Last day of November, 2022. N’s baby has been out and about on this earth for exactly one month.
Week Three of the UAW strike. Fifteen days until the term ends—I hope we make it. There have been some good chants this week already at the picket. TAs need more calories— / Cut the admin’s salaries! Etc.
This morning I pulled the Five of Wands. This card depicts five teenage boys fighting for superiority amongst themselves with large wooden sticks in a chaotic jumble. “Beware the immaturity of the comparison game,” writes Elliot in his book of interpretations.
I pull this card a lot. Having a natal sun in the seventh house I think encourages a certain will-to-comparison; the seventh house is the house of relationships with others, and the sun is one’s identity, sense of self: I would probably argue that to have an identity that lives in and on the lives of others is necessarily to be a comparativist.
I would like to think that this tendency need not be judged as problem behavior so long as the comparison does not operate on a hierarchical basis, which, of course, unfortunately, it usually does. Differentiation, discernment, are useful and good things to have and to be able to do. Using comparative analysis as an instrument for ‘rationalizing’ self-criticism and paralysis is neither wise nor beneficial.
Get the holiday-season sense today, out running errands, that people are (more than usual) leaking energy, as in, lacking the ability to control their own emotional reactions. Get dollops of this in the lady standing in line behind me at the post office, for example, who huffs and puffs holding her taped-up cardboard box as if surprised by the astounding slowness with which the singular employee is processing the half dozen patrons who precede her. I keep myself turned just enough away so that her profile is hitting me, and the tendons and heartbeat on the side of my neck feel irradiated by her frustration. When I do make the mistake of turning a bit, toward the postal worker’s scales and register, as one patron finally finishes up, the lady behind me lets out a huge exhalation that includes a flow of language, not directly intended for me, but intended to hit and attempt to relieve itself on any nearest sentient being.
Leakage! Typically my hackles raise and I judge such letting-out as irresponsible, immature, embarrassing. But today, day twenty of the cycle and the precipice of the luteal phase, I am in the beginning of my monthly dying, morbid, done caring; and I am certainly not holding anyone to any standards.
This includes the postal worker behind the sheet of transparent plastic, who on closer inspection appears to have entered a coma, or a dream. He stands up from the stool behind his desk between patrons and, as if there is no line of people weaving around the little office and out into the hall, begins to toss a pile of paid-for packages (where people had been rushing in to drop them off) one by one into a large canvas-lined cart behind him. He has a few words with himself, and then with a colleague or two who must be behind the half wall that separates the front of the office from the back. The lady behind me huffs ongoingly, but I keep myself turned well away, survey their Christmas advertising, and exist serenely until it is my turn to be processed.
There are others like her I notice today who seem particularly leaky energetically. I chalk it up to the holidays, the stress of managing, hosting, family, gifts, cheer. End of year reviews. I feel lucky to be able to avoid so much of the life that is being lived outside of my apartment. I do not often have to run errands like those at the post office. It makes me wonder what people are doing in their homes, though I am not interested in wondering for long.
J and I got cheese danishes after our shopping tonight and he said, mouth full, while driving, “It is like eating your way through a croissant…into a cheesecake…and out the other side.” I told him about the Boulangerie that used to be in the shopping mall down the hill from my childhood home, the first bakery where I ever saw or ate cheese danish. The ones we got tonight were larger and flatter, and had more pastry (and icing) and less filling, than I remember that bakery’s having. It had been maybe fifteen years since I had eaten one; and J had never had one in America.
image: John William Waterhouse depicts my trying to revive J after a sugar crash (The Awakening of Adonis, 1899, detail).