Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
‘Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

In the days of the internet you have shadow versions of yourself floating around out there.  You aren’t just the one person. You are who you always wanted to be. You say everything you always wanted to say. You never have to be imprisoned by the confined misery of the hand you were dealt.

When two personas try to meet in real life, though, they have to reconfigure themselves into who they really are.  And it’s a roll of the dice whether or not those two people can get along or not. Sometimes they can live in deluded ecstasy together. As in, their individuals pretend selves become the collective pretend couple.

This kind of living has pretty much finished me.  I just want you, the internet, to know this.  After fifteen years online I’ve finally come to the conclusion that “warts and all” is the way to go in life.  Just get all messy and sloppy in it.  There is no benefit that lasts just being in it for the ego boost. We must be bigger and better than our egos.  Think about what an ego must look like, what it would like if it was actually manifested in human form. You know it would not be nearly as big, as hot, as cool, as all-powerful as it thinks it is.  No, it is cowering in the dark, afraid to do anything that might risk it losing at life.  The ego: it’s the little man behind the curtain and it offers you nothing back except a lifetime of unrealized expectations.

Except that ego drives us to do all sorts of things. I think that evil little sack of shit drives my own creativity sometimes, the doing of this bloggggggg, wanting to have a voice “out there.” I know it drives rock stars and movie stars.  But trust me, when it gets down to happiness – look elsewhere.

I finally went back to yoga after a long break.  What a relief that was.  In yoga you have to fight your ego at every turn.  You’re in the front row showing off or in the back hiding. You’re doing the advanced pose or the modified one.  But my ego drove me to the point where I injured my shoulder and couldn’t do it anymore. So not only am I in the 1/2 class and no longer in the 2/3 class but I slapped myself down and put myself in the back row.

I am trying to get life right.  I  make mistakes every day.  I wake up hating myself.  Then I wake up okay with it all.  What I do know is that there probably isn’t ever going to be a happy ending for anyone until they practice what the Buddha teaches.  Ahem.

• What is the First Noble Truth?

The first truth is that life is suffering i.e., life includes pain, getting old, disease, and ultimately death. We also endure psychological suffering like loneliness frustration, fear, embarrassment, disappointment and anger. This is an irrefutable fact that cannot be denied. It is realistic rather than pessimistic because pessimism is expecting things to be bad. lnstead, Buddhism explains how suffering can be avoided and how we can be truly happy.

• What is the Second Noble Truth?

The second truth is that suffering is caused by craving and aversion. We will suffer if we expect other people to conform to our expectation, if we want others to like us, if we do not get something we want, etc. In other words, getting what you want does not guarantee happiness. Rather than constantly struggling to get what you want, try to modify your wanting. Wanting deprives us of contentment and happiness. A lifetime of wanting and craving and especially the craving to continue to exist, creates a powerful energy which causes the individual to be born. So craving leads to physical suffering because it causes us to be reborn.

• What is the Third Noble Truth?

The third truth is that suffering can be overcome and happiness can be attained; that true happiness and contentment are possible. lf we give up useless craving and learn to live each day at a time (not dwelling in the past or the imagined future) then we can become happy and free. We then have more time and energy to help others. This is Nirvana.

Oh hi, Nirvana.  I’m looking for you.  Help me find you, will you?  I love this notion of the “imagined future.” This is a trap.  The old “when this happens, this other thing will happen.”

The fact is that life washes over us every day and we barely notice it.  The sun comes up and it goes back down. Light washes the landscape and then it goes dark. And every day our body keeps track of the time passing.  We feel things start to fade.  We age.  And that is all.  But if we can be right here, right now, well then maybe – just maybe – we will kiss the tip the nirvana occasionally.

I feel better now, internet.  Thanks for being here, my imagined self, my projected self, my real self and mean crumpled old ego thank you too.  Oh, memories.  Oh, sweetness.

There is nothing special about today. Except everything. As the days and nights pass, I am continually reminded of the swiftness of time, how it starts rolling and moves faster as it gathers mass. It moves faster but doesn’t get more dense – it gets lighter somehow. We don’t have any way of tracking our days so we let them slip by undetected. The doors are locked, the lights go out and we sleep. For me, sleep is always a daunting task. With no one to sleep with the bed is a lonely place and the hours in between night and morning can sometimes be trying. Will I wake up at three and start thinking about things? If I do that, will I ever get back to sleep? Where will my thoughts take me tonight? Panic of all the things I have yet to do? Panic that my life has come to nothing? Panic that I am alone in this bed? Panic that I still haven’t even accomplished half of what I set out to accomplish? I feel lucky that my thoughts have yet to lead me over to the next room, where my daughter sleeps. She has yet to give me much cause for worry. And I know I’ve been there as best I could. Where she is concerned, except for the dad thing, I have no regrets, either immediate or long term.

But…

It usually goes like this. Things seem perfectly fine, give or take a bad day or two, up until it’s time to sleep. My body tricks me by pretending it’s tired so I trudge on off to bed, closing up our apartment for the night. And then the head hits the pillow and the darkness falls. Except that it is never really dark – there is always light streaming through from somewhere outside in the city. And that light, much of the time, is what wakes me up.

If I do wake up, either by a bad dream (they happen sometimes) or by the light, I hope that my thoughts don’t take a dark turn. Even when they do, even when I’m convinced I’ve made nothing but mistakes and continue to make those same mistakes repeatedly – as if stuck in a Beckett play, rapping my head against a wall, somehow, by morning, everything falls back into place. It is as if the spirits have their fun at my expense in the middle of the night but by the time daylight comes, they themselves must return to sleep — and they do. They go back into my drawers and my closet. They hide under the bed. And their slumber, as opposed to mine, is restful. I do not disturb them during the day. I would love it if they left me alone at night.

My nights got really bad back in my early twenties when I was having serial killer dreams. I guess I was never much of a good sleeper, not when I had to sleep alone and I hate sleeping alone. Did I mention that? Welcome to the rest of my life, incidentally. But back then, when I was having these dreams – I would be in a room with a serial killer and I would have to try to charm them out of seeing me as one of their fresh kills. They terrified me to the point where I was afraid to go to sleep and so I sought a therapist – a very kind woman, a Jungian, who helped me through this for the next five years. A lovely thing, therapy. With her help I finished college and headed off to grad school (where I proceeded to then take further steps to ruin my life – but I’M STILL HERE!).

The bottom line is this: I know that I am having a hard time of it when my little spirit friends start partying at my expense in the middle of the night – taunting me about all of the things I’m doing wrong. What bills I haven’t paid. What I forgot to do, put off doing, or just plain decided not to do. The books I haven’t read, the toenails I haven’t manicured (and yoga again today, egads). My hair, my wrinkles, my love handles, my untouched body, my frantic libido. WHAT ELSE!?

But it is with every day that sooner or later, as the glorious California sun comes up — as the June gloom coats the sky and begins to evaporate around noon, and it is another day. The morning has a way of righting the night. But though it brings hope that things can change today, it also reminds me that we tick them off, these days, and they pass. They pass. So this of all days is a special day because it is one of a finite number. We have them now. They are gifts. Every torturous night, every sane day.

I found this story via a good friend on Facebook. Cassie Boorn sent out calls to older women to write letters to their twenty year old selves. Some highlights were then posted on Mental Floss:

• “Speaking of money, way to not have a credit card yet, that is a good move. Although, seriously: you have no concept of managing money in any kind of real way. That’s going to suck in a few years when you do get a credit card, and aren’t as good as you should be about paying off the balance.”
• “You look like a damn model. Enjoy that concave stomach and stop being self-conscious about your body.”
• “As for prince charming, thanks for believing that he exists. When you meet him, don’t be surprised if he doesn’t appear to be much more than a friend at first.”
• “You didn’t develop your character because you did everything right. As that rickety old woman told once you,flowers grow in the valley, not the mountaintop. And you have to walk through the valley to get back up there.”

All of them, pearls of wisdom, my friends. I have so much to say to my 20 year-old self. I realized, though, that saying it is one thing. Hearing it at 20 is a whole different thing. Imagine, for instance, what Lindsay Lohan has been hearing from people, and how she’ll look back on her 20s. What we don’t realize as young women is that there is time ahead for the things we seem to want now. We also don’t appreciate what we have. So I wanted to write a letter to see what would come out, knowing that I probably wouldn’t have listened back then. Because, you know, we all knew everything already, right?

Here is a pic of me around that age:

Dear 20 year old Sasha:

You will never have this much energy again in your life. Do not fret your thighs. Do not fret your face. It isn’t perfect but perfection is over-rated. You have youth on your side. Enjoy every imperfect minute of it. Do not waste time trying to lose five pounds. Stop fretting that you look fat in those jeans. You don’t. As my friend Emily used to say, “You look spectacular.” And trust me, if you could see what I see now you would agree.

It’s okay that you’re studying acting – it will help you later in all sorts of ways. When you go to NYU, make sure you check your financial aid paperwork. And guess what? You don’t have to starve for a whole semester. Your meal plan will be INCLUDED! So now you won’t have to find out at the end of the year that you could have been eating in the dining hall all of this time! Do not drop out of NYU. Stay at least a year.

Don’t grouse about being 24 when the rest of your classmates are 19. YOU’RE 24! That is SO YOUNG! And remember, those older guys who want to get into your pants – they don’t have your best interests at heart. Stop searching for love as if it meant everything. Everything else meant everything. Love will wait.

Don’t be afraid of being good at stuff. You will be nervous in writing class and embarrassed when people think your writing is good. But stick with it. Work hard. There is nothing silly about what you will be doing.

Do not take French, take Spanish. You have no idea how important that will be.

When you find yourself back in Los Angeles and in therapy (good move on that one), definitely stick with the UCLA plan and graduate, as you did. But major in something other than theater. Try business or economics or urban planning or even art history. There are so many better ways to spend your time at college than pursuing something that you don’t even need to go to school for in the first place.

DO NOT TAKE OUT STUDENT LOANS. You are selling your soul to the devil when you do. No one should ever have to take out student loans in order to study film or art or writing. There is no worse way to ruin your future. Take out loans only if you have a viable career plan after college so that you can pay them back. But my advice to you is to never take them out to begin with.

Be more responsible with money. Don’t get so many parking tickets.

That guy you meet in the Irish pub? He will try to date rape you. That really hot guy you meet at work who makes you laugh? He has a girlfriend. And by the time he leaves his girlfriend he’ll come looking for you. But you can’t trust him.

When you are accepted to graduate film school at Columbia University, opt out. Do not attend such an expensive school because you simply couldn’t afford it. Moreover, you didn’t need to go there at all to study what you were studying. Grad school locally is a better idea. But skip film school. Study law or psychology or education. Get a solid foundation for a more stable future.

Finally, because after Columbia I don’t have any more advice for you. I’m proud of what you’ve done, where you’ve gone, whom you’ve become. But there is one very very important thing to know: be wary of your willingness to drop everything for a guy. There will be one guy you will meet much later in life — he’ll be British and he’ll be a deceptive person. Do not go on a second date with him. Just move on.

Oh, and p.s. date the guys who are nice and boring rather than the ones who are exciting and careless. You will thank me later.

Love, 45 year-old Sasha

As I move through my 45th year, I am seeing so many things more clearly. Life seems a lot less complex than it did twenty years ago. And yet, the older I get, the more nostalgic I feel for my youth. I am bathing in a cliche. I have been watching films from the early ’80s and I have been remembering what it feels like to be desired the way only young women are. But it isn’t just that — it’s the energy, hope and life force one feels when they’re just starting out. It came with a whole bunch of neurosis. This is the ugly truth of it. In most ways, it is better to be older.

Some young women really remind me of what it felt like to be a young woman – and though I have no idea what will happen to them as they age – they seem to capture the swagger, the sexual confidence, the vulnerability and the child-like wonder of being a woman between the ages of 20 and 25. At that time in my own life I already felt old. I had no idea, really, who I was and how temporary it would all be.

If I could impart this to young women I would: it doesn’t last. Enjoy the flame while it burns.

The women that remind me of those days are:

Blake Lively

Katy Perry

And especially Daisy Lowe

I was eating a banana the other day and it reminded me that it’s been a long time since I’ve interacted with a male organ. (Oh no she didn’t!) I’m sorry to have to be so blunt about it but it is a fact of my life: I have given it up, at least for now. Why? Because I’ve wasted way too much time interacting with it. It might be true that cock has attempted to ruin my life. Sure, maybe it was the great conversation, the memorable moments in movie theaters, the restaurants, the running on the beach in the rain, the champagne, the flowers, the hugs, the laughter, or maybe, you know, it was the cock.

It wasn’t really until I saw the Eat, Pray, Love trailer that these thoughts began to circulate and form a conclusion – maybe a conclusion I don’t really want to reach.

I never read the book because I don’t like being an Oprah demographic. It isn’t that I have anything against Oprah – I love Oprah. I am just a rigid skeptic. I don’t go in for religious or “spiritual” stuff. I’m a science gal through and through. But you know what? What’s so bad about this sort of thing? When she says “Since I was fifteen I was either been with a guy or breaking up with a guy” and I have to say – yeah, me too. What’s with all of the cockcentric living?

And so I’ve given up the cock. At least for now. And it’s shown me a lot of great things – like I can be a full time mom, like I can work hard every day and not feel guilty for being successful. Maybe my life doesn’t have any room for a big old cock. Big sigh.

The last serious relationship I had broke my heart so completely that it made me think that I would never be able to believe in love again. And it’s true. In many respects, a door has closed. Trust was a hard fought thing for me to begin with, but this dude was leading a double life and sleeping with all of his ex-wives and ex-girlfriends the whole time. I didn’t find out about it until much, much later. It was the second of two heartbreaks; at least the first one was kind of normal by comparison. I wanted someone I couldn’t have. That’s really the long and short of it. Insert deep and meaningful psychological explanation here.

And so, after the tears and the “healing” I had to wonder, was it the guy or was it that stiffy? I don’t have the answer, I really don’t. I just wonder about it now. How much of our love and desire is wrapped up in our bodily organs?

Food for thought, so to speak. And by the way, I do miss the conversation and the laughter and the running on the beach in the rain and the bookstores and the movie theaters and all of it. I even miss the cock when you get right down to it. But hey, it’s time to eat, pray, and love – and forget the manufactured happy ending I’m never ever going to get.

p.s. I don’t think, you know, for the record that I ever really did run on the beach in the rain. Something for the bucket list.

I think it’s really weird that the press is poring over details of the Stephanie Birkitt/Dave Letterman love affair. I have an idea that Letterman will divorce his wife Regina and marry Birkitt. What do you want to bet. See, here I go, joining the choir. This Letterman thing is far from over. Sure, he did put himself in a good light by coming clean on his show but it is just too juice for the press to ignore. It will not be let go by the wingnuts either. Finally they have something really big on Letterman to invalidate any objective commentary he might have given over the years to help the Democrats.

But Birkitt is in a stew. The only hope she has of making things okay in her life is to write a tell-all book. She is infamous now and perhaps un-hireable (is that a word?) as a result. Her best bet is to make Letterman marry her and they can travel the world together. He’s probably too old now to cheat on her. Merill Markoe famously said that she always thought she would be the only woman Dave ever cheated on.

The weird thing about these women? They all look alike – they all have that pointy nose, weak chin thing going on. They are also probably smart and funny – well we know Markoe is funny:

Anyway, I wish the Dave story never happened. I wish he hadn’t pretended to be with someone a long time because it made him look like a good guy. I wish the sweet, honorable midwestern Dave still existed.

On the other hand, perhaps we put way too much on our celebrities to be better than human, better than us. And maybe that isn’t fair, and maybe it is what drives people like Letterman and other politicians to have to lead double lives in the first place; why can’t we like them as they are?

It really isn’t fair to put Iman on this list, is it? Does she count? Didn’t she swallow one of those Egyptian beatles to look forever 19? Helen Mirren, absolutely.

Every so often, if you’re doing a blog, it’s important to drive up your non-existent traffic. I do this by putting up the obligatory boobs post, that will no doubt bring lots of traffic, or not. Probably not. But hey, there is no point in doing this thing if you’re not going to do it all the way.

So there I was in the gym, faced with yet more naked bodies – of all shapes and sizes. It sounds like a cliche but trust me when I say, all shapes and sizes. You name it, I’ve seen it. Even if I tried not to look, it would be unavoidable. Boobs and pubic hair. In the gym locker room. You’d think it would be kind of erotic and hot except that, really, it’s not. It’s a lot more Auschwitz-like than Girls Gone Wild. I hate to make a Holocaust joke. But I just did. I’m going to hell.

So anyway, a friend recently advised me that when putting on your bra you’re supposed to lean over and jiggle them in. So I thought, there’s no way this will actually work. Sooner or later they jiggle back to where they aren’t supposed to be. In my case either popping over the top of my bra or pointing in the wrong direction due to the tightness of the fabric. Aren’t you so glad you clicked on this to read it? Here you were misled to believe that this would be something at least sort of hot? Or maybe you were hoping for an insightful nugget on life or perhaps something Oscar-related. Instead it’s as mundane as flossing your teeth, which all of you should do by the way. Don’t make me lecture.

Today, I’m proud to say, I jiggled them into my bra and what do you know, perfect fit. Maybe there is something to this instruction. Have you ever noticed that most of growing up includes realizing all of those things old people told you were actually true? All of the nagging my grandmother did and my mother did ended up being dead on. And yet, I brushed them off.

Now I must reconsider all of them. Somewhere my grandmother is laughing in her grave, god rest her soul. And you know, that’s something coming from an atheist like me.¬† Just kidding. Well, not really but one never says it out loud.

For me to have this blog. No reason whatsoever. Any chattering I want to do I can do on Facebook. And yet, and yet. I am therefore I blog. Or is it, I blog therefore I am? Either way, Jane Campion is bringing a movie about John Keats on the awards circuit this year and I’m kind of excited about it. The film is called Bright Star. And it’s just played Cannes. I don’t really pay much attention to what people say out of Cannes unless it’s unanimous bad or unanimous good. So far, there is nothing particularly dramatic either way so I’ll just wait to see what I think of it. And I can’t wait. Campion is one of the better directors out there, someone who really never did “sell out” and easily could have.

The title comes from this poem:

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art–
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors–
No–yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever–or else swoon to death.

This is neither here nor there. Just saying.