Darlings! I have not been blogging at all for several months because I have been very busy. Here is a very quick rundown of what has been happening:

1. Training for the river swim continues! I must now step up my practice from 3 days a week to much more, though it’s painful and I am grumpy about it.

2. I have moved in with my loving and lovely boyfriend! Boyfriend, you are the bee’s knees to live with.

3. I have stopped reading books except for the Game of Thrones series, WHICH IS MORE ACCURATELY A Song of Ice and Fire series, but who cares? It’s like crack, I can’t even. I had to put them aside to start this month’s book club pick, but how long can I hold out? Only time will tell.

4. I have been attending a sewing class! It’s been hella fun. Tonight we will be completing our projects and I will graduate to a Real Sewing Person. And now that I have my aunt’s old Singer and a workstation on which to work, I will be sewing all the things.

(This is part of a larger goal of mine to make more things by hand. I’m less concerned with being crafty and good at it and more concerned with learning how things are put together. Once you break down even the simplest thing, like a shirt, into all its parts, you start to wonder if you really should be buying these $5 tees at Old Navy. I mean, you will, because it’s St. Patty’s Day and you need something green, but man do you feel guilty about it.)

Hoping to have a nice little purse to share after this class. Ta.

In the last few years, and maybe it’s just old age catching up with me, I’ve been changing my mind about some things I had considered hammered out in my head for good. One was my opinion on suicide; I’m not even sure why I thought I needed an opinion on suicide (it’s a little like having an opinion on murder, I mean, come on) but nevertheless at a rather young age I arrived at the conclusion that suicide was more or less a very selfish thing and only very self-absorbed people would ever bother killing themselves. Last year (and I don’t remember what prompted this change of heart; maybe one of my old high school acquaintances committed suicide or something) I rethought it in the context of euthanasia and realized that if I believe a person in immense physical pain should be able to decide when and how he or she will die (which I do) then it was very pig-headed of me to not extend the same sympathy to people in immense psychic or emotional pain. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be ravaged by cancer any more than I can imagine being plagued by severe depression, so who am I to say someone who commits suicide to escape that pain is selfish?

This is going to be a fun blog post, I can tell.

Sorry, but I’m getting to my point, I swear. It’s just that I’ve had another about-face in my entrenched thinking, and I’d like to share. Andrew Sullivan linked to this blog post by Sylvia Lucas, which asserts that the male body should be portrayed just as sexily as the female, because ladies like hot men, guys! I’m less concerned with seeing more naked people in movies, though, and more concerned about the basis of Lucas’ argument: that women are not as icked out by mens’ bodies as everyone claims; that men are beautiful and certainly deserving of visual appreciation; and that we should all stop saying how ookie dangly bits are.

I feel properly chastised because I have definitely, both jokingly and seriously, implied on occasion that male bodies are, if not gross, then at least not as attractive as female bodies. These are passing comments I’ve made, perhaps in the context of discussing bisexuality, about how most women dress better (or at least are forced to dress better or more complexly), take better care of themselves physically (for the same reasons), and are just more beautiful in all their varied shapes and sizes than men. And I sat here and thought about it for a minute after reading Lucas’ piece. Do I really believe that? Do I really think men are yuckier than women? I don’t think I actually do. And I feel more than a little chagrined at ever saying so.

I am told some ladies appreciate this one.

It’s not that I believe that men need a nice pat on the head (poor men with your higher paying jobs and generally easier lives!) but I think in this instance, I owe dudes an apology. Being told your emotions need a mute button is bad enough; I shouldn’t have been reinforcing the idea that your dangly bits are stupid on top of all that. They’re not stupid. They’re just fine. Or at least, no more weird than ladies’ bodies.

Bodies are pretty cool, period. There’s a whole bunch of organs and vessels somehow working together so that we can walk! And speak! And put things up on shelves! That’s impressive all on their own. But we also manage to have skin that’s soft instead of scales, and hands that are clever instead of hoofs, and hair that smells nice as long as you wash it once in awhile instead of fur, which always smells terrible, I don’t care how much you brush your dog, it stinks, sorry.

So yay for human bodies. And men, maybe your form will make a comeback soon. The Greek ideal was male, if I recall. Maybe we can share the ideal in the next aesthetic era. That would be nice. The pedestal is plenty big enough.

I liked Steve Jobs, and I want to make that clear. I’ve always been bi-operating system-sexual (mixing Mac products with Android like a champ) and I was always wary of subscribing to one person’s or company’s vision, but Steve Jobs seemed like a cool dude. And now that he’s gone, it’s clear he’s inspired a lot of people.

It’s natural and good to remember a public figure like him in terms of his inspirational messages. Steve Jobs was an excellent speaker and we have no shortage of insightful, pithy quotes from him on all kinds of subjects. I’m seeing a lot of shares and retweets of his Stanford commencement speech, easily one of the better “follow your dreams” speeches we have on video. And seeing this video pop up again, along with all of Steve Jobs’ bits of wisdom, dovetails with other things I’ve been listening to lately.

The political talks about the economy and our education system all seem to be striving for a goal of allowing everyone to be prosperous and well-employed and happy. I can’t count how many business books and self-help books are out there that boil down to “do what you love.” The Wall Street protesters’ demands seem to seek to level the financial playing field for the majority of Americans. But I’m trying to envision a world where everyone receives the same high standard of education, everyone has the opportunity and the means to pursue whatever career they choose, and everyone makes a career out of doing what they love. I’m envisioning a lot of actors, singers, sports players, novelists, inventors, political leaders, and ice cream taste testers, but not a lot of construction workers, sanitation workers, secretaries, and dry cleaners.

I’m all for aiming high on a personal and national level, but not everyone can be Steve Jobs. He was an incredibly skilled man but he was also very, very lucky. The story of his life (and the story of the computer industry in America in general) is the stuff Oscar-winning films are made of; there are so many twists and turns and what-ifs and if-onlys that it’s a miracle I’m not writing this on an IBM dot-matrix typewriter. I’m just thinking, maybe it’s dangerous to be telling ourselves that we all should strive to attain the kind of professional success and dream-fulfillment that only a few people ever get to experience.

I remember being told as a child (and this story was probably exaggerated by whoever told me; a grandparent, maybe?) that everyone in Japan, even the garbage men, took extreme pride in their work. And that was how Japan prospered so greatly (this was the ’90s): every citizen was doing the best job they could no matter what it was. I doubt the validity of that; surely there must have been SOME slackers, but even so, every country needs a garbage man. Every infrastructure needs people to do jobs that no one grew up dreaming of doing. Is there anything really wrong with doing a job and doing it well even if it’s not what you dream of doing for a living? Isn’t it kind of all right to acknowledge that your dream job might be too competitive, or require a level of skill you may never attain, or in actuality not be very dreamy after all?

A lot of people are quoting the part of the Steve Jobs commencement speech where he compares your work with your lover, and he says you shouldn’t settle for anything less than true love in both cases. I fear a lot of people interpret this advice in a self-destructive way. I think about the people who are waiting to find The One their whole lives. And I wonder what they plan on doing if they never see those fireworks or hear those bells ringing.

I love my job, even though it’s not the job I dreamed of having. (Well-paid world-traveling crime-fighting novelist positions are hard to come by.) I love my boyfriend, even though I had a different picture in my head of who I’d end up with. (Portia is, of course, already taken.) I’m not living the dream, or maybe the dream has changed. But I don’t need to be an astronaut anymore. I’m okay here on the ground.

Image from this sweet tee shirt.