I've learned some things...

Yeah, it's like 5 minutes later, and I am not smarter yet, but this I know...

This post will not be profound. I don't have the happy of flower power sprouting out of my ass yet. And, Spring is not upon me. At all. (So much not, I feel like a napkin at a BBQ resteraunt, all used up and a over worn.)

Yet, a day away from New Year's eve, I've had a revelation. Velveeta and reality TV are my rocky road. I know the brain cannot process fatty food and intense emotion at the same time...but this concept has had a whole new meaning in the passing months.

I want to marry velveeta and bury myself in trashy reality TV!

No, really. Surrender.

I guess that's the message life is giving me. I really am going to have to surrender. But how and to what, exactly? For me, it's all getting a little out of whack and I'm not sure how to make sense of it.

Bull#2 writes a review and checks one of the commendable boxes, and uses words like efficient, clear, and concise. Then slips in some personal digs, calls me zealous in my efforts (trust me, it was meant negative), and remarks about my time away from the office.

I really shouldn't have scheduled a training session in advance of a meeting Bull#2 wanted to invite me to and I shouldn't have taken the approved vacation time this holiday season that would be taking place whilst another meeting Bull#2 wanted me in attendance for would also be taking place. Oh, and in the last 7 months, there was one or two sick days I called in for, and there were those 2 pre-approved days off for doctors appointments. Man I have, obviously, been abusing my vacation and sick time. What was I thinking?

I also shouldn't have asked one of my former professors to write a letter of recommendation for me for grad school. He'll do it, he said, but he warned me that my art just isn't good enough at this time and that I should expect to have to apply a couple of times and paint some more focussed work before I am actually accepted.

Another wonderful boost to my ego came when one of my close friends, who happens to be going through a lot of tough stuff, unleashed on me. I apparently do and say a lot of annoying things. I'd go into all of the annoying things I've been doing for the last 8+ years, that have been grating on this friend's nerves but weren't worth mentioning until now, but I'm not sure it is necessary.

I'm either that annoying, or not. Either way, I have to accept that this friend needed a place to put all the hurt, anger, frustration, betrayal, abandonment, etc., they are feeling from the events in their life, and, tag, I was the place and my personality was the target.

What sucks the most?

Well, I can take that my boss is an idiot and in sections of my review took out on me many of the boss's own short commings. I can also accept that I may need to look at myself professionally, even if I've never gotten a negative review in my entire life before (even for jobs I hated more).

I can take that I may not be a good enough artist for grad school at this point. That's fine. Getting my BFA in art taught me to have a thick skin as a creative.

And, I can take that one of my good friends either finds me wildly annoying, or moderatly annoying, depending upon where the anger was coming from, and that I may have some personal things worth looking at.

But what I can't take is that I don't quite know what to do with all of this now. It's all a bit much at one time. I am left wondering, how do I surrender to so much negative energy and turn it into useful productive steps? Maybe there are people out there who could essentially be told "You're not good enough," personally, professionally, and creatively, and come out feeling spry, but I feel like life just kick the crap out of me.

Wow! The last half of this year really has been a fabulous learning experience. (Wait?! WTF am I supposed to be learning again? Oh, yeah...Surrender.)

You can't make this stuff up

Ah, COME ON! I know I’ve been joking that this place is so dark it’s like a cave, but I’m not a friggen super hero, I don’t want to hang out with bats. Am I kidding? I wish.

Here I go and give myself a break from my new place hunt that I’ve been on for the last 2 months straight, like a second job, and only drove the neighborhoods for an hour and a half today, leaving myself the rest of the afternoon to spend with Cella, doing lunch and a movie, and upon returning home I end up less than five feet from a bat in a floundering flight.

Not cool.

“Nuh, uh,” you say. “How can it be?” you ask.

Fine. Than what was it? Just as I was turning key to knob, a black, blob of a featherless flying object was flipping its stunted flaps against the overhang of the condo porch, in what appeared to be a disorientated redirection of aim, at 8:30 pm in the evening. (Little reminder, the expression “blind as a bat” has it merits.)

Just in case there was a chance I mistook a bird for a bat, because perhaps birds do fly at night and bats don’t exist at the beach where I live, I Googled it. One article down from my basic search, dated 2010-04-07, I found a siting in my area. “Rabid bat enters home; Health department issues warning.”

Perfect. If I die from a panic attack a pack of rapid bats can eat my decaying flesh instead of wild wolves. I can’t think of a more poetic disposal of my corpse. Nice. (BTW... Do bats come in packs?)

Did I just get served?

First, I've got to get better at remembering what fake name(s) I've assigned to the people I blog about, and remembering whether or not I've posted about that something with that someone, or some whatever, or not. But, right now, I'm not any better at remembering $hi!, so I'll just make my point...

I just got served. A booty call, that is. Whatever fake name I called this guy, a month or so ago, when I met him, just one of the dudes I met out and about, it doesn't matter.

He dropped off. After a bunch of text messages, and our planned/impromptu outing to buy some sage to burn and cleanse his ex-girlfriend's energy away, gone, baby, gone! That meet and greet didn't get smoked. He wussed out when it came to a real connection, to going beyond the chase, beyond just trying to ego finagle me into his snare with text messages. Yet, today, dah-dah, ta-dah, he texted me and tried again.

Can you say, "Let's just see if this biach is eazy and will sleepz wit' me?" (Which is so disappointing, because he was such a great conversationalist and I had more respect for him than his actions have just now commanded.)

"Hi Levan," was his opener.

I didn't know it was him, at first. He's got the same name as one of my long-lost friend's husbands, so I thought, Shoot! What's up with the text outa the blue? Everything okay?" Then, later, just now, I called back after the text, to see, what up?, and it took me a minute to figure out it was the guy I met, who bought me a draft beer with my beans and salad addiction at my local eatery, and it was the guy who, while financially successful, is personally stunted.

He actuality put it out there, to see if I'd bite. "I'm in this place where I'm just having fun. So if you want to hook up tonight..."

You player hole, you! Did you really think I was that girl? Kiss my better-than-that!

The phone conversation ended with him thinking he might still have a chance, even after I assured him I am way too old, and way too self actualized (no matter what life brings me), to be the booty call for some guy with a self/relationship identity crises.

Never the less, he may call again. But, as always, I reserve the right to forget to post, to forget a name, to forget if I've named a post, and to forget to care about those who haven't posted a sincere desire to be a real part of my life...

Holiday-itis?

You know how they call someone a short-timer when someone is on their way out of a job? What do they say? You have short-timer's syndrome? So, what do they call it when you can't wait to go get your holiday started, can't wait to go to Colorado, can't wait to sit on your ass, eat a velveeta and white-flour tortilla quesadilla (a staple meal in Jen's house), watch movies, and laugh about what belly buttom jam smells like with one of your best friends?

We'll probably also make a list on which celebrity women are hot enough to have IBS (irritable bowl syndrome), and get away with crapping the bed during sex. Yes. I know. My conversations with Jen are the stuff of 12 year-old boys, dirt clods and farts, and are totally gross and immature. (Can you see why I can't wait?)

I am so already there in my head. I am sitting in Jen's sunlight-filled living room and we're plotting our evening plans. Or, we are at lunch, and we're both drinking a beer way too early in the day. But it doesn't matter, because it's the holidays and the chilli rellenos, drafts, and laughter are flowing. Maybe I'm sleeping in and I can hear the little foot steps of Jen's daughters coming down the hallway and tiny voices outside the door, whispering, wondering, if Aunt Levan is up and is going to come out and play.

I'm also already sitting down in the den, by a crackling fire dancing it's way inside of a stone-rock fireplace, and I'm yelling up to Jen, "Bring me more wine when you get another beer. And bring me my own bowl... You're not hogging all the cheesy popcorn this time, damn it!"

I don't know what book I am polishing off yet, because I'm packing light this year to avoid baggage fees, but Jen's got a title or two I'm pretty sure I'm going to want to get my hands on. I also don't even know what, exactly, we are doing for Christmas eve or Christmas day. But I don't care.

Holiday vacation, two weeks off, resting my eyes from fluorescent lights and computers, gaining back the stress pounds I lost, laughing until beer comes out of my nose, HERE I COME!

Surrender

This post took a while, and it is blong (that's what my friend Rod calls my long blog posts), but what can I say except that?

About a month or so ago I woke up with a hangover. I’d been talking on the phone with Jen the night before, and, before I knew it, 3-4 glasses of wine had gone down the hatch. This has happened before, where, because the conversation with Jen gets going, and we get to laughing, I think: What the heck? Just one glass. Jen thinks: Screw it, just one beer.

Then, the next morning, because "just one” ends up being more, Jen and I both wake up with a hangover. One of us picks up the phone first, but we both ask, “What the hell? How long were we on the phone and how much did we drink last night?”

The ick part this time is that it wasn’t a blue moon on a Friday or a Saturday night, like usual. I had to go to work the next morning. Jen didn’t. Drats! I was all by myself in my: Ah, man. Sonuva bitch this day is gonna be a helluva of a dragger.

Turned out, my day, while it felt like molasses had slowed the hands on the clock, was amazing. The hangover left me with the effect of being too tired to be stressed. I kept zoning out. It was awesome. I was in an all-day meditative state.

No thoughts, no resistance, just complete surrender to the current state, to the tired, to the Now. There was even a point where I took a walk, so I wouldn’t fall asleep at my desk, and the world had turned into this amazing shade of acceptance.

That’s when I think the paradigm shift hit, that I can’t keep resisting the Now, or resisting this job, or this place I live in, or this life. This everything that is on the outside of form that I think is supposed to make me happy on the inside of mind and emotion.

Ava, my fellow traveler, has been reminding me, all along, "This is all necessary, all the changes you are going through. This is part of your life," she's said. But, as we all know, and I know too well, we don’t always get the message when it comes to us. We come to the message when we are ready for it.

This has been a difficult thing for me to process, accepting that I am not always as ready as I’d like to be. It’s especially hard for me as I watch certain patterns repeat in my life, and I comprehend that life is giving me another chance to understand something about myself, and about what I am doing here, yet, while in the midst of an opportunity to learn and move forward, I watch myself remain rigid.

Sometimes it sucks, eh? Having good information in your head, or, rather, in your core. Knowing it’s there. Waiting for it to rise to the surface, to get some air so you can stop chocking on your own thoughts and catch your breath long enough to get over thinking too much.

Yet, the message gets lodged somewhere between deep knowing and the nag of your perceived reality, two such competing forces, that you can’t even hand the good thoughts a life jacket. How are you supposed breath in the good stuff when you are too busy sucking air through the pinched straw of all the negative energy swirling around in your head and gooing up your gray matter?

It’s true. There is no better way to keep a problem alive, or to make it worse, then by feeding it and ruminating over it in a non-productive way. No good comes from resistance. I know this.

I know we do all of our quality work when we are present and when our actions are guided by clear intuition and positivity. But the frail human part of us, all the soft and peach-like matter, can be just a bruise away from spoiling, can't it?

That’s why we regurgitate, over and over, all the acid. We are hungry for something. We don't always know what it is. So, we unconsciously feed off of the negative and find ourselves surprised when all the sweet under our thin skin starts to rot, when our thoughts become like a festering infection.

That’s when things get worse.

Most of the time things aren’t actually deteriorating. (Our situation isn’t really getting shittier.) But because our unconsciousness, our silly minds, believe everything is positively beastly, we often do feel that we’re getting more and more beaten down. But, again, it’s almost always mostly in our minds. It is our inner beasts that present themselves to us, to our ruminating mental rhetoric, as a threatening force capable of overtaking us.

That’s what was beginning to happen to me pre-hangover. My head shit was kicking my life’s ass.

Shoot, I’m never going to be the Dalai Lama. I’m barely Being my own level headed Levan lately. But, there are things I am certain of Now. I’ve got to hold on to and continue to practice and to build upon what little enlightenment I’ve cultivated over the years. Because if I don’t get some of my Zen back, living in this place, where I am resisting life and fearing it as it comes, it is going to kill me before I die.

That’s the truth for all of us. We all can think of a thousand horrible deaths. But, there are really only three ways to die: Mentally, physically, or emotionally (mind, body, or spirit), and getting stuck in your head is a lot like pulling the trigger.

Death by thinking too much? Are you kidding me? Is that really how I want to go?

I inherently know all suffering is in the mind. The mind creates the problems. The mind is responsible for the illusion that we are under attack from our lives. I know. I know. I know. It’s irrational, this behavior that sustains the preoccupations that can deteriorate our health. I so know.

My preoccupation with home and with work is what has allowed me to forget that there is a difference between life (life force) and a life situation (a lesson).

We are not our situations. Therefore, whatever fears we experience from them do not exist in reality. If our fears are not real they cannot define us. If we cannot be bound by these fears, than these fears only exist in our delusions—in the problems we create by constantly mulling a situation over in our mind. (That is how our fear becomes greater than our reality.)

"Worrying about something doesn't change the outcome. All you can do is take it day by day. Live here, in the Now, and don't let fear take you somewhere else. I can hear these words in my head. Yet, I’ve been doing exactly what doesn’t work. I’ve been resisting EVERYTHING.

I’ve not been surrendering to my life as it is, or to the moment as it comes. Nor have I been accepting the cycle of life. Instead, I’ve been putting tags on my life. This is good. This is bad. This sucks. This sucks not as much. This sucks more.

We are, as I’ve been exhibiting, living in resistance when we judge what is and label it acceptable or unacceptable. Nothing is ever, or either, wrong or right, wonderful or a fright. Everything is always just as it is and exists independent of our judgment.

Again, I’ve fallen off my own practice. I know change is the only constant. Nature knows this.

Nature does not resist the cycles of life. A tree doesn’t cry because it’s lost its leaves in the winter. A butterfly doesn’t need therapy because the wind it twits its wings upon keeps shifting. No. The tree gets new leaves in the spring, and talks to all the pretty girls who walk on by. The butterfly, totally unattached to the cocoon it came from, has already forgotten the cycle that came before and talks to the pretty girls even more.

This knowledge is what I was beginning to comfortably lean back into as I was strolling along on my work walk. Yes, in the middle of trying to think less, I thought, I have been going through a cycle. Soon, I’ll get some new leaves. But this has been my winter…in love, in home, and in work, and this is necessary.

As I began to surrender, I could feel some peace move back in. Then I laughed and wondered if a flower would sprout from my ass once my Spring arrives.

What came next is going to sound like pure Cheez from a can of Whiz, but I’m going for it. You with me?

The leaves on the trees, rustling in the soft air, began to whisper into my ears, talking to me like they’ve done before. Then they became positively and wonderfully boisterous in their declaration as they lulled me further into their pull. The sound of the birds, in those trees, and in the sky opening to me above, flapping their wings and chirping their chatter, echoed so profoundly it was as though a mega phone was magnifying their conversations and booming out the blast of the breeze gliding under their feathers.

Every zoom of a car whooshing by in the distance was like a wave breaking on the beach at my feet, thunderous but calming. The clicking, tapping, and sashaying of passersby’s shoes on the sidewalks and asphalt made a melody that began to vibrate in my heart. I felt like that kid in the movie August Rush, the little genius who could hear music in every-day sounds. (Not the genius part, just the music part.)

The silencing of my mind chatter had made my hearing so acute that I could only concentrate on each new auditory sensation between the gaps of stillness within. That day, that walk, those moments I spent so connected to nature, to the Oness, was, in effect, one of my few successful meditative experiences.

Side note: I suck at meditating. Every time I try to tap into the gap, I get more stressed because I just keep thinking, and thinking, and thinking. Then I think, again, even louder. Over, and over, my thinking mocks me. Man-o-man, I think some more, There is so not any stillness in me right now. SHIT!

That’s when the mega noise moves in and starts clanging around in my brain so hard every part of my body starts to gnarl from the neck down. As such, meditating has the effect of wigging me out instead of getting me to chill. (Meditating is something I definitely need more practice at.)

Later, not many hours after my work walk, while at Whole Foods, and still in my quasi-meditative state, I was engaged in a conversation with a clerk who assured me that I could open and eat (test drive) the Raw power bar I was questioning him about. Awesome. Then, after taking two quick bites of the bar, I almost blacked out.

I was looking straight at the clerk, and had just said, “Damn! This is good,” when I felt the light of my surroundings dim to the black circles caving in on my eyes.

My vision became tunneled. My knees threatened to buckle. The weight of gravity menaced my stance. My shoulders slid into a slant as the left side of me seemed to want to win a race against my right side in getting to the ground first.

My brain and body weren’t happy about the consciousness I was about to lose. My shoulders got the message to shake me back to attention and then told my head to rattle itself into place so my eyes could blink the black spots gone. Once I was mostly erect again, thanks to the white knuckle grip I’d gotten on the grocery buggy to keep my balance, I asked the clerk, “Did you see that? I almost passed out.”

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I don’t know," I answered. "If I walk away from you and then you hear the loud speaker say there’s a clean up on aisle 9, and it’s some blonde chick with a half eaten power bar in her hand, instead of a broken jar of spaghetti sauce, I guess I’m not.” Then I laughed. “No. Yeah. I'm fine.”

He thought I was joking. I knew I wasn’t.

I thought I was going to take three steps away from the only other human who had knowledge of fact that I almost took a dive, and that my lights really would go out. But I couldn’t admit that to him, a stranger, cool as he was.

I’ve never passed out in my life, unless wine was involved and I was 20 years old. I’ve only almost passed out twice before. Once, years ago, when I sliced into my finger while cutting an onion for a Thanksgiving dish, and, another time, even more years ago, when Mr. Gold Standard gave me such an orgasm it resulted in a Charlie horse in my right calf. The pain of that cramp sent my eyes rolling back further into my head than the orgasm did.

Too much information? Probably. The point is, two bites from a power bar, that’s not exactly a near-faint story I’d have picked for my repertoire.

Aside from my fear, I was also a little embarrassed. I’d just told this young, hip, Latin grocery clerk that I’d not had an easy time of eating lately, that I’d been losing my appetite from stress, and, rather than cramming one more avocado or a handful of nuts down my throat, to make sure I was getting my daily caloric intake, I thought I’d add in some other easy high-calorie points that weren’t as bad for me as a run to Taco bell. I didn’t want this clerk to think I had some eating disorder and that’s why I was feeling faint.

Another side note: Usually, I don’t lose my appetite from stress. I haven't lost my appetite in over 16 years, since the two days after my split from Mr. Gold Standard. My regular M.O.? I sidle up to french fries and cuddle up to a box of macaroni and cheese comfort. In other words, bring me carb over-load, zone-out, heaven, thanks.

Not that it mattered what this clerk guy’s impression of me was. I just knew in that moment I couldn’t take another accosting glance like so many people at work are still giving me, people who I can tell are just waiting for me to engage them long enough so they’ll have their in, so they can ask me how I lost my weight.

It may be the first time they’re getting their answer, but it’s the hundredth time I’ve had to have a conversation about myself I didn’t feel like having with a stranger. It’s been months since I’ve dropped my weight. I’d like to move on.

Plus, it’s still personal. These assholes don’t know how much research and responsibility I’ve put into the last eight and a half years of my life, trying to understand and manage my hypothyroidism in the healthiest possible way. It’s none of their business that I’ve spent the last two years of my life eating healthier than I’ve ever eaten, going mostly vegan, giving up my beloved cheese, my cherished dairy, my fried, floured, and comforting saturated and trans fats. Why should I have to tell them that even with excluding those heart killers and thigh fillers, it still took me more than a year to even loose the first 2 pounds?

I’m over assuring people that there’s nothing wrong with me; I’m currently at my normal weight (the weight I was my entire adult life before my thyroid crashed). I’m sick of explaining that I’ve been running 2-3 times a week for the last 8 months. Shit, people, it’s no secret how weight loss can be achieved if you don’t have an underlying health/psychological condition. And, BTW, quit treating me like I’m a murder mystery. If I didn’t open my book to you, I sure as hell don’t want you on my back page.

In all fairness, given the fact that the last five-seven pounds I’ve lost have probably been from the stress of the last five months, and that I did just have a near pass-out incident, right on the heels of my child-hood eczema coming back, and that I had also gotten a field of tiny stress bumps all over my back, along with a rash on my calves, I started to wonder if something, other than anxiety, was beginning to take my body down and if these annoying inquiring minds were seeing something I wasn't.

With heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and arthritis (just to name a few) running in my family, along with my thyroid condition, I can admit, in the whole 57 seconds from the time I’d almost passed out to walking away from the clerk, with my heart zooming faster and faster, I was starting to think the worst.

The clerk squinted his eyes at me. “Are you sure you are okay?”

He was starting to figure out that I wasn’t. He could probably see it registered on my face that my heart, to compensate for the blood pressure drop, had begun to over-do its job. There was no hiding how light headed and bugged out I'd gotten from the blood pressure dip and spike.

"I should get lower to the ground in case I really do go down," I continued to joke as I began to huddle into my knees. Then I lied to the clerk again, as I stood back up. “You know? Actually, I'm fine,” I said. “I just needed to catch my breath. That was weird, though, huh?”

Then, off I scurried. I was in a hurry to do my passing out at home.

As the check-out girl ran my power bars, hemp seeds, avocados, and barley over the scanner, I had so many questions pinging around in my head. Am I well enough to go back and get sandwich bread? Am I out of bread? Am I even going to make it home? Why am I worried about bread right now? Am I going to crash my car if I drive home? Am I going to have a heart attack while I am driving? Seriously…do I need bread? Will people slow their cars down to gawk at the girl who caused a pile up on Pacific Coast Highway? Okay, why won’t my heart stop racing? Am I having a heart attack right now? Should I call 911 when I get home or should I wait to see if I pass out in aisle 9? What’s happening to me?

After watching Heather, my old neighbor, slip into a seizure at the begging of this year (February 5, 2010: Everything is Connected? Prove it! post), and, equipped with the knowledge that along with both of my parents, my healthy, running uncle has also had a heart attack, I was going a bit berserk thinking all the stress I’d been collecting was going to be the curtain call.

Just as I was about to moronically operate a moving vehicle all the while light headed, shaky, and panicked, my friend Lyta, a great old friend from High School who I’d reconnected with on FaceBook months ago, texted me.

I needed someone there for me. I needed Lyta, who is still the same tenderhearted badass that back in high school I used to sneak out of class, and hide from the bouncers behind the 300 quad with, to smoke ciggies.

After explaining my predicament, I said, “Just talk to me. Keep me calm. I am about to drive and I probably shouldn’t, but I gotta get outa here.”

I wanted to give Lyta my address, just in case, but I didn’t know my address. My current lease clearly states that I cannot use the mail where I am living. If I am not getting mail where I live, then where I live is not my home, and people do not instinctively know the addresses to places that are not home.

Plus, I was too busy keeping my eyes on the road and keeping my knuckles white on a new grip, my car’s steering wheel, that I didn’t feel confident enough to quickly refer to the address card that I’ve been keeping in my wallet.

Time had become my enemy. With Lyta on the other end of the line, from the grocery-store aisle, to grocery-store parking lot, to me laying on my back in my own bed and staring up at the over-sized ceiling fan above me, that takes up half the damn bedroom ceiling, 30 minutes or more had spun into an eternity.

Dear Lord, I prayed, Please don’t let this annoying and constant reminder of my landlord, this beefy, eyesore of a ceiling fan, with its bulbous half-domed light, be the last thing I see. It’s bad enough that I can never find the fricken remote control to operate the blade speeds and the light brightness. Does this pregnant crème-colored glow with fat, brown, wooden elephant ears really need to taunt me now?

Worrying that I’d be leaving Lyta at the other end of the phone wondering if I was okay once I hung up, I took a chance that my upstairs neighbor would be home and could help me out. Also, since I couldn’t relax, and had relocated from my bed to the living room floor, I didn’t want to keel over alone in a living room that was not my home.

I’m not kidding. That’s where my head was. I was wondering if my worst fear would come true. For the record, I do not fear death. Nor do I fear living life alone. I do, however, fear dying alone. I’d rather die with strangers in a badly painted hospital room than die in a beautiful palace on my own. (I'm just not that evolved).

It felt a little weird tapping on a new neighbor’s door. A couple of questions came to mind. 1) “So? Would you mind watching me die on your porch?” 2) Can you call 911 for me? I can’t remember the number. ” 3) Do you remember me? We met yesterday.”

Trying not to look like a fritzed and confused cat with baggies on its feet, I settled on, “Hey. Hi. Something is happening to me and I’m sort of freaked out. Can you sit with me for a bit until I figure out what this is?”

Jo(that’s what we’re going to call the neighbor), a lean and lanky tom-boy of a gal with short, platinum, blond, spunky hair (the kind I wanted as a teenager), had no problem following me back to my place while I made some dinner and tried not to worry about the fact that over an hour had passed and my heart was still running the 100m Sprint.

“You’re having a panic attack,” Jo told me. “My ex used to have them all the time. You’re going to be fine. Have a glass of wine. Take deep breaths.”

Oh, okay. Great, thanks, I thought. Nothing to worry about here. I’ve never had a panic attack, but why shouldn’t I add a little more neurotic behavior into this nice little bag of bullshit I’m filling up for myself? Once I find a new place to live, if there’s a front lawn, I’ll have collected enough crap to use for my own fertilizer.

Too much wine the night before (dehydration from the hangover) was what I thought had gotten me into my mess, but I was willing to take my chances on a little hair of the dog rather than continue to be ravaged by the unknown beast ambushing my every fear.

Eventually, Jo was able to leave me to a cup of hot tea, my television, and a mostly normal heart beat. Now, post that panic attack, past the preoccupations (the obsessive thinking), I have to ask myself: Did I really need to get this knocked-off my balance in order to get some of it back? And who pushed me off my rock, damn it?

Was it Bull #1, the boss in my last job? How about Bull #2, the boss in this job? What about the crazy bi-polar bitch of a boss, who I worked for just before I starting working for Bull #1? Did she start my undoing?

Maybe it was getting laid off from the best job I’ve ever had, along with those 4,000 other folks, in the company I worked for about three and a half or so years ago when this economy started to take a dive. Was that the start of it?

Or was it hitting that slick spot in the pavement, where the rain had brought the oil up from the asphalt, and fishtailing my way into rolling my car onto its side three weeks before my un-employment, from that lay off, was about to run out?

I can’t say when this winter that I’ve been in started. Nor can I claim to understand each lesson I am supposed to learn every time I loose my leaves. All I can do is what I’ve been doing. The best I can, each time.

I remember waking up after rolling my car, with only a tiny bump of a bruise on my head, and thinking that I was one of the luckiest and blessed people in the world. I’d never felt more grateful for everything I did have in my life... everything from the small things, like being lucky enough to have a warm bed with high-thread count sheets to sleep on, right on down to best stuff, like friends who’d give me their couch if I didn’t have a place to put my own warm bed.

The cycle of things has never been lost on me. Just as with the trees and the butterflies, there are cycles in a person’s life. Those cycles can last an hour, a day. They can span over weeks, or even spread through years. This is why I’ve been asking myself how I have come to a place where I became physically affected from the stress of one of my life’s cycles, especially when I know change is still coming. Peeks and valleys are inevitable.

Living in a dark cave of a condo, while it’s f’n with my psyche, is not a brain tumor or cancer. My job, the bad boss, they’re also both external things that my happiness, my ability to navigate with inner peace in life, shouldn't be dependent upon.

However, for each of us, how we deal with external issues (the world of form and illusion), is different and it is the same. I am not any different from anyone else who would also be adversely affected by these same things. Where we live and how we make our money to pay for where we live is a big deal to us.

That said, I am learning to accept that I am apparently a doofus when it comes to anxiety. While I get the concept of change, and know everything in life, of form, which includes everything tangible from our home, to our job, to our cars, to our good dishes, aren’t where happiness comes from, I still, in my human frailty, cling to the notion that it is those things outside of me that will support my happiness, my balance.

For a better part of a day, I let go of those inclinations, and I surrendered to life as it is, during what I am going to refer to as the great meditative hangover of 2010. But, a week and a half later, I had my second panic attack. (Go me! Way to egg this neurotic behavior on.)

Actually, I can pinpoint the culmination of events that lead to the second attack, so at least I’m becoming more conscious in my reactions to my stress. That’s gotta be at least 2 points for the head-case team, yeah?

On a Monday I had the pleasure of sitting next to Bull #2 at a work luncheon…

Screech!

Before we proceed, I’d like punctuate that I hate most work luncheons and functions. No. I ice-pick-in-the-eye-ball hate them. I abhor being expected to spend an hour or more of my precious passing minutes on earth, or any of my stress-earned cash, on time or a meal with people who 90% of the time I’d rather avoid than trade hot and idle air with. Forced socialization is bullshit.

So, since I’ve been tasked with attending not one, or two, but at least six or seven birthday meals, or going-away lunches, holiday parties, or blah-F’n this work functions that, in less than seven months, and, being the sensitive person I am, each time I have done my best to stay clear of anyone who threatens the balance of the energy within my personal field, I got jacked when I wasn't able to physically maneuver the way I wanted. In other words, I’ve chosen the furthest corner, of every shared table and room, from Bull #2.

But on that Monday past, it didn’t work. There Bull #2 was, the boss, sitting right next to me, and, because no one had complied with Bull #2’s request to share a meal, calling people piglets for ordering their own meal. The boss only called everyone a piglet about five times, then let it go. No big deal. The boss was just joking. Derogatory comments are totally okay if you attempt to mask them in humor and you have a high rank in the company.

On the boss went, into cajoling at least half of the table into asking for a drink of their own, so the wine the boss ordered would not be sipped alone. Sadly, those lambs weren’t knowingly conscious of the fact that the boss was already buzzed on the bulldozing effect of broadening the spectrum of power, beyond the office domain, before the alcohol glass bottoms were even tipped.

But I knew. I could feel it. It wouldn’t have mattered if Bull #2 had laid into me or not those weeks ago I’ve previously mentioned. I sense when a person in power is abusing their authority, misusing their position over others, and it hurts my heart. My shield isn’t thick enough. Put frankly, it sickens me and that behavior is part of what weakens my defenses.

That’s why, when, a Tuesday later, my landlord came-a-calling upon the office next to my cube, I slipped into another panic attack. Did I mention that the person I rent from is someone I work with? (Can’t remember.) Did I mention that there was the possibility looming that, because the reporting structure at work is changing, there was a time I was led to believe that my landlord might become my new boss? (I’ve only just recently learned otherwise.)

My first instinct was to plug my earphones into my ears in order to drown out the voice of the threatening $400.00 a month rent-raising, pretend-to-be-a-friend (but really a wolf) landlord out. But, despite my best efforts to think in my head: Screw you! My body decided to screw me.

Now Dasher! Now Dancer! Now, Prancer and Vixen! A second panic attack was in the mix’n!

Yay! Go me, again! Christmas has come early for the crazy. Where’s the magic, fat man? I wanted Santa to bring me a sunny new place, not a neurotic personality.

On, Comet! On, Cupid! On, Donner and Blitzen! To the top of the shady porch where I live with the noisy bitch and her dog above, to the top of the wall and the tree blocking it that gets no sunlight at all, now dash away, dash away all, and flee from work today before this second panic attack really makes your heart stall.

I joke, but it was no joke to me—this next panic attack. It came on with a bigger vengance.

Whatever I wasn’t coping with, have been conscious of, not conscious of, and whatever had/has riddled me again with such alarm that my body was reacting to a need to flee, concerned me. Bull #2 and the landlord, they are not the cause. They are catalysts. This I also know.

The effect is rarely a direct result of the cause. Our reaction is not the reason.

I know most of my beasts. I have lived with, gotten over, punched through, and healed from so many of them. Some, like a boulder on my back, I still carry. We all have our burdens to bare, to let go of. Those afflictions we’ve defined and those we’re still blind to.

Whether we can name our encumbrances or they remain innominate to us, what’s important is that we learn to accept the tenancy of our life, of these lessons, for what they are. If we do not surrender to what is, to what will change, what will cycle through us, because of us, in spite of us, and for us, than we will never know the sweet surrender of life’s blessings.

Am I good yet? Have I learned to totally surrender?

On the F’n contrary. I’m so human that I wouldn’t be surprised if I find myself in another “Z” shaped huddled mass, elbows parallel to my knees on the bland-ass, 1980s, high-shag, beige carpet (which I’ve covered with red drop rugs so I can get every penny of my deposit back), crying, and wishing that more sunlight would wake me up in the morning.

In the mean time, I’m good with accepting that most days my chin will be up. Other days, it won’t be as easy to ditch the heavy work puts in my brows, or as simple as flicking the forward weight out of my shoulders from stress. Until I move into the sun again (and I mean that as literally as finding a new place to live) I might still have some mornings where it takes me a little longer to unscoop the “C” shape out of my sleeping middle.

And, while it may seem that I started this year with such zeal and promise, and have, in many ways, ended up, in what appears to be, the worse for wear towards this year’s end, I have every faith that I am going to look back on this year as one of the most important times in my life.

I may not have all the answers Now, and may not ever get all the answers I want out of this cycle, but I’d rather admit that I know less and continue to fail in front of others while I am trying to succeed, than make up a favorable outcome that doesn’t exist, and, in that deceit, make others feel like they’ve failed.

The reason I write is to unite myself with others. The only way to close the gap between us is to let go of what separates us, our pride, our secrets, our fear of failure. If that is the lesson this year has taught me, I think I’ve learned it well. It’s okay to fail, to be human and to be affected by a difficult time, for as long or for as short as that cycle's lesson lasts.

It’s okay of if you don’t know how to surrender.

I'm still learning, too.

Friday Night Fun

You know my life is exciting when it is a Friday night and, rather than tipping one back out and about on the town, I am about to settle into my couch to watch a movie after I just got off the phone with Jen where we had an actual argument about who it was, in a similarly dip-shit-ish conversation, that originally came up with the right combination of what belly button jam smells like: ass and feet or ass and arm pit.

We’re now both convinced that ass and feet is the smell winner, yet we are not convinced on who first decided that is what belly lint stinks like.

Let me point out that we might as well be 16 years old, or just going through puberty, popping zits, or arguing the finer points of bra size, but we’re not. We’re older. We are supposed to be wiser, cooler, and less dumb-ass-er.

Yet, here I am, on a Friday night, proclaiming to my dear friend that it was me, I am the one, who came up with “ass and feet,” not my friend. She insists it was her.

So, good. Ass, feet, and arm pits, that’s better. Better than everything else that has been on my mind.

Smell on my fabulous friends.

Go team!

Postage denied.

Okay, so I started my blog at the beginning of the year all positive and "GO this year," and have slid my way, towards this year's end, into a menage of mini meltdowns, too many complaints, and an apparent post traumatic stress disorder from all the change in my life, yet I am still more positive than Post, the guy I met last week.

First, he waited almost five days to call, which I've never liked in a guy. And, even though I just spent the last 2 hours on the phone with him, and there's something there I am going to give another chance, why do I feel like I'm still the the girl looking for the spot in the sun and he's the one who should be living in my dark cave of an apartment?

He actually said at one point in the conversation, "I don't like places that are too bright, with a lot of sun light."

What?

I can't tell if he just has a weird sense of humor, and I am not getting it yet, or if we're just writing on different letterhead all together and there's no reason for me to figure out when I am supposed to laugh at his jokes.

It doesn't look like this is going to be something to write home about. But, I've been wrong about a lot this year...

Going Postal

In the middle of my shit storm, I may have met someone, "may" being the operative word. No, it's not Rick, the smart, physicist guy from a week-ish ago. I never heard from that schmuck and, probably, honestly didn't want to. He was cute, smart as hell, older, put together, mostly, and I was intrigued. But, handsome and sail-boat owning as he was, he had thin lips I didn’t imagine kissing, and, then was that curly 1980s type mullet of his. 'Nuf said.

So now, despite my better judgment, in sharing something before there is anything to share, as I only met this fellow yesterday, since I've been out on a limb these days, what do I care? I'm so over my ego. If nothing comes of it, then that. Nothing comes of it. Next.

If something does, here's the meet cute moment, how it went down...

I walked into the post office to retrieve whatever mail I've ignored for the last two weeks, and just as I was about to turn the heavy, copper-ish PO-box key to see what my neglect has collected, I noticed this brown haired, medium built, nice looking fellow talking to the attendant who had helped me sign up for my PO box about 6 months ago.

This is the very same sweet faced, petite and thin, brunette clerk who found me in tears when I explained why I needed a PO box, why I was pissed I was essentially becoming homeless. I, of course, mean that I was losing, and have lost, a place where my heart had been at home, for a very long time, in exchange for a place that doesn't offer my heart a home or any comfort.

So if there are any homeless, non-apple eating chaps out there, who have internet access and are reading this post, and now want to kill me for calling myself homeless, I've got a Swiss army knife with my name engraved on the side you can borrow. Have at it. I’m getting life has pitched me a licking to learn from and even if I die, I've probably done enough learning in this life to come back as Oprah’s other best friend. Oprah will have me star in my own television series and I’ll have enough money to pay people to get my gas for me. (This life for all of us is payment enough.)

I can't recall if I ever mentioned that little mini meltdown at the post office those months ago, but, apparently, I was getting a jump start on what would be, and is now, my post traumatic stress disorder (from moving and changing jobs). There's nothing like consciously/unconsciously intuiting a future unraveling. I highly don't recommend it—even if, for me, I know what will come out on the other side will make me stronger than I’ve ever been.

Sick. That’s what I am. Sick or smart. I am rather glad this is all happening, my storm, SUCKS as it does. I’m getting something from it. Haven’t breezed it all up yet, or connected every dot blowing me in different directions, but the puzzle corners will glide together. (They always do.)

"You're not wearing your sunglasses like usual," I overhead him, the guy, say to her, the clerk.

He's right, I'd thought. She hasn't worn her sunglasses since that first month I'd gotten my PO box. I guess I wasn't the only one wondering what the deal was with this cool-cat chick. Medical eye condition? Laser surgery? Going incognito? Going postal like me—hiding out? What was with the sunglasses?

Then, I think I recognize this guy as the guy Cella and I had met months back, the night Cella had her a bit of fun. I am just about to bust him, and say something like, "Hey. What's your name, again? Didn't my friend and I meet you…?” and, “You never called my friend, you ass…” when I realize it's not him, the guy Cella and I met.

Yet, I'm staring at this guy still, a stranger, with an expression I know to be an I-recognize-you glare, mixed with a physical I’m-ready-for-a-mini-confrontation shoulder-puffing rumble. But what does he know?

He knows I am fixed on him, that’s what. Mid-gaze, amidst my mental reconciliation, of the actual reality of him being him, some stranger, vs. the assumption of him being someone else, we lock eyes. This snaps me to, so I disclose my confusion.

I say, "I'm sorry. I thought you were someone else."Then he says, "Damn. I thought I was about to get hit on."

Seeing how way more cute this guy is, and thinking I'm cool, even while my heart started beating so fast it was punching dents into my left breast trying to beat its way out, I say, "How do you know you’re not getting hit on?"

That's when the sunglasses clerk gets cooler than me and asks me, "What's your name?" Since I thought she somehow psychically knew I not only wanted to check my mail, but also wanted to re-pay my PO box rent for another 6 months, I give her my last name so she can start looking my shit up.

She's hip on me being a dip, though, but doesn't let on. She gracefully requests my name again, specifying that it was my first name she is after. I move closer to her and the stranger.

But I'm still none the wiser to where she is going with her inquiry, as I’m under the assumption she is now taking care of stranger guy and me at the same time and letting me bust ahead, take cuts, in front of the line starting to form. Feeling gently ordered to comply with the right answer, I say, "Oh? Levan. My name is Levan." She's a Federal postal worker, for heaven’s sake. I had to give the right information.

Then she looks at the stranger I mistook for someone else, who we are going to call Post, and says, "Levan, meet Post. Post, meet Levan." She, essentially, was the puppeteer managing our meet-cute moment and facilitated a shake of our hands. Contact.

Yes. I know the name Post is bland. But I’m not shooting for the stars at Love here. I’ve got no feeling one way or the other about this guy. No read. I’m so crazy lately I more feel no than yes on him, but I don't know if that's just because I don’t know my own up from my down right now.

There was something else there about it that was so much like what the psychic described as how I’d meet the One (standing in line, he'd say something funny, I'd laugh, etc.) I’ve dog eared the experience.

Plus, I met him in the Post Office. What can I say? If it goes, I might hate that I chose Post for his name. If it don’t go, it’s just a reference. Besides, whatever happens, a name is just a name. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

The other clerk, all smudgy and bland, in her: I can't even remember what she looked like way, who was just doing her job, and who wasn’t watching Post and I, like the line-O-plenty of Post-Office customer people collecting and on looking while we fumbled our way through a potentially cool-cat guided kismet exchange, broke the connection and called out, "NEXT!" in, what I’m going to remember as, falsely (for effect), a shrill voice.

"Uhm. Yeah. I wanted to pay for the next six months on my PO box," I drizzled out to the smudgy clerk.

As Smudgy checked the records, I readied one of my artist business cards to pass off to Post if I was done before him and had to be the one to do the pass off. Drats! It was.

Ready, set, GO! Act nonchalant in front of the other customers still watching the guy-meets-girl spectacle, which are now about 7-8 people who may as well each have had their own popcorn and an over-sized/over-priced soda pop in hand. Just hand him your card like a porn star who can have any man in the moment.

"The rest is up to you," I said, as I presented him my labeled over, wrong e-mail, artist (too cheap and too tired to buy new business cards) card. He had his card ready for me, too.

His card? Way more professional. And way more fun. He's a tax man, you see, yet something about his card made him look more like a member of The Monkeys, or a cover-band musician, than a bland accountant.

If I hear from him, I'll have to ask him: What's up with the card? I'm sure he's wondering the same from my card and asking: What’s up with the stick-em-on cell number label and the pen crossed-out and corrected e-mail? (Psycho, cheap bitch.) Honestly. Who spends the time putting cell number correction labels on business cards rather than just getting new cards? Sigh... me, the girl who doesn’t want to figure out how to re-format a graphic for printing and doesn't trust what her address will be next.

Now we know I really do love Mother Earth, or I really am OCD or crazy or lazy.

Will I be sad if I don't hear from Post? Probably. But only for a couple of days, which for me, these days, in love at least, is long enough to let go of the what if I used to hang on to for weeks or more. There was a time, with love, I'd cry over what was, and what is, and what hasn't become.

Now, I only cry, not because of love found or lost, but because I get edgy with all that I’ve learned, about everything else, but cannot always accept when it does come to what is, I don’t know how to completely surrender to the other parts of my life. I don’t know how to meditate my way out of stress when it comes to work and home. I can’t stop the inner turmoil from coming out on my body in the form of headaches or stress rashes.

But, and I might still be crazy, most of these tears I cry, while a bit knife turning, are mostly happy. Not ha, ha, ha…yippee my guts are on the carpet again happy. But, shit, I am making progress, and getting to know myself even more, happy.

Knowing how far I've come, not holding on to things and trying to cram them into a "meant to be" idea, but rather trying to un-cram the mental wedgies into acceptance, that’s enough to rejoice over for Now.

And, another reason I am posting about this guy, where nothing may come to fruition, is because it occurred to me that while I've come to accept that I may not meet the One I am supposed to be with any time soon, meeting my One Now would actually be the best time. Not because I am so exhausted I want him to take care of me (but it would be a break before I got tired of it and needed independence again), or because, naturally, the distraction would be nice, and I’d be getting laid again, but because I am so raw and so exposed from the changes in my life right Now that I wouldn't have any energy to put up any walls.

Right Now, I would not be capable of presenting any of the precursory and/or cautionary masks many of us put forth when we're in our best-foot-forward phase of a relationship (personal, professional, or spiritual).

I don't have any best foot left in me. I have no access to my usual, "I'm fine," and "I can take care of myself" shields.

It's just me right now, with all my beautiful flaws and all my messy perfection.

Take it or leave it.

Me? I’m going to take it. I’m going to learn from it. I’m going to do me some more crying. Probably some more resisting. Definitely some more misunderstanding before it all comes clear. But, I’ll take it.

It is what is. I’m going a little postal, but I’m getting, or at least looking for, the messages.

Post Game Highlights

I have showed my toes (done the taking off of shoe and sock upon request) to two different men in a bar scenario only twice in my life. (I’ve showed my toes plenty while in private—za-za-zing—or wearing flip flops, so that’s not where I am going with this.)

The first time my little piglets got a theatrical request, and I gave them their bar beseeched debut, it was years ago, during my early twenties, in a crowded sports bar in Colorado. (That seems to be a theme with me, doing everything in my early twenties.) The man asking me to twinkle up a foot for revue was some random dude promising, upon compliance, he’d give up his Colorado Rockies baseball cap. I didn’t want the cap. Not a sports fan. But…challenge a drunk young’n? Sadly, after I presented him naked toes, the fucker shot me down and didn’t give up the cap. Lying bastard. He didn’t deserve my digits.

The second time, I’ve publicly pointed my manicure in a man’s direction, when dared or goaded, that was the other night. His name is Rick. That’s what we’re going to call the guy who peaked my interest enough that when coerced, by both him and Cella (who I was doing a school night evening out with) during the course of a conversation about why I do my own pedicures, and have done so for years (I’m grossed out by going to the salons—with the threat of funguses and all) I surrendered my cherry-red painted ground-bound digits for review.

And, here we are. If Rick gets another crack at showing up in one of my posts, let’s get an overview of him first, before we decide if we like him. Right now, make no mistake, we are interested. Not like, HOLY SHIT! You’re it interested. But, hmmm, you are quite clever and handsome. We should talk more just so I can see.

If we never speak of Rick again, we’ve decided we don’t like him. Or, because of his baggage, or whatever (we’ll get to that) he decided not to call me. That’s where I’ll decide he’s not worth mentioning again.

Cella said, “He’s a diamond in the rough.” She recognized straight away that I was fascinated by this single/separated (ok, probably bad news—even if he’s been separated for 3 years now) brown, curly haired, bearded, fair skinned English man, who said he was a physicist. Yeah (leaning into it), me likes them smart.

Cella also, slyly, traded her seat next to him for mine so I could saddle up nearer him and find out more. Good, good wing woman, that Cella, especially when you consider she started talking to a dented tooth, gray haired man who had no business buying her a rose from the flower/rose pusher lady. (Can’t stand them rose peddlers. Don’t care for bathroom attendants while I am at it.)

Once Rick and I got to talking, that is when I learned he’s got a boat, a real boat. Not a motor boat that is, as Cella joked is an extension of a man’s penis, but a long ass sail boat with a cabin and wood parts and all, that he, himself, artistically, all craftsmen like, refinished the wood parts on.

Can I remember the name of the special, imported-something-a-rather, wood he put his grit into? What do you think? Can you say “Wine”?

But the artist in me has got some muscle sensory memory about him taking pride in creating, restoring, something, thanks. The asshole in me likes using the word “wood” for innuendo sake, even if I am the girl who discounts any man who’d use a sexual innuendo to flirt with me. From early on, I remembered something I learned: A gentleman reflects himself, not the woman he speaks to, and in that way a true gentleman treats every lady like a lady, regardless.

Anyway, somewhere in my conversation with him, I also got that his boat was a sail boat, and his love for working with wood, building something new or restoring something old, was his passion. That’s when my intrigue flagged a page on him.

Rick also said something about Martha’s Vineyard. Everything in my not pretentious spirit, but craving culture lust, shouldered up. I waited to want to gag, but also paused to appreciate the pleasure he took in speaking of things refined. He wasn’t bragging. He was reminiscing enjoyment. There is a difference. Once his use of the “F” word hit the same ground as his mention of the vineyard, the sucker in me, for smarts, culture, and cussing, got reeled in.

I read once that a good writer does not subject their readers to a list. Well, A) Who knows if I am a good writer yet. I’ve just got a voice and some commas, so B) A list is the only way I am going to succinctly get Rick’s highlights on the game map before I tire of him or find out more.

As such, the list commences. I’ve always loved me some dorky, sweet, handsome intelligent breed of a man who knows how to keep the conversation moving. Check. Didn’t expect super-duper firm guns when I did my flirt, and touched his left arm and felt the strength of a fit body scream through a pin-striped, cleaner’s pressed, collared shirt. Superficial? Duh. But who cares? Check! I’m not a physicist, and obviously am an artist, but meeting a man wholly unthreatened by my feminine strength, my need for mental stimulation…check, check, and CHECK.

Is Rick an “it” guy? No clue. He’s got at least 3 more days to get a hold of me before he pisses me off for playing it too cool. Did I have one of the best conversations with Rick, a man who didn’t make me feel like I needed to be younger or hold back age references or intellectual appearances, which makes me want more from him, because it was refreshing and inviting? Definitely.

We’ll see. That’s all I can do, with Rick, with life, with it all…is just see.

Honored

BTW, I realize that the last post might seem out of the blue. I wrote that email to a friend because that friend had felt regret for sharing with me more than they were comfortable with sharing. It wasn't about that the friend had shared with me, it was about what the friend had shared.

I hate advise. But, this would be my advise in life, anyway... Never regret sharing anything with a true friend. You honor that friend by allowing them to know you in every way that is vulnerable and strong, and in letting that friend in, a friend who can be strong for you, that which you beleive makes you weak does not. You, and the friend, indeed, gather strength from the experience of going deeper into the fold.

I beleive this. If this comfort in life is not true, and I am an idiot, I'd like to remain so. Never tell me different and leave me to the bliss of my friendships and ignorance.

Let's ROCK it!!!

I’ve got another post coming I am meaning to get around to, where think I might be putting the sourpuss away for a spell, but until I get around to this post, I thought I’d bring little miss positive out, for a squirt, and share another e-mail I sent to a friend.

Once again I am not going to share what friend, and what the circumstance are/where, because… Shit, we’ve been here. You get the drill. Anonymity is our friend for my friends. But, the meaning of this post is this: Sometimes I fall away, and my friends pick me up, sometimes it’s my turn to pick them up. Either way, friends, my friends, they are manna from above and we, you, ALL rock!!!

My friend...

It's true. You are beautiful to the bone. And, now, you are going to get the more present me, the friend who isn't complaining about her own life and I am going to tell you something...

You are not your actions. You are your core, your Being—the Source. The true you is part of the bigger connection. So, you are me, I am you, and we are everything. Yet, we are both human, too, and, this being human stuff, it means we are flawed and flawless. It is part of our design.

So you, we, are loving, learning, amazing human beings who are more than the love we give, the learning we do, or the mishaps or milestones we encounter along the way.

Listen, I know this!

I've become a different person in the last 10 years. I've lived this. For what it's worth, it's taken me a long time to get to just the stressed-out bitch who sometimes can't handle a shitty boss or un-fulfilling work. I used to be worse than the stress I've been sharing with you lately. (Sadly, it's true. Insert laugh here!)

I blamed myself for years for the things that happened to me from my past. I wanted to be mad at the world. Then I blamed myself for reacting from my humanity. I was mad that I was not perfect, that everything human in me, that needed to shut down, to shut off emotion, to get emotion, to be cared for, to care less, to get attention, to ignore attention, to want this, to not want that, to want control, to lose control, to care, to not care, to love, to hate, did what I’ve done, and will likely do.

I understand how we can hate who we are. I’ve always loved myself, but in the midst of that love there was hate. I have hated who I was. I have hated things I’ve done. I have hated ways I’d become. I have hated what I thought I could never be and who I thought I never had a chance to be. I have hated those who I thought made me hate me. I have hated me and others more because I didn’t know how not to hate.

I didn’t know about balance. I didn’t understand how to tap into the love for myself or for others. Then I forgave myself and I forgave others. Not over night. Not in a day. That forgiveness led me to more love and finding the love I always had but couldn’t reach, and I do not mean the kind of love we all feel is in our hearts, but the kind of love that is Love itself. The kind of love that is who we are. That is our Being.

What I am saying is that just as it took me years to learn some of the wrong lessons life presented, I, personally, needed years to un-think those lessons. I had to relearn and practice better lessons.

(Some learn quickly. Others do not. Whichever the speed, learning is a process, not a destination.)

I guess what I am trying to say to you, and trying to remind myself of (since I have recently let stress rule me instead of Love), is that becoming more conscious, loving our true Beings, it is a process. It is a practice.

It takes time and many reminders to accept and to live in Love. And, forgiveness, for others and for ourselves, like walking in Love, while both may be the most natural things in the world, they aren’t always the easiest to come by because we are human.

That’s the trick: to forgive ourselves along the way when we haven’t made it as far as we’d like to have come in Love. There is magic in letting go instead of hanging on, but if we can accept what is, accept imperfection in our humaneness, perhaps we might find more peace along life’s way.

And on it goes as we go. Yes?

We will live. We will fall. We will get up. We will sing. We will cry. We will dance. We will trip. We will laugh and cry some more. But we will learn. Then we will forget. Then we will learn again. Forget again. Then get some things and perhaps become more conscious.

Then we will die. Our true selves won’t parish. No. Our truth can never cease to exist as the source of us is our ultimate truth. But we will leave behind our human bodies as we continue to exist as divinity.

So what’s there to fear? It all is as it is.

I am a liar.

There are no doubts, now. I am good at lying.

I figured out something about keeping this blog up after my last post. This is the liar I’ve become, but not the writer I am or have always intended to be.

I’ve been continually apologizing for a bad memory about what I’ve posted, or not. I’m sloppy. I’m going to be sloppy again in this post and don’t seem to have any remorse.

Meaning, I’m not looking back at what I have written nor am I looking at what I am writing. I am only writing forward, recording my life, stuff, posting, as it goes, and I am not even sure I’m making a point each time. I’m like the cafeteria food at a grade school of trying to be a writer. I’m getting close, but the getting by on pizza for breakfast and the French fries, for a vegetable substitute, they count as calories, but they don’t really count as sustenance. (It’s like I’m Twinkies instead of organic vegetables.)

Filler sucks.

I’m sharing enough to share, to connect, but I’m not sharing near what I’d share if I was writing behind a character. I am not giving even half of the honesty I have to give. I admit it. I am living it, this giving of half truths in every blog.

I am so afraid of the repercussion of someone I know, who I wouldn’t divulge half this information to, finding my blog, and thus making my current need for anonymity (as it relates to job security) a thing of the past.

The writer I am, while not blogging, would cut a line down my center and expose my core so vividly that every bit of my guts would fall like entrails on the examiner’s table. I’d let every ounce of my mess and the beauty of me lose, to be posted like a check list for all who would read it, allowing them to tick off on the boxes of what they could identify with, or what they could not, and I’d ask an editor if what I’d thrown up for the tally made the list or busted the chase and fell flat. (I’d be a fucking professional with sailor’s mouth and a spell checker.)

I’d not try to spin it happy at every end or always try to be inspirational, like I’ve been doing with these blog posts. I’d just say how it is and then slip into that Polly Anna as I was feeling it, because I am a positive dork along my center line naturally. In other words, I want to feel it not force it.

Regardless, I’m finding that there is a problem with blogging. I’m never going to be totally honest. I am always going to be a bit of liar. I need to hind behind a character, and have characters for the stories of my friends to hide behind. I need to not lie. In a blog, I don’t have that. My friends don’t have that.

I want, want, want the cover that characters allow. I want to let go of all the safety I, and I feel my friends, require. So, from here on out, no matter what I say, continue to consider me to be a liar. I’m telling as much of the truth as I can, but there is so much more I cannot, and will not, share in this forum.

As I alluded to in my last post, I can admit that I am scared shitless that one of my dear friends is potentially suicidal. But I cannot say more about why this friend is in such a bad state, because, again, I cannot and will not give enough details that can ever be traced back to this specific dear friend. (The protection of their identity is paramount to me.)

I can also say that I am stressed, and that Bull #1, and Bull#2, and the Lead, have been/are part of the stress I’ve been enduring in work for the last 2 years, and that they’ve all messed with the security of my lively hood (how I pay for my life), but I cannot say more because they are people, not characters. I can’t slam them in a public forum. Whatever they’ve done to me, something likewise has been done to them and I’m not going to continue their undoing, certainly not publicly.

I’d love to bend them over in a book, though, were I could give them fake names and make up untraceable job titles, and drill down to their every nuance and not hold back. I’d have targets on their backs and drills in their ears in no time. But here, now, in real time, where this is my job, not as a writer, but as a girl who needs health insurance and a roof over her head, and as the girl who needs to make her 9-5 money, I have to be obtuse to protect myself and them.

Likewise, I’d love to say how it’s not just the roaches and the lack of light that are f’n with me with where I live now. I’d like to say how I got sliced on the lease the night before I moved in. But, if I go into those details, on how that person renting to me, who was supposed to be a friend, screwed me, a couple of those details being a move out date of December the 31st, 10:00 am (really? Is this a hotel?), and an agreement to hang no more than 10 pictures on the wall, and a verbal request of not going barefoot, as the oils on one’s feet can soil carpet, then I’d be potentially taking down a real person.

So, none of that happened. I'm lieing about that. There also have not been any inferences or my rent being raised by $400.00 come lease end. And, I wasn't living with this person’s furniture: an amour, a dresser, another dresser, another shelf, a wall hanging, yet another amour, and another smaller dresser, and more, too much to mention, along with my own furniture, up until about a week ago.

I have not been feeling like this place is not my place, but someone else’s entirely. The roaches, they're all a lie, too. Who picks up a roach in their hand? That can't be the truth. The contant water from the golf course and the snails, they aren't destroying my plants either.

Sure, call me an ass for signing the lease, but I didn't get the lease until the night before I moved in. Or did I get it sooner? Which is the truth? Just for fun, here's a question: What would you do if you were leaving your husband of 13 years and being given certain circumstances to accept (via a last minute lease) at 6:45 pm the night before all your things were going to be moved from the husbands place? (You get that my old apartment is my ex-husband now, yeah?)

As a writer, all is fair in life being lived and ink on the page. As a person, getting by, these people, these situations, I feel a responsibility to protect them.

So, every thing I just wrote I is/was a lie or may not be.

The only thing that is the truth is that I am sick of lying and I need an editor. I need to bleed without a tourniquet. I need to feel without a filter. I need to connect without the fear of sabotaging my livelihood. I need to be a writer without boundaries. I need to be able to punctuate without knowing every grammar rule.

What’s fabulous? Finding a way to marry needs, wants, and gots-ta haves.

Ready.

Willing!

What's next?

This is one of those posts, where I will attempt to be clever, to be profound, and/or to shed some positive insight on something. But, I will probably fail, miserably.

Recently, I went with Chloe, her mom, her sister, and one of her best friends to look for a wedding dress for Chloe. She is getting married next February, about a year to the date of when she met her husband to be. I may have even written about the night my bubbly, light-blue-eyed friend let lose those eyelashes of hers and batted a boy into her charms. But I honestly can’t recall if I did write about it.

That’s still the blow of me being a blogger. Having given up the need for perfection, to just get my writing out there, as a by-product, of not looking back, my memory constantly fails me. Either that, or I’ve dropped my basket completely.

If I did post about their meet-cute night, I’d have bragged about what a great wing woman I am. I would have explained how I got up from the table Chloe and I had been sharing, and how I extricated myself from the conversation, leaving Chloe alone with this good looking, Irish, geek-sheik of a guy who I thought was a good match for her.

I would have gone on to say how I suffered through conversing with a table full of meat heads for as long as what I thought was necessary for the mating ritual to get off the ground for Chloe and this possible prospect of a man. A man who had already been leaning his way into Chloe, leading with that smile of his, one that emanates from his strong and jutting jaw. He’d also been beaming at her, with his own long-lashed light eyes, through retro horn-rimmed glasses. They’d barely noticed I was gone.

It worked, me ditching the table, because here we are now with a wedding in Chloe’s future. Not that I can take credit. That’s not where I was going with this. Where I am going with this is that here we are Now. For the first time in my life I was watching a girlfriend trying on wedding dresses, yet I didn’t feel a tinge of jealousy. Not even a spec.

I’ve been a maid of honor three times and a bride’s maid at least once (I keep thinking there’s someone, or another, I’ve forgotten), but this time I didn’t wish that it was me who was choosing the dress. I wasn’t mopping up silent tears somewhere inside—like I’ve done before in the past—or putting on a brave face and falsely grinning my way through, wondering whether I’d choose lace, beads, or bows for my dress.

I didn’t care, at all, about dress dazzle, about going for a sleeveless number or not for myself (which would depend upon the width of my arms), or if I’d go with a long or a short veil, or if I’d even wear a veil.

If you’re curious, I’d probably choose flip flops, the beach, and a dress I could throw in a wad in the corner as soon as the sex part of the evening was afoot. Along with a tasteful menu, I’d also serve Cheetos at my reception, just so people would wonder: WTF? And, because I’d want them to be faced with making a choice as they went to wipe the orange snack dust off their fingers: just wipe; wipe and suck, then wipe again; or suck the dust off first then wipe (which is really the best method). Being presented with these choices would leave many of my guests with a smirk, reminding them of whose wedding they are at.

Actually, the liar is back. I was putting on a brave face whilst sitting their amongst Chloe’s closest peeps, and there were some tears I was holding back. But it had nothing to do with me coming to another year of my life passing by and me not having found anyone to share my life with. I’m still convinced that’ll come when it does; five minutes or fifty years from now (Well, five minutes would be tough because I’m at home in my pajamas at the moment, so there’d have to be a knock at the door.)

True, you are probably recalling that I thought it might be this year I’d lock my lips on a winner-winner chicken dinner of a man, but, it’s look’n like my intuition might have been wrong on this one. But I am fine with being wrong. Really. And, it feels pretty incredible to be fine with something that used to consume me when I was younger.

Nah, the tears I was holding back were stress tears. Stress, stress, and more stress. Work stress. Home stress. That’s what is consuming me now and I don’t know how to cough it out.

The whole time I was watching Chloe beaming and battling between dress choices, because of cost, style, and because of the opinions from her loving peanut gallery, I was just hoping I wouldn’t dampen her day or spoil the mood with my shit. (I was seriously ready to burst into tears at any moment and call uncle on my stress.)

I was also silently feeling sorry for every girl who goes through the wedding planning ritual, and thinking: Blah, blah, cake, location, wedding dress, blah. Holy screw this!

It’s all so ritualistic and nauseating to me now (and this has nothing to do with Chloe), how it is supposed to play out for women, this wedding business. Societal pressure, religion, family expectations, self-imposed expectations, it all just punctuates the picking-out-the-dress part of it, and the every-other part of it, and makes all the parts of it not seem like me anymore.

I’m getting progressively turned off by the idea of a wedding at all for myself. It’s about the marriage and about the person you are going to be willing to fall in and out of love with for a life time. Once I’ve chosen the right man, eloping would probably do.

What the hell, though?! I was watching my friend trying on wedding dresses, and didn’t even have it in me to feel that normal jealousy any single girl would feel while watching a close friend get to do something she always thought she wanted for herself.

Who am I? How did I become the girl who cares less when and/if she meets the right guy? When did I become the girl who’d choose a great apartment, that feels like a home again, and a new job, that doesn’t feel like hell, over love?

I’ve always been a love conquers all girl. Now I am not? Call the press. Some stressed bitch has taken over my body.

What changed? When did I snap and become incapable of getting my rubber back? When did love become an after thought—something to care little about? Is this earth? Really? Am I going to wake up with an alien probe up my ass? Where did I go?

How have these stresses in life made me so overwhelmed with my experience on earth? The anxiety of a job has never gotten to me like this, to where I feel frayed at every end. Maybe not having the sanctuary of home to retreat to after a day on the battle field is what’s pulling my threads out.

Or, maybe I became this fritzed out, and this frenzied resemblance of a girl, the day my current boss, just a couple weeks ago, pissed all over me in a meeting. Is that it? Have I not bounced back yet?

I’ve never had a tongue lashing before, personally or professionally. I’ve certainly never gotten verbally beaten down within earshot of about 10 people who were just trying to sit quietly inside their cubes and offices to do their work. (I had a feeling I should have closed that conference room door the second I’d walked through it. Damn it! Why didn’t I listen to my intuition that time?)

But how could I know I’d get slammed for having the wrong information, information that was given to me by someone who was supposed to know their shit. How would anyone prepare for a public slaughter? The crowd doesn’t care if you are guilty or not. If someone picks up a rock, like the big boss (we’ll call this boss Bull #2), and throws it at you, for whatever you did or didn’t do, the crowd isn’t trying to discern your guilt or innocence. Mob mentality takes over. Then the buzz begins. “Did you hear? So and so got pummeled in the town square yesterday.”

This brings me to my next question (I have many questions I haven’t been able to answer for myself yet): Am I more concerned about what those 10 folks think, if they think I am failing, or if I think I am failing?

The boss, Bull #2, knew the information I had was crap, and that it wasn’t my fault I was mis-informed. That’s why Bull #2 was so mad. The boss was fumed enough to call five more people into a meeting later that day, including the person who’d mis-guided me, to let everyone know just how wrong we all were. (Go team!)

But the people outside the conference room, they didn’t know everyone got it wrong. They just heard I got something wrong and they just figured out that more people were in a room with me later that day and they could hear Bull #2 doing even more yelling.

Yet, over the years, I’ve learned not to care what others think (mostly). That’s why I am wondering if this is more about my own need to succeed, my own desire to feel good about what I am showing up to do 8 hours a day, then it is about what those other cube/office dwellers think about me.

I think what’s becoming increasingly harder for me to deal with is that I am being set up to fail. I am being treated like spackle, spread so thin and expected to fill so many holes, on so many major projects, that I am too busy trying to learn everything that I am not learning anything effectively. And, while failing at anything is tough, feeling like a failure at something that isn’t, remotely, personally satisfying, that’s weight upon weight. Weight I am not shouldering well.

Sadly, there is no comfort in the fact that I am not the only one feeling stressed by the atmosphere I work within or by the work being given to me by the big boss. Other people in my office, they are just as poised to snap like an uncooked spaghetti noodle. That’s what happens when you all work in the same larger environment and for the same bully of a boss who barks out a billion big-ass projects to be done simultaneously and to be done yesterday. Even those expert in their positions feel like they are drowning, failing.

One person I work with told me that their body went numb, that they had acute chest pain, and they weren’t sure if they were having a panic attack from the stress of work or were having an actual heart attack. They went to the ER just to be safe. That’s not good.

Someone else confided in me that the atmosphere of the office has got them so maxed out they almost passed out at the gym because they were having an anxiety attack while on the tread mill. That’s just as bad.

More worse is that those two people aren’t the only ones who have shared that the build-up of work, and the way Bull #2 manages projects, shifts priorities, and fears people into producing more than what’s realistic, is causing them enough mental anxiety that it is physically manifesting itself.

Well, at least everyone I work with is normal. If they didn’t admit to medicating with alcohol, breaking down in tears, popping aspirin for the headaches, or drinking the pink stuff for the upset stomachs, then I’d really wonder if the aliens had transplanted me to an unusual hell, where people aren’t emotionally and physically affected by stress.

But the absolute worst part, is that while Bull #2 could use a good kick in the soft skills, the big boss I had in the last division was also a bully and also used intimidation to manage (we’ll call that big boss Bull #1).

It was Bull #1’s threatening ways that caused my previous lead to snap. Guess who took that hit? Me. Wait, so I have been verbally beaten before. (How could I forget that?)

Yeppers, my old lead, who we’ll call Lead, let loose all over me in a meeting, too. I was trying to clarify something for our medium-ranked boss, so the medium boss could take the information back to Bull #1, and Lead’s Asperger ass, getting frustrated that the medium boss wasn’t understanding me, body shaking violently, face reddened profusely, and fists clenched fiercely, unleashed this frustration all over me.

Lead couldn’t have directed this frustration at the medium boss, who often musunderstood things, because that’s not how it’s done. Don’t you know? You always step on a lower rung.

Two of my co-workers, who witnessed Lead’s psychotic break, wanted me to file a grievance against Lead. They’d never seen such a thing. I didn’t file or go to HR. I just wanted peace before departure.

One of my past co-workers is still convinced Lead is a sociopath and I could be in danger. I still just think Lead has Asperger’s syndrome and couldn’t contain, in that moment, the silent rage of being so socially uncomfortable. (We’ll find out if I was wrong if someone finds my dead body in a ditch and Lead has left town.)

The shit really does roll down hill where I work, though. By the time it gets to those who want to do a good job, a lot of times they’ve gotta eat shit to do it. It’s sad, really.

When people are sharing their horror stories about the wildly inappropriate behavior exhibited by the higher ups (leads, department heads, division leaders, VPs, and so on), and they are actually competing over who has had the worst experience with so and so, or with so and other so, and this goes on all over, that tells me that I work in an environment, as a whole, which not only tolerates this behavior, it is considered the cultural norm.

But I'm fine with this bullshit at work, with all the loose ends in my life, with whatever this all means. This is life, right? We’ve all got stuff to learn, our dung to dig away from. And, sometimes, when we thought we made the right choice(s) to make life a little lighter, then we find out that we may not have turned the right corner, we can feel a little stuck. But, again, that’s life. I’m fine. I’m so NOT fine.

So why do we say we’re fine? Because we want to be. We want to be better than fine. We want to be great. Therefore, the best we can do is fake it until we make it. Faking it is part of keeping our inner world from getting gutted.

Is that the beauty of life, that because we gain knowledge more easily than we gather wisdom, we don’t always know what to accept, what to change, and we don’t always have the courage or the wisdom to know the difference or how to make the right change?

Is that how we learn, by failing? Is that how I got to where I am, where I tried to trade up on home and on work but seem to have traded fucked for both? What happens after the failure? What happens when we’re too busy licking the salt out of our wounds, or too exhausted from getting licked by life, that we don’t have much energy left over to re-balance one or more of life’s major stressors: work, finances, relationships, family, health, safety, security, or home. (A complete list of all of life’s stressors, along with batteries, and wine, has not been included.)

But we’re agreed, yes? This journey in life isn’t always gilded in gold. We’ve all been through hard times. Sometimes life’s shifts are easy. Other times, making a shift kinks the mind so much it feels like the very change that’s supposed to be making you stronger is more like taking a lightening bolt to the back of the head.

Then, just when you thought you were going to put the fire out from your latest zap, to keep the rest of you from being scorched entirely, you realize more smoke is coming out of your ears.

By my own making, my fragility and my fortitude have been on display for almost a year now. I’ve gotten better at not needing a character to hide behind in order to be open and share certain truths (or I’ve gotten better at caring less about what others may learn about me), but I’m not getting better at hurdling some of the boulders in my recent path.

Still. I’m a gear shifter. I know this about me, and you’re probably get’n this about me. As one of life’s passengers, one minute I'm riding sunshine. The next minute, I'm farting dark clouds of my ass and complaining. And, while lately, the forecast has been a bit rainy, and something smells funny, I’m still hoping for sunshine. I still believe it’s around the corner.

I hope so; because if one more dark cloud cuts my ass off in traffic I’m afraid I might get so banged up I’ll loose my bumper and won’t be able to take another hit, or, worse, I’ll run out of gas.

Ava, in her infinite wisdom, reminds me that it is all about perspective. Good point. That brings me to my next question. How is it that at first the experience of having taken on so many changes in my life (breaking up with a guy, moving, and getting a new job) made me feel more powerful than I’ve ever felt?

Yet, now, I miss the sanctuary and familiarity of my old apartment of 13 years (even with the butthead’s noise) like a divorcée might miss her pain-in-the-ass ex-husband. Seriously, I continue to mourn the loss of that apartment like the conclusion of a 13 year marriage.

I also find myself wishing for what my old job offered me. Not the management, Bull #1, the medium boss, or Lead (actually, in spite of the incident, Lead was pretty cool to work for). I miss the mind-numbing work vs. the extreme stress of this new position and the beyond stress of working for Bull #2.

Is it always about security and sanctuary? Is that why change is so hard, because it isn’t secure? Is that what I’m feeling? Or, is it that I can embrace change, but the changes I’ve recently made aren’t the right changes, yet?

This is a strange place to be in, where I am at, questioning everything, even my own reserve.

I know I have the reserve, though. I’ll eventually figure it all out. This, too, shall pass.

In fact, I am more worried about and for a dear friend of mine than I am worried for myself. This dear friend, who has gone through tragedy after tragedy in the last six years, sent me a text, than repeated in a conversation, that if it wasn’t for their child, they’d be done.

Yes, this friend meant done-done.

Wow. Ava and I have been talking about the fact that whatever it is, whether it’s this, or something else, we all have to learn to cope with what our current lesson in life is. But to see someone in my life having that overwhelming feeling continue to build, to get worse, so much so that it has gotten to a point for them that if one more thing happens they’ve admitted, they won’t be able to go on, that’s the ultimate loss of perspective.

That’s someone not asking: What’s next? Like, “Let’s go. Ready. Let’s get to the good parts. That’s someone saying: What’s next? “Is it going to be that one last thing that does me in?”

I’ve been left with more questions than answers when it comes to my own humanity, and there have been times in my life where I have felt vacuumed out, but even while I am going through what I am going through Now, I still feel great about where I’ve come to in life.

Under the tarnish of all this stress, I’m still shiny. I’ve had the pleasure of becoming a person who doesn’t want to apologize for loving herself. And I have come to this wonderful place, where I’m grateful, where I want to be me. Period. And, I want to be here, even if here, with work and home, sucks right now.

I know if you don't believe in life's magic, then everything in life becomes tragic. I know what it is to feel like you’re continually fighting to catch your breath, I’ve been there. It feels like you’re being robbed of your magic, your sense of purpose. A place without purpose and magic is a place without hope.

Part of the magic is knowing that in spite of everything we go through, we do, and our life does have a purpose. That’s perspective. That’s the magic.

I know this is a heavy post, but if there is anything fabulous to be gained from this post I would ask that you remind yourself, and everyone you know, especially someone like my dear friend, that because we are all connected, because we are all magic, we have purpose.

Stay fabulous and keep the perspective! Remember that whatever is next, hard or easy, it’s where we’re supposed to be because Now is all we have to get us to where we are going.

(And hey, depending upon what you call hard, getting something hard in your life might not be all bad.)

Grateful, while exhausted...

So, I've been working on this whole post (which may or may not make it to public), where I am trying to be smart, and clever, and figure out, and then share, what I am to learn from all that is stressing me out from work and home, and I haven't figure it out yet.

All I know, in the mean time, is that I am stressed out enough that I am losing my appetite over it all (work and home).

I've only lost my appetite (where food is concerned) once before in life. It was over love. So, this recent loss, for my love of food, sucks.

When I lost that heart love before, my lust for tuning out by filling up on food I love, a Mexican pizza from Taco Bell, or turning off, by overloading on fries and a cheese burger from In-N-Out, it was the devastation of the heart break that did me in.

But, then, my heart cracked in half and all, I only lost my need to eat my way through misery for 3 days. Essentially, that mind-numbing bliss and comfort of fatty foods, and filling up on those digestive boggers, to bug out, was short lived. I was 25 years old and heart broken.

Then, that three days later, I bounced back. I found the refrigerator. Isn't that what everyone does? Fill it up over here so we can avoid it over there?

So, this appetite loss, here, Now, that's been going on for almost a month, because of work and home, yikes. This might be big, Batman.

But, I still know how lucky I am in other ways. I just sent an email to Ava, and while I had not planned to post about it, after I hit send, I decided to do so.

I wanted to post what I just wrote to her because as I sent it, I realized there is that part of me that gets to be, needs to be, and still is, all sun-shiney.

I DO need that.

I always mean to have a light spot in my posts, even when I am in the middle of a shit storm. So, while I've not felt a lot of light lately, I just got a bit of light in knowing, remembering, I still am luckier than most when it comes to the people in my life.

Light spot=good, and great, friends.

Friends are IT!!!

So, now I share what I sent to Ava:


I know I've been a fine little mess, lately, and I've been complaining, annoyed, stressed, and, by proximity, you've gotten a bus load of what I am going through. But, while we all, as friends to each other, feel uniquely honored that someone would choose us to share...still, we're take'n a hit, taking in a lot for a friend.

You've been take'n in a lot of my hits, lately. And, you've done it with a grace and a spirituality that I, often strive for. So I want you to know, it's not lost on me, how valuable you are and how much I've leaned on you since I've known you.

You are pretty awesome. So, if in anyway I've leveraged your awesomeness beyond capacity, my apologies. But, I gotta say, even with all my work/home stress, I know where I am blessed. Tag! U're it!

U rock!!!

Thanks for being YOU!

Really, I'm getting bugged again?!

So… I alluded to, in my last post, that I have so much else to write about, those things to write about being work, home, job, whatever. And I may or may not have said that I’m stressing BIG time about work. What I didn’t say is that one of the reasons I haven’t posted about my job stress is because I am so wiped out from it that I can’t find the energy to write about it.

What I am say’n now, though, is Holy Shit Fuck, and me saying this has nothing to do with work in this moment. Yes, I am home on a Saturday night, and I just said the word strait out: FUCK. I didn’t say Friggen, F’n, or scale down, like I usually do when using the word fuck, but I just said a straight FUCK!!!!! That’s what is warranted here.

Why holy shit FUCK!? Well, because as I sat down to start to compile my notes about the “I’m friggen stressed beyond at work” post, I got distracted. I decided to check my email first. That’s where I encountered a wonderful e-mail from Ava, about this old lady Rose, and Rose’s message to the kids she went to college with. Her message was essentially to remember that growing old is mandatory, but growing up is optional, and, we make a Living by what we get and we make a Life by what we give.

Great message.

But, just as I was about to settle in, and take a breath, and think about that message, how wonderful that it was, and how nice it was to get an email from Ava in my evening, I felt something under my foot. I thought it was a leaf. I don’t know what I thought it was. It was just something that was there and, as I was still reading the email about Rose, not looking, I reached under my foot to pick up the leaf, the something I thought I’d tracked in, whatever it was. It felt crunchy, light. Then, I realized I’d just picked up a roach.

I’m burnt, man. I’m so stressed to the wall about work, and so wigged out by this place that it is so dark that it’s messing with me, I’m telling you, I can’t live with roaches, too. I can’t be picking them up and not knowing they are in my fingers. FUCKING GROSS!

Why yet another roach? I was already starting to feel crazy from the dark of this place, and overwhelmed from paying almost $300.00 more in rent a month, that I can’t afford. Just when I’d leveled off, after having had a conversation with another neighbor, who told me the dark in her place messes with her too, and just when I was barely getting to a point where I thought: Nah, man, it’s the job that’s really bugging me out. Then, I get bugged out, literally?!! What the fuCK!?

Seriously, have you ever picked a roach up in your bare hand before? Without a napkin, or without peeling it off the bottom of a shoe, but picked it up finger tips to crawly, creepy carcass?

Forget that I was thinking it was something else. When I already had a day today where I was so overwhelmed by my work-stress situation that I slept an extra hour this morning just not to feel my own heart pounding out of my chest from stress, picking up a roach is so NOT COOL!

My motto in life now, is I HATE ROACHES! Work roaches, stress roaches, people roaches, and most of all, real BIG, gross roaches. I don’t care if it is irrational fear, fear of bugs or spiders. This is now my second insane bug encounter.

Once I thought there was a fly was on me, on my leg as I was sitting at a coffee table drawing a picture. It wasn’t a fly. It was a black widow crawling across my leg. I realized as much when I brushed it off and it crawled away with its red ass glowing on its round black back.

Now, I’m jacked up on stress and I just picked up an inch long roach. What is this? Seriously? This creepish encounter, it’s filed.

FUCK! I am so not feeling fabulous right now.