Expect the Unexpected

Hi, Boomers,

I'm excited today. In fact, I've been excited all week. I feel like I'm high all the time because adrenalin has been surging through my body with more than its usual speed. It was a good work week, teaching yoga every day - getting back to what I love doing. After experiencing the spiritual connection to Bali, it was a great feeling to connect my mind and body and breath in movement and intention. I also worked daily on marketing plans for my book, which was like another full time job. I even made time to dance tango on Wednesday night at one of my favorite venues - El Floridita on Vine and Fountain.

I was only away about 9 days but it felt like I was away a month. I guess that's a good sign that my vacation was terrific. And I'm still carrying Bali around in my heart, in my head, and in my future.

Okay, I won't beat around the bush. I'm having my first book signing tonight at my Saturday night milonga - the place where I regularly dance tango. It's actually called The Tango Room and we just celebrated our ninth anniversary at that particular studio.

I don't know what to expect from a book signing. But I'm just going with the flow and having a good time. Invitations were sent out and plans have been made to celebrate all 60 year old women in our tango community. It's free to all of us who have reached the 60th decade. A milestone for sure, and yet, we are all really very young at 60 it seems to me.

My book, Sixty, Sex, & Tango, Confessions of a Beatnik Boomer (still shamlessly plugging, aren't I), deals with turning 60. One day, right in the middle of being 60, I startled myself by consciously recognizing that I had turned 64. It was just a number to me. Nothing more than a number. I felt like I was 19; I acted like I was 19, and I moved like I was 19. In fact, I didn't move as good at 19. I like to think that living with joy, with yoga, with dancing tango has lead me into surrender and acceptance of living gracefully in my 60's. I'm now two years older than when I started writing the book and I feel younger. I feel like Benjamin Button decreasing in age. Maybe I'll die looking like a baby.

So tonight I celebrate many gifts I have been given: my family - sons and daughters in law and brother and sister in law and adorable nephew, my grandchildren - all five of them - my wonderful, loving friends, the tango and the pleasure and happiness that the dance has brought into my life, the ability to actually write a memoir about living joyously with gratitude and love.

I reflected today that I never had a vision about a book signing in my future. I just wrote daily for a year and a half joyfully. Sometimes I got so high on life that I wanted to scream. And sometimes I did just that. I screamed. Strange to me that I didn't have a vision of an outcome sometime in the future. It was just about the process, the journey that was a kick. So today I am surprised and I am grateful. And I wanted to share that with you.

Namaste

Joan

It's A Girl

Hi, Boomers,

Well, finally, after thirty-eight years of trying, my family came is about to produce a girl baby. It's a miracle! And it was random, of course. My oldest son and his wife gave birth four months ago to a perfect baby boy, Jude Love. It was their third boy. Oh, there was the usual, "Are we ever going to get a girl in this family" remarks, but everyone was happy because Jude was a healthy and a happy baby. My youngest son produced a male heir the first time. And now: Here comes the girl.

My last blog was about being a grandmother and its miraculous joys. It's still a mind-bender to me. However, it brings me around full center to living in my 60's and finding surprises and unexpected moments.

I was speaking to the marketing consultant from my publishing company this morning. The call was by way of introducing himself to me and getting my ideas on how to market my book, Sixty, Sex & Tango. Now, if I had to choose a marketing mentor for me vis a vis my book, it would not be a forty year-old male. And yet, the voice of this forty year-old male captured my attention. He actually was familiar with the themes in my book about living joyfully in the decade of the 60's, finding passion in life and love, and was going to recommend my book to his mother-in-law.

I posed the question to him about his interest in my book's topics. He thought that life brought a variety of experience to each decade and it was always worth reading about what other's have gone through.

"I get your book," he said. "While it is not specifically a self-help book, it is a book with experiences of a woman who has lived fully in her sixties and has insights and opinions and experiences that might help others."

Wow! Did he really say that. He's forty; he's a male; he's so far away from my sensibilities.

"Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you," I was raised with three older sisters."

How did I get so lucky today? I can't wait to hear his marketing suggestions and work with him after the book comes out. Mr. Marketing Consultant was fun, humorous, intelligent and randomly assigned to me by the publisher. It's a good thing no thought went into the selection.

On the bad news side: I just found out that my beloved therapist made so much money investing in a prostate cancer drug that he is retiring. When I say so much money, I'm referring into the 20 to 30 million range. He bought the drug at $2.00. I had a chance to buy stock in Dendreon, the company that brought the drug to market. But what would a schlepper beatnik/hippie yoga teacher do with a millions of dollars? I actually contemplated that thought in my 7 am yoga class this morning. And I actually couldn't think of how I wanted to alter my life. Sad, but true.

Namaste

Joan

Slogging Through 60

Dear Boomers,

  I haven't blogged since April 26th.  I feel a bit remiss but not necessarily guilty...until now.

I've been in a general malaise outside of my yoga teaching.  Oh, I love my work and am grateful every day for my students, my private clients and my friends.  

I guess it has to do with adult children this week and the end of the old lover comeback.  Let me start with the old lover comeback:  there wasn't one; it was a non-started, a fake and phony attempt to reconnect with heart or devotion and with a dedication to carelessness;  Moving on (although I didn't move on all week), the other issues revolve around my sons and their inattention.  I guess it's great not to have sons that have a mother complex - the tiny voice inside of a man that says to a woman - No! No! don't come any closer to my heart because I really cannot love you with my total being.  That's the inner mother.  The outer mother is a symbol of the inner mother.  Too complicated, huh?

Anyway, whenever I try to connect to one or the other of my sons, I get, "Mom, didn't I tell you not to call my home phone," or "Mom, I'm on my way to work, getting Starbucks, call you later."  No call later. One is chewing me out while the other just ignores.  What's the brain process here.  We live in different cities.  I try to come into Vegas once a month to see everyone, be with my grandchildren, be available, yada, yada, yada.  

What is family connection, anyway?  What does it mean to be connected to family?  Family asks after you, as in, are you happy, feeling good, depressed, or are you doing all right with finances, work, dating.  Sometimes I think a mother/grandmother should just take off for Tibet for six months and let everyone wonder what happened to "Mom."  She used to be around a lot and now she just doesn't care about us anymore.

I won't leave.  It's just not in my nature to leave my family.  I almost did once in Buenos Aires when I could have had a job teaching English as a second language.  I thought long and hard about it.  I'd dance tango all night at the milongas and then I'd get home about 3 am and get up at 7 and teach English to those peacock Argentine men in their high rise buildings.  I'd last about one week.  I wonder if women who are a couple feel this kind of lonelinessor is it because I am single that I sometimes excess being ignored.  

Anyway, I had a great weekend despite kissing off the old lover with an epic Beowolf poem exhaustedly, meticulously composed over a three day marathon.  I was obsessed to get it perfectly written, and, if I do say so myself, it was a masterpiece of irony.  And I already know the old lover won't even get it, let alone read it.  But it doesn't matter because I feel fabulous today at 65.  Oh, but you see, I also had a marvelous date with a much younger man this Sunday and all went right with the world.  After the walk on the Venice boardwalk, which resulted in my buying T-shirts for my grandsons (oh, yes, I don't hide much), we went to an exquisite move called "Examined Life - Philosophy is in the Streets."  Age didn't seem to matter much.

The day and my date reminded me of the best of times in Berkeley in the 60's at the beatnik coffee houses along Broadway and Columbus Avenue with jazz puncturing the cold night air.  WOW!  I felt like 19 again.

Namaste

     Joan

FINDING MY INNER ELMO

Good Morning, Boomers,

      I love being a grandmother in my 60's.  I'm headed to Las Vegas tomorrow morning at the crack of dawn to take care of my 2 grandsons and attend the 1st birthday of my third grandson.  My daughter in law will be away attending a college reunion of friends from her Tulane days.  My son, Jonathan, and I will take care of the kids.  This is the best part of being 60.

     Text message last night from my daughter in law, Carli:  "I know you'll be so excited to know I got tickets to see the Elmo show at the Thomas and Mack Center."  Carli knows I won't be excited.  She was laughing at me when she sent it.  I went into a deep depression when I read it just before teaching my 4 pm yoga class at UCLA.  Way to mentally prepare myself for a positive yoga practice.  

     I've done lots of things as a grandmother, some good and some not so good.  The bad things are related to losing my temper when my grandsons begin to play with food and I get the stern witch voice going so I scare the holly crap out of them.  But I do love to hunt for books at Barnes and Noble with my oldest grandson, 4 year old Jordan, and we do like to play in the part and swim together and those are part of the great fun of hanging out with the boys. 

 

     But Elmo!!!!!   I hate Elmo!  I don't like the way he looks or talks or moves.  I don't like anything about Elmo.   Both my grandsons love Elmo and so I have to look interested in their fascination with the creep.  Thank God Jordan is on his way of love with the guy, but Luc is right on track developing an addiction to him or it.  

     I can endure the birthday parties this weekend, especially Greyson's 1st birthday party; I can endure eating out with them and watching them play with their food.  I can endure the craziness at bedtime and the screaming when they don't know how to share toys.  But I cannot endure Elmo and, yet it seems I have to.  This is my inner child screaming for a way out and there is no out.  There is a way out of cleaning poppy diapers, a way of sleepless night, waking a baby grandson for an hour at 2 am, a way out of coaching them to eat when they have no interest in food, a way out of distracting them from dangerous behavior, but I believe with all my heart, there will be no way out of my Friday night meet and greet with Elmo or my name, Gran, will be mud.

     I don't feel bad about this negative feeling even though I am a yogini and teach yoga all day in the positive light of the universe.   You see, Elmo isn't real.  Elmo is a made up character in Seasame Street so he doesn't have to touch my heart or my mind.  This really gets me off the hook because it doesn't relate to my karma in past lives or on earth.  Now, I'm free to really despise the big guy.  Take that, Elmo!

     Now I feel better.

     Namaste

     Joan 

     

Attention Boomers: Let's Turn Back Time

Dear Booomers,

     Did you know that most of the airports in the great and glorious and super tech U.S. do not have Internet access, and if they do, we have to pay for it!  This is the United States of American in the year 2009.  Years ago I went to Amsterdam and the Internet was available at free computer stations and I thought I died and went to heaven.

     Can't we do something about this situation of no Internet access in airports?  We are supposed to be the leaders of the free world and we can't even access our Internet for free in our airports!  It's a pathetic and shameful situation.  But what is more pathetic and shameful is that no one does anything about it.  No hue and cry; no letters to the editor; no flood of email to our so-called legislatures. When are we ever going to give something away for free in this country?  Hey!  Aren't the airwaves free anyway?

     I was sitting in the Las Vegas airport last night waiting for a delayed plane.  Every Southwest plane was delayed because there were very strong winds and dust storms in the lower and upper deserts.  Los Angeles weather was just as bad.  I thought I'd get on standby on the flight before mine, but I was #20 and it wasn't going to happen.  Out of a sense of desperation, I asked the man sitting next to me if he thought I could get Internet access in the airport.  "Not in this B Gate," he said with authority.  "You mean there are other gates with Internet access?" I asked excitedly.  "Yeah, you can get it at Gates A and C."  The obvious question was "What happened to Gate B."  I felt stupid asking but I asked anyway.  "They ran out of money," he replied.  "My company wired A and C Gates and they ran out of money right after that."

     I wanted to know who ran out of money, but I figured it was the McCarren airport with its usual shortfall.  Airports always have money problems and that's why most of them look half finished or in need a facelift almost immediately after they are built.  If you've been to LAX recently, you'll know what I mean.  Outdated and outmoded.  

     

     But where was the outrage not only at the lack of sophistication and technological expertise, but it was also one of the most chaotic scenes I have ever witnessed in an airport and I've been to many airports around the world in my long life.  Okay, India and Cairo are really bad.  I was stepping over bodies all over Gate C.  People were practically pitching tents it took so long for Southwest to get organized with their out of control flight delays.  I waited an extra 50 minutes after my plane landed because there was no crew.  They were coming in on another flight that was delayed and then delayed before that.  It took five hours to get home on a flight that was 46 minutes.  

     Did we Boomers march and protest in the good old days or was it my imagination?  What makes us so complacent now, so lazy, so like lemmings being lead to the edge of the cliff and told to keep going and we do and we fall in to Iraq or Guantanamo?  We've been content with less than adequate situations and immoral and unethical conditions for decades since our Vietnam protests and our Civil Rights days, and we've become immobile and satiated with too much food and good times to care a wit that we are actually sitting in pig shit.  

     I was starting to get radical sitting on the floor with my computer on my lap, my butt and legs numb from the hours of waiting.  I tried desperately to stir up some opposition to the enervating atmosphere.  No one took the bait.  No one seemed to care that we had been reduced to shells of our former selves, filled with stale pizza and sub sandwiches with too much doughy white bread and pepperoni.  Hours before we took off, our cell phones ceased to interest us so all we could do was just stare into space and find solace in the din of white noise.  

     Even I was beyond impatience and hostility.  I, too, crossed a mental line after failing to muster any support to picket the poor woman giving out hourly flight updates, which no one was responding to because the florescent lights had given us a lobotomy.  It was simply no use to shout, "Let's burn our bras and take over Southwest."  There wasn't a Boomer in sight who could have lasted an hour in a Gate C sit in.  What happened us?  Where is our edge?  What will finally make us take up arms against a sea of trouble and by opposing squash the incompetents.

       Or maybe I should just focus on finding a really cool and smart male companion to get me off of my mini-rant.  I'd at least get some satisfaction.

        Namaste

        Joan 

         

You Can't Go Home Again

Greetings, Beatnik/Boomers,

Sometimes it is tough being a parent of adult children and an ex-wife all in the same night.  With trepidation I entered the restaurant wearing both hats.

I mentioned in my first blog yesterday that I had hoped the birthday dinner of my oldest son was going to go well.  It was a family affair, minus one of my daughter-in-laws who was sick.  My ex-husband was the host.  My two sons were present as was my oldest son's wife, my other daughter-in-law.  

This birthday dinner should should have been routine, but nothing is routine in my family it seems.  There is always something going on.  We have a bit of a tendency to catastrophize events.  Couldn't I be 65 and have no drama at a family gathering?  Shouldn't every issues have been resolved by now?  It wasn't and why should it.  That's just the family dynamic.  But it is beyond tedious.  Sometimes I feel we are the The Adams Family on crack.

But this time we did not fit the goulish description of TV's one most popular program.  Yet, we didn't fit the phoney "Leave It To Beaver" family either.  Last night we fell somewhere in the middle of "Arrested Development" and "Brothers and Sisters."

My sons had fought bitterly over the winter holiday.  No need to give you the details, but somewhere in a matter of an hour, a stealth bomber had entered my ex-husband's house in Park City and exploded with flares and fires between my two sons.  The fight, a little on the physical side (let's just say they were chasing each other down the stairs and I broke them up in the laundry room), ruined the evening planned by my ex at a country club with his dearest friends.  I had flashbacks of the horror I felt at seeing my two boys go after each other in the manner they once did as kids.  I entered the country club, crying buckets as I entered the bar and drowned myself in a martini was was only four ounces and had no visible alcoholic content.  Of course, we were in Utah!  Everyone else put on a brave face.

Last night's birthday dinner was the first time I had been in the same room at the same table with my sons.  I wasn't privy to all that had been said and not said throughout the last three months.  I deliberately absented myself from my family for awhile.  It was my their fight and not mine.  Wasn't that good of me?  There were years when I always tried to make it all better for everyone and failed miserably.  But this time I closed my mouth and threw away the key.  Is that what it's like being 60is and wise?  Who knew it was that simple?

It all went well.  There were laughs; there were stories.  My second son had just returned from Austin and the South X Southwest music festival and my oldest had returned from DC on business.  It seemed he went jogging with a couple of right wing Christian Republicans around the Lincoln and Washington monuments ending up at the steps of the Capitol in a bizarre and really out of body experience for my son.  The Austin music festival was fascinating for all of us.  My ex, usually somber and sarcastic, was actually animated, albeit still argumentative.  I ate and drank great wine and relished listening to  the conversation.  No one came away emotionally scared.  It was a miracle.  

I never thought, never could imagine myself in my 60's living with a sense of foreboding or anxiety.  It was like my faucets got switched.  Which one was I turning on for what feeling.  Last night at dinner  I told my daughter-in-law that I had an outer body experience for a few minutes.  Of course, I was sitting there single again and facing my ex-husband and realizing that it was actually our 45 wedding anniversary if we had still been married.  I toyed with bringing it to his attention or making a joke or a toast to years of knowing each other but we really didn't know each other at all.  We pretended to know each other a long time ago when we were in our twenties.  That was long ago and far away and there was no sentiment left.  His struggles, and there are many, including the primary one of his living in a cave without light (my code for being unconscious), were too painful for me last night.  Bringing up an old, mangled marriage memory was out of the question.  I couldn't go home again. 

Live is certainly not lived on a level playing field, but is a wildly interesting character study.

Namaste

Joan

La Vida Loca

Greetings, Boomers.  Greeting to those who are 60 and over and living la vida loca.  

This is my first blog.  I'm nervous, anxious and technically challenged.  I'd rather write in Word.  It's probably no different than writing a blog, but it feels different.  I'm expressing my deeepest sense of self into virtual reality.  It feels impersonal.  I would prefer talking about living in my 60's face to face with a real person.  But I'm forging on, taking a personal risk and dancing as if no one was watching.  

I just finished writing a book called, So You're 60, Get Over It:  Confessions of a Beatnik/Boomer.  I had no intention of writing another book.  My fantasy was to do stand up comedy.  Soon after turning 64, well sometime before that probably,  I began to think of my 60's as a pretty strange and funny time when all the rules of living I once abided by were totally gone.  I wasn't really a parent anymore in the traditional sense; I was a cheerleader for my kids.  I became a grandparent, but it was really somebody else's child, and I had no say as to how to raise my progeny.  My children were adults and living their own life without my approval and caring less about my disapproval, which I could not voice.  My sons had turned the child-parent paradigm upside down by parenting me instead a long time before this.  I was now the one doing everything wrong.  And since I am single and sometimes dating, I have to keep my social life separate from my family life.  And if I didn't, the question was:  why did I date losers?  More important the dynamics of sex has changed and not for the good.  Sex is part of a relationship negotiation at 60.  Men and women are not having sex on a level playing field.  Men are losing testosterone but women can replace estrogen levels and have a pretty good sex life.  It is definitely time to try younger men.  

Everything about my life us crazy except my work.   I'm a yoga and meditation teacher fine tuning the spiritual mind/body connection living my Tao while practicing daily losing.

But sex preoccupies me.  Not only do I like sex, but I also thint that sex in my 60's is particularly funny and strange and sweet and generally kind of an out of body experience. One Saturday night as I was attending my regular milonga, the place where I go to dance Argentine tango (more later on that other passions of mine), I told a female friend, a film director, that I my fantasy was to do stand up about sex in my 60's and all the various, idiosyncratic and funny situations I and other women my age have encountered.  My friend replied to me:  "That's more than stand up.  You should write a book."  And I did and it was blissful and cathartic and full of wonderment at discovering my transformation as a woman in my 60's.  

So I put myself out there at 60, expose my innermost thoughts and desires and fears, looking for a way to be joyful and grateful every day for all my gifts of family and friends and yoga and tango and music.  I'm inspired and hopeful.

Times are difficult for us all.  It's not easy to find the humor in living with half my retirement gone, gone, gone and still working at 65 and looking at 66, 67, and 68 and on to 70 as working years.  But I decided that the economic downturn gives me another gift:  the ability to create, see clearer, be more inspired, and more loving to my family.  Now if I could not stop obsessing about the DOW, I might be able to clear out most of my cobwebs and be more conscious.

I didn't mean to get serious in my first blog.  But since I finished my book, the times got more serious for us Boomers.  Bad economic news is a definite drag and causes depression.  So can tax season.  We'll all get past this moment because what goes down must come up.  I'm an eternal optimist.  

But right now, I've got to be a grandmother because the my grandsons, Jordan, 4, and Luc, 2, are getting up from their naps.  Everyone is sick.  Even Greyson, my youngest grandson (10 months) whom I babysat for yesterday.  My entire family, including my ex-husband, are all in Las Vegas, both my sons and daughters in law, my 97 year old mother, my brother and his wife, and my best friend.  I'm on my once a month weekend warrior visit.  I don't go to Vegas for fun; I go to connect with my family.  And sometimes it can be fun.  Jordan just came into my room to ask me for a drink so I'm off to spend the rest of the weekend celebrating my oldest son's birthday (Jonathan, 37) and to hope that the rift between my sons (Aaron, 33) will begin to heal.  I feel like I'm a bottle of glue with arms and legs stretching out to bring my family some peace and hope.  

This is not what I expected from being in my 60's.  Where is my script?  My cheat sheet?  My advanced curriculum for Living 101?  I'm winging it like everyone other Boomer.    

More later.

Namaste

The divine in me recognizes the divine in you.

Joan