lixlove

Not this Borg

This Borg

Sunday Exception
I distinctly remember being able to skip Sundays during Lent. The season is 40 days and 40 nights, not counting Sundays. Now, I’m sure this has something to do with old-time Lenten traditions of undergoing serious fasts and allowing the poor church patrons to eat a little something on Sunday so they had enough energy to get to church and sit through service. I’m also sure that Jesus didn’t “take breaks” from his fasting. Neither here nor there, when I was a kid I was allowed to skip Sundays and I’ve opted to continue what may be a family tradition or simple adult delusion. So on Sundays, I eagerly watch Top Chef and shamefully click through the channels delaying the moment when I have to press the power button and enter into silence.

Dear Readers:  It pains me to inform you that I fell off the wagon from my TV and DVD fast.  The past few days had been hard.  Even though my apartment has been devoid of the obnoxious sounds of chicken wing and beer commercials, TV’s absence has been disquieting.  Putting it on is somewhat centering – it buys me time before I have to figure out what I want to do with my day or evening.  Now that center, which doesn’t seem to be easily replaceable with the radio or magazines, is missing and I’m a little off-balance.

Wednesday was a hard day for me at work.  I don’t mean to disrespect my job or my colleagues, but some days I experience a perfect storm of feeling bored, angry, frustrated, imprisoned and cold – each feeling exacerbating another.  There’s too much to say about these feelings to explain it here, but I’ll say that I had a lot of those regrettable days last year.  I thought I had figured out how to navigate through those storms, but I failed yesterday’s test.

After my second solo movie during Lent, I found the crowd of Caps fans leaving the Verizon Center – collectively distracted with children, cigarettes, hunger and intoxication – a little disarming.  This is not a time when being invisible is helpful.  I started to cry on my walk home.  Maybe I needed to cry earlier in the day, but it came out then.  After a few sobs and an angry tirade to the back of the 52 bus that zipped past me and another WMATA rider without stopping, I pulled it together.

Of all the celebrity pics that resulted from a Google Images search for “off the wagon” this was the most awesome

At home, I poured some red wine and nuked some leftovers.  ”I’ll just watch a few Daily Show clips until I finish eating and head to bed.”  A few clips turned into a full episode, which turned into a full episode of Colbert Report, which turned into a full episode of Bethenny Ever After (yes, I watch it and I love it), which turned into Eat, Pray, Love on Netflix, which turned into more wine and and more sobbing.  Pathetic? Maybe.  If there’s a realistic theme in Eat, Pray, Love, its that we can feel emotionally overwhelmed even under perfectly livable circumstances – or maybe its just me and Elizabeth Gilbert sobbing at the Ground Zero of our comfortable middle class lives.  Since that book sold a gazillion copies, I refuse to believe that it’s just the two of us.

As I watched my shows on my laptop in bed sipping my wine, I felt great.  ”I’m back, baby!” I said to my cat, snapping my fingers in the air as I did a little dance of victory.  The juice was back in my veins.  I didn’t care about the three weeks I had put in, or my three readers I might disappoint.  I lounged in a bath of aaaahhhhh!!! and it felt good.

But I’m not done.  Today is a new day and I’m hopping back on the wagon.  One thing I wanted to get out of this experience was more mindfulness, and while I’ve put in more time on the meditation cushion, I feel that there’s more room to grow.  I also hoped to gain a new coping mechanism for bad days – something to replace staying up half the night in a TV-Malbec Haze.  Maybe I won’t find anything during Lent or during my life, but if movies and booze are all I have, then I suppose its better than nothing.