
Well, my birthday came and went. I’m sitting at my mom’s house in LA. It’s nice to see her. My TMJ is still hurting like hell. I took a vicodin. I kind of want another one, but I’m trying not to get addicted. On Friday night, I threw a huge birthday bash at my house, and a surprising amount of people showed up considering it was also Good Friday and Passover. (Luckily for me–as a Greek, our Easter is a week later). I got what I wanted. A bunch of people in my house singing happy birthday to me like I was a two-year-old. A really ostentatious chocolate wedge cake from Falletti’s, and appreciative compliments to the chef by all the guests, telling me what a good cook I was. I made the most delicious chicken souvlakia for everybody who wasn’t fasting, lentil soup for everybody who was, and I taught my husband and my best guy friend to make Spanikopita together, and they did alright. I should have kept an eye on them, because they really convinced themselves not to use enough cheese, but it turned out pretty yummy anyway.
I was wished happy birthday by the guy at the liquor store, this very nice Palestinian man who is also Greek Orthodox like us, and who always engages me into really intense conversations about spirituality when I go into his liquor store at 1 am to buy booze or munchies. And I stand, right in front of the magazine display of pornos and stand to the side while people march in buying fifths of hard alcohol and cigarettes and six-packs of beer, before last call and we talk about God while random bums sneak in the back and stick spoons into ice cream containers in the back and gobble just outside the watchful eye of the surveillance camera, but who always piss off my friend, the liquor store owner later when he discovers the half-eated pints of Ben and Jerry’s rotting in the back. It’s really strange to have this conversation. But really, why not? His sister died a horrible death and he was never religious, but he had taken her to all these healers and monastics and they prayed for her and he developed a spiritual life after that. Then he got married. We joked because we had two priests at our wedding and he had FIVE at his. We got married the same summer. Then, he couldn’t bring his wife (who was pregnant) into the states because of visa issues. She is waiting for him in Jordan with their now 3-year-old baby boy and he is always traveling back and forth, wondering if he should sell the store. Anyway, this beautiful liquor store owner, who I haven’t talked to in about a year (because he is always in Jordan visiting his family, this altar boy in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, who was the first to recieve the “uncreated” light at midnight on Pascha, now owns a liquor store in a cruddy part of SF that the college kids nickname “Filthy’s” and sells six-packs and cigarettes and lotto tickets to the passer-by. Anyway, he was down there working, and two of my neighbor’s went by to buy a bottle of wine, mentioned that they were going to my birthday party. He was so touched that he gave them a free bottle of wine to send up to me. What a sweetheart. Then, the Chinese lady who owns the dry-cleaners saw me waiting for the bus eariler that day and came out and hugged me and told me that her sister was visiting from Hong Kong and we caught up on stories of her daughter who is a law student at UC Davis…all in her broken English. Then a 21-year-old tutor who works for me in the writing lab followed my home like a puppy on BART, wanting to talk about literary analysis, and missing his stop. I really felt the love. My friends all came over and I had too much to drink at my own party and belly danced with my friend M. Then, somehow, I ended up in the middle of the party undulating and doing backbends half-way to the floor in my skinny jeans that I can finally fit with everybody at the party clapping and hollering and cheering me on. It was the kind of birthday I really wanted to throw myself last year but held back on and then was upset that I had to go to a big birthday party for somebody else the next day. Why wait until your 30 when 29 is the real year to celebrate?
On Saturday, I got up at 8 after going to sleep at 4 am and drove down to Santa Barbara on the 101.
I went to see my special healer friend from the past who is a chiropractor and she let me drive to see her in Santa Barbara after 6 hours on the road. Then she let me stay at her house. She performed the cranio-sacral technique on me and some big crackings of my neck. I don’t know what they are officially called, but….they gave me some relief. Then, she put her hands in my mouth and re-adjusted my jaw. It was really intense and I screamed when she was doing it. I didn’t think I would scream. In fact, I was pretty embarrassed about it. What they do is put a hand inside your mouth and back and try to release the pressure in your actual mandible joints. I am not in touch with my own body sometimes and have trouble perceiving it and have a high pain tolerance, so I was not sure why I yelped like a whipped puppy when she cracked my jaw like that. She told me, you’ve got the tightest mandible I’ve seen in years. I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean…It seems kind of freaky. I asked her, why do you think I made noises? She said, well, probably because it hurt like a bitch.
Oh yeah, it hurt like a bitch, I repeated, somehow struck by the fact that I had to have somebody else narrate back to me my own pain sensation in order to feel it. Strange. I was going to go stay in a hotel, because most of my Santa Barbara friends have moved or a few are just too creepy to stay with, and she said, oh, come on, stay with me. So I crashed at her house the night before her Easter. The next day, I woke up and took a shower and washed my hair with her really nice shampoo (I always feel guilty about using somebody’s really nice shampoo while staying with them, but sometimes it’s just inevitable.) That night we talked about life, we compared experiences of grad school. We had a lot of the same experiences–though 21 years apart. We are kindred souls.
She came into my life after not hearing from her for 3 years. She broke up with her dream guy. He was a real horrible fuck to her. She was emotionally broken and wanted to die for two years. She threw herself into the waves at ocean beach on her surfboard in winter begging them to mangle her pretty body, but they would not. She still has my poetry chapbook I made in college about a bad break-up called “Ex-girlfriend Extraordinaire” right there on her bookshelf. (Which since I’ve written it has ended up used in all of these titles by other bloggers (WTF).
Then she referred me to a friend in the Bay Area who does the same technique as her. She gave me all these positive affirmations to do before bed:
“My jaw is loose and relaxed. My jaw is tension free. As I sleep through the night, my jaw is loose and relaxed. When I wake in the morning my jaw is tension free.”
She told me I need to have more body work done and that she was sorry she couldn’t fix me. You have some kind of emotion inside of you that you are not letting go. I suspected this. Your pain has an anchor in your back but we have to get to it over time. (I’ve known this for years). I have never fully felt all of my emotional pain and it’s manifesting in the physical. Yet, maybe the physical pain is making me feel very emotional.
I don’t have a problem feeling pleasure. I can feel and perceive pleasure pretty easily. I love to eat sweets and to cook. I love to dance. I love to cuddle. I can have an orgasm–I can have multiple orgasms if the wind blows the right way. But pain–I can’t do. My body won’t let me. I wonder why that is.
For now, at least I have my tiny page of affirmations that she wrote them on like a prescription.
I am trying to say them instead of the words that keep popping up in my head which are “You have the tightest mandible she’s ever seen.” Instead I am trying to say: I am loose and relaxed. I am tension free. I will get to the bottom of this pain. I will become a strong person. I will step forward into the day and with two hands clapping, release everything and unfold into my own creativity.