to make (white cake with white frosting for me; spice cake with white frosting for Dad; yellow cake with chocolate frosting for my sister), and we got cards from everyone, and a few little presents, and a wonderful warm feeling that your birth and existence were meaningful and special and this was your day.  (Especially important in a household where kids typically didn't have much say in day to day life and preferences.)

In the short-hand forced on by the busy life of adulthood, birthdays boil down to cake.  I didn't get one last year, and I might be alone and putting together a makeshift birthday, and who knows, I might spend it partly in tears (although I'm feeling better today, so maybe not) but by god, I will eat some fucking cake, and it will be iced with my mother's homemade frosting that could bring kingdoms to their knees.  And since adulthood means I spend most of my waking weekday hours tired, that means I'm baking a cake today.

I am not a baker.  I'm not a butcher or candlestick maker either, but I'm especially not a baker of desserts.  Bread, yes.  I love baking bread.  (And I love eating bread so much that I don't bake it very often.)  I tend more toward the savory than the sweet, in my mouth palette as in other areas.  So baking a cake is sort of a dicey, slapdash prospect.  I bought a cake mix from Aldi; mostly cake is a vehicle for frosting, in my book, so I don't care if it's not the best cake in the world.

Which, judging by the appearance of the thing I just removed from the oven, is a good outlook.  I haven't baked much in this apartment because I've spent the year that I've lived here too harried and harrassed to undertake anything artisanal like my usual cooking, so I had no idea how very unlevel the oven is.  The cake looks like a topography map of the Appalachian foothills.  The slopes aren't even uniform.  If I had any hand at decorating I'd figure out a way to put Frodo and Sam and the rest of the Fellowship somewhere toiling up one of the ridges.

But instead I'll just slather the whole thing with Mom's divine frosting.  Maybe I'll even use the frosting to make it look level and feed the cake-ier portions to my roommate.

At least it all smells wonderful.

anxious

Finally, the outdoor temperature has dropped enough to render the open window in front of me an enjoyable experience, instead of a nasty sensation reminiscent of drilling a hole into a bowl of warm soup.  The vista never improves -- nothing poetic or restful to the eye about a parking lot and the neighboring apartment building -- but I'm choosing to focus on the strip of grass just below my window, and the tops of the trees standing in vibrant green and sunlit gold against a backdrop of pure September blue.  Fall is coming, and I couldn't be happier about it.

It's been a bad week fraught with pointless anxiety tightening all my blood vessels and gnawing on my stomach lining, as if I am constantly five minutes away from delivering the most important speech of my life to a crowd of millions.  I can't say for certain when the anxiety reentered the core fabric of my consciousness -- probably around the time of the start of my most recent relationship, just over two years ago -- but I've only really noticed it as a medical condition more than a product of circumstances since the breakup in early June, when the anxiety persisted with nothing specific to attach to.

The constant worryworryworry is annoying.  It keeps trying to fix on the usual sources, but those sources aren't legitimate sources anymore.  OH MY GOD MONEY YOU DON'T HAVE ENOUGH MONEY.  *Checks bank account balances*  Oh. We're totally fine.  Okay.  HOLY SHIT RELATIONSHIP YOUR RELATIONSHIP IS BAD.  *Blinks*  Oh we're not in one anymore and life is good again.  Um.  JOB! YOUR JOB IS STRESSFUL AND MISERABLE AND INSECURE PANIC PANIC PANIC!!!  *Pauses*  Oh.  We love our job and are kicking ass at it and our bosses appreciate the hell out of us.  Huh.  HEALTH HOLY CRAP OUR HEALTH COULD GO AT ANY MOMENT.  Well, maybe.  Blood pressure is high again and I haven't been exercising regularly for a really really long time.  So on Wednesday I put myself back on my old BP medication dosage (I'm so annoyed with my current general practitioner that I don't even want to write about it at the moment), and Friday night I started working out again, which felt fucking AMAZING, so much so that I did it again yesterday, with plans again for today, and a resolution to return to my hour-plus-long evening workouts, since I'm finally adjusted to my work schedule and need the extra time slots I have in the evenings to get the kind of workouts in that will get me back in shape.

Which, you know, is one of the purposes of anxiety, evolutionarily; I read somewhere that people with anxiety tend to notice and react to problems more quickly, and think more creatively under pressure to solve them -- probably at least in part because they have already considered the fifty different ways a situation can go wrong and planned out ahead of time what to do for each one.  So my busy brain's constant planning can come in extremely handy, and makes me more quick-footed and competent at work, and swift to notice and solve my own problems (like not exercising enough, which affects, among other things, my blood pressure and my anxiety levels).  And I do tend to respond cool-headedly in crisis.  Which is nice; it's preferable to freaking out and melting down when moments matter.  But anxiety running amok means a shit ton of wasted emotional energy and unnecessary bad feelings when everything is fine.  I'd like to strike some kind of reasonable balance so that I don't lose any of my preparedness while still feeling relaxed and peaceful and empowered on an average basis.

So I have an appointment to see about getting medicated, at least temporarily, for the anxiety.  Unlike the depression, for which I plan to remain medicated for the entirety of my life, the anxiety only requires medical attention periodically.  I waited a few months to see if it would pass, but it hasn't, and it's interfering with the quality of my daily life.  And fuck that.  I've spent enough time feeling helplessly miserable.  Life is GOOD, goddammit, and I've worked hard to make it so, and I refuse to let a chemical problem detract from my enjoyment of my achievements, or prevent me from achieving and enjoying further.

One of the best aspects of learning to cope with trauma, depression and anxiety over the years has been the acceptance that comes with growth and healing -- learning to look at these problems in less polarized terms.  In this instance, I could hate my anxiety and hate that I have it and think that I'm screwed up and need to get rid of it altogether; or I could view it as an occasionally useful product of human evolution (quick responses to potentially bad situations and rapid, creative solutions) and accept its purpose while finding ways not to let it steamroll me into the ground or immobilize me into a glassy-eyed bundle of twitching nerves.  Looking at it that way has the added benefit of moving me out of the "I'm a failure for not being perfect" paradigm and into a place where I can fully accept myself, and forge wholeness and health from that acceptance -- be my own best ally, recognize the ways my coping mechanisms and responses are intended to be helpful, set appropriate boundaries for them, and know exactly what goals I'm striving to reach in order to live a full, healthy, happy, satisfying, meaningful, purposeful life.

So anxiety, thank you for caring about my wellbeing, and thank you for your watchfulness.  Also, prepare to chill the fuck out.  I have shit to do and you're overstepping your bounds.