My dad is supposed to do another chemo treatment tomorrow, a treatment he was supposed to start last week but it was delayed because he had low platelets. That said, with my father’s health being as precarious as it’s been, I’ve been thinking a lot about both of my parents lately and about what they are going through with my dad’s heart condition and cancer.
Mostly, though, I’ve been thinking about who my parents are and who I am because of them. Let me start by saying that I’m no different than any one. I’m normal and both my parents and I are human. Therefore, I am and they are, by that nature, imperfect. Thank goodness. Where would any of us be if we didn’t have our parents and the mis-doings we fault them for to blame some (or many) of our shortcomings on? Isn’t that part of being a kid?
But, fortunately, through luck, love, and/or the beauty of age, for more years than I can now count, blaming my parents for any of my defects has mostly become a thing of the past. It should be noted that I qualified the previous statement with the word “mostly” because I am smart enough to realize that for many of us there will always be things to work out from our childhood. And while in most cases our parents may not be to blame, I understand that because our parents are the people we are supposed to be able to trust the most, if something has run sideways from our past, in anyway, our parents inevitably become the primary fall guys. (What are parents for?)
But that’s not what this is about… I just want brag about my mom and dad a bit.
So, let me tell you about my dad. He’s the reason I became an artist and chose getting an art degree. When I was a little girl, with wonder and amazement, I’d watch my father as he sat at the dining-room table and painted. He worked in many mediums, but seeing the way he pushed water colors around, with his brushes, with some tissue, and with a cut-up cotton rag, dabbing the color out of a tiny puddle of blue and white just enough to mute all the color just right, making a sky you wanted to lay under as evening sets to night… Oh, how I couldn’t wait to grow up and paint my own pictures and let my imagination paint beyond even the horizons I could see.
When my father was younger, he played every sport, too. Well, it seemed that way. I have these memories of going to watch him play basketball, baseball, and volleyball (volleyball he played with my mom). He was even the coach of my and my sister Lynn’s T-ball team. (Of course, I’m the only one who remembers the fat kid who sat down and peed on 3rd base.)
What I also haven’t forgotten is what my dad told me when I was 17 years old. We were on our way to an audition for a summer school program for the arts. 500 hundred students were to be chosen out of a pool of 5,000 applicants, 100 students in each discipline: drama, visual arts (drawing and painting), dance, video, and singing. I’d already missed out on a visual arts grant from my high school earlier that year and had chosen another dream-de-teenage-dejour to pursue: drama. My dad knew how racked my nerves were, and as we pulled up, he said, “You know, I’m jealous already.”
I couldn’t imagine how my dad could be jealous of me, as I already thought I was going to fail, and, befuddled, I asked, “Why?” My dad said, “Because, whether you make it or not, just for trying you already have more courage then I ever had at your age.” To this day I think my dad telling me I was strong is the reason I got into the program. He gave me the confidence to just be, just try.
A couple of years later, after I’d moved out of the house to try out my own wings (I moved out 2 weeks after I graduated high school), my dad said, “I admire you. So far you’ve lived your life not wondering what’s behind door number three. You’ve been opening every door.”
I don’t think my dad has realized that with his words he gave me the courage to continue to open the doors in life I have been afraid to go near. What he’s said has been my motto when I have the most fear. “Just open the damn door, Levan. It’s just a door. If it’s the wrong one it’ll lead you to the right one,” I’ve been telling myself.
My dad helped me with my ability to be the person I keep trying to become even when I don’t always feel like I am there yet. But, I live my life trying to open door number three and trying to have the courage to continue to audition for the best life I can have.
It should be said, my daddy-doo can fix anything, from a toaster to a car engine. It took me a long time to figure out that a lot of men aren’t quite as handy. It took me even longer to realize a lot of men aren’t as creative as my father. They don’t all know how to play three different instruments, like the trumpet, a guitar, or the piano (which he taught himself in his 40s). Most men can’t carve a house out of a piece of wood or make a bird out of a pine cone, either. They don’t win mud-bogging races, or know how to jump a dune buggy off the edge of a razor-back sand dune. They don’t get a Harley fatboy in their late 50s or help out at a church pie night. Nor do they travel the United States with their best friend, their wife.
Let me tell you about my mom. She reads. Oh, does she. So much so that she can’t remember all the titles she’s gone through and she has to go to book exchanges and check the publication dates because then she knows if it’s recent she probably hasn’t already devoured the book. But, don’t expect my mother to go bragging about all the things she knows. That’s not her. No. She’ll just add to a conversation about something you can’t imagine anyone would know something about, and, whoola!, she does.
She can also cook. Oh, can she! It was one of the most memorable days in my life when her mom, my grandmother, told me that my potato salad might be better than my mom’s. See, if you’ve had my mother’s cooking, if you grew up with the kind of meals I grew up with, you’d think all mothers knew how to kill it in the kitchen like my mom. Not only can she make every kind of salad there is better than most, whatever it is people tell her, “This is the best...”
She’s also just as creative as my father. (Thanks, mom and dad, for giving me that artistic passion.) One of the ways my mother expresses herself is in the antique furniture she finds which no one else knows is a gem. Then, presto, she’s refinished the chair, the trunk, the table, the desk, the you-name-it, and it’s gorgeous.
It was my mother who gave me my first set of tools, you know. Yeah, mom doesn’t borrow dad’s drill. She’s got her own. She’s the one who gave me my drill for my 40th b-day.
It’s my mother’s wisdom which has been the tool she’s shared with me that I’ve profited the most from. She’s the one who said, “Every child may not agree with some of the choices their parents have made in raising them. However, there comes a point where you need to take responsibility for your life and not carry around the baggage of your past.” Well said, mom! I may not have all of my mother’s grace yet, and may never. But, if I am even the slightest glimmer from her light, I applaud the wisdom and the leading by example she’s given me that’s enlightened my way.
My mom is also the girl who has been married to my dad since she was 20 years old. My mom is the woman who, in a fleeting moment, admitted to me, when my sisters and I visited my dad before he started chemo, that she doesn’t know what she’s going to do if she loses my father. But, most of the time, when I ask my mom how she is doing, my mom is the kind of woman who says, “I don't want to talk about how I am doing because I refuse to feel sorry for my self.”
My mother is the one who taught me, that, as she’s always said, “things always work out.” Even with all the changes I’ve gone through, and all of the decisions I’ve made to try to re-arrange my life for the better, and even when I’ve started to doubt myself and haven’t wanted to tell my parents as much, so they don’t worry about me, my mom is the one who made me believe I’d get it all figured out again. “Don’t worry, mom,” I told her, as I was living in Colorado and waiting to hear if I’d get unemployment. Then she said, “I’m not worried about you, honey. You always land on your feet.” She made me believe, when I was doubting it myself, that, no matter what, I would be able to hold my shoulders up again.
I guess all that I am really trying to say is that I love my parents and I hope, with all that I have, that they get more time together, that I get more time with them, and that anyone who wants more time with anyone values the time they have now.
Here is to hoping my dad who knows how to kick ass kicks cancer's ass!
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Sunday, September 18, 2011
I'm Tired
Now that we’ve got “My thin skin” post out of the way, and I’ve mostly digested the crap-ass comment from Mr./Miss. Anonymous regarding my love letter to California, how about we see how thin my skin really is?
It’s thin. The truth is, the comment by Mr./Miss. Anonymous kinda sent me over the edge. I began questioning why I am even striving to be a writer. I started wondering and asking myself, “What if my writing is the worst kind of suck and I don’t even know it?” And thinking,”Shoot, I know I’ve been lax in my blog, and getting things out there without trying to be perfect, but what if I’m just delusional and my writing is crap beyond my non-edited mistakes?”
Then, it hit me. The fact that someone I don’t even know could have that kind of affect on me, it really showed me how raw I’ve been lately. But, because there have been so many straws weighing on my camel’s back, and so much emotion that has been piling up only to get pent up, I think that comment by Mr./Miss. Anonymous gave me a target for my anger and the release for my emotion that I’ve needed.
I can’t lie. I’ve had some weeps which have worked their way out in little spurts when something tips me, but until I read that comment from the ASSnonymous person, I’d not had a good cry yet. I know myself well enough to understand why I’ve been shutting my emotions down.
I’ve been trying to turn my feelings off the same way I tried to turn off the physical pain I experienced the day I broke my wrist over four years ago. After slipping on a declining slope in the snow, I fell back onto my wrist and I snapped my radius in half. The sharp, vibrating, burning sensation inside my wrist from the immediate break was so excruciating that I was afraid to cry. I thought if I let the tears out that my brain would get the signal of how much pain I was in and that a confirmation of that pain would then make the pain even worse. (I simply could not take any more pain.)
I guess what I am trying to say is that I’ve been feeling so emotionally overtaxed, so tender and exposed from the weight of my emotions wearing me out, that I’m afraid if I acknowledge how beat up and fragile I feel that I might actually break in half. Seriously, if I didn’t already question whether or not I have an anxiety disorder, I am now at least certain that my crazy is showing and that stress is not my best color.
What’s got me constantly on the verge of tears? Fuck. It’s all of it. I’m tired, man. Just plain fucking tired.
I don’t want my dad to have any more heart attacks. To catch you up, a few weeks after my dad’s quadruple bypass, while I was still in Colorado, my dad had two more heart attacks. Two of his graphs didn’t hold from the bypass surgery.
I don’t want my dad to have cancer, either. The whole reason my dad ended up in the bypass surgery in the first place is because he had a growth on his salivary gland and they wanted to do a stress test to find out if he could withstand the surgery to remove that growth. Obviously, my dad failed the stress test. This is what ended him up in the quadruple bypass surgery. He also failed the benign growth test.
By the way, Anonymous, how do you like me now? Am I still too happy for you? Is my dad’s cancer bullshit? Do you still think its nonsense that I needed to write about something positive, such as being happy to be back in California, before I admitted, and then reminded what few readers I have, that the last couple of years have put enough of a strain on me that I feel like I’ve aged more in this time than I’ve aged in the past 10 years?
I’ve heard other people say how a series of events or even a single circumstance can take its toll, but if I didn’t get it before, I get it now. All the things that have collected, first with me feeling forced out of my home of 14 years by the butthead neighbors, then with the bad job, the bully bosses, my dad’s health, feeling displaced and feeling figuratively homeless since I left my old home, and with me learning to be more adaptable and flexible then I actually bend, has turned me into a different person. (Frankly, I don’t even want to be around me right now and I am wondering how my friends are putting up with me.)
It really is incredible how much stress can screw with you. I’ve gotten my first gray hairs and my jowls have now come in. Shit! That sucks! While dating is the last thing on my mind (and the thought of dating makes me want to puke), when I’m ready, how am I supposed to get another young lover if my sagging jaw skin is threatening to make acquaintance with my doubling chin?
(Yeah, I may write things about how a gay man is telling me that I am stunning, but maybe you can see now how that’s not me bragging. That’s me realizing that I’m living on borrowed time. I have to take any compliment I can get right now because I fear I’ve heard the last of the compliments.)
I’ve got another question for you, Anonymous. Do you think that my sisters and I are assholes because we haven’t been able to keep our dad’s cancer diagnosis straight since we’re getting all our information from our dad, a man who is stressed out of his mind and who is afraid of dying, and from my mom, a woman who is afraid to loose her husband of more than 45 years, rather than getting the information straight from our father’s doctors.
Are both my parents jerks because they, in their distress, seem to hear and process the diagnoses and the information about my dad’s cancer different than each other? Then, they seem to give that information to us differently, too. Was it wrong for me to be freaked out and fear the worst because I’d not heard back from my parents for three days after my dad had his first chemo treatment?
One more question, Anonymous. Does my whole family suck because we’re glad that the second opinion my dad got from a doctor at the Mayo clinic told him he had a better chance at life, that he actually had the aggressive kind of cancer which can be treated aggressively, that is rather than the slow growing non-treatable kind of cancer he was told he had in the first opinion which, incidentally, gave him 2-16 years to live?
How’s that for a diagnosis. You could die really soon, or not so soon, but you are going to die from cancer, not old age.
You know what, Anonymous? Now, I am actually feeling bad for you. The fact that you spend your time posting belittling comments on people’s blogs means that you wouldn’t even get how important it was that my sisters and I all got to go visit my dad before he started chemo, and we got to play pool with him, and see all of his new wood carvings, and then take with us a memory of him still healthy (visually, at least) and smiling ear to ear because he got to have all of his daughters together before he gets sick from his chemo treatments.
My sister, Christine, reminded me of how important that would be for all of us to take that visual home and to keep that memory in our hearts rather than to have seen our father when he was already sicker than shit from his chemo.
I never told anyone this, friends or family, but I had a feeling my dad had cancer back before his bypass and back when he and my mother informed us that he had a growth on his face. I also didn’t ask my sisters if it was just as hard for them as it was for me to see most of our father’s left earlobe gone and to see the ½ inch dent, or hole (call it what you will) in the side of his face where his earlobe used to be and from where they removed the cancerous growth, hoping they got all of it, understanding later that the cancer has spread through his body.
Something that made me feel good is that after talking to Christine one night, she admitted that the only word she could also come up with for how it feels to emotionally deal with our father’s health is an overwhelming sense of being tired. Just plain fucking tired.
What I didn’t tell Christine is how exhausting our visit to see our father was for me in a different way than it was for her and for my sister Lyn. Yes, my dad’s health is especially trying for me and both my sister’s, however what added to my tired was the fact that I couldn’t help but take in how much duress my mother has been under. While Christine and Lyn were focused on spending time with my dad, as was I, I was also trying to do double time.
See, my mother is my and Lyn’s mother, not Christine’s. Christine is my father’s daughter from his first marriage. Also, I’ve had the added advantage of getting to see Christine, who lives on the East Coast, way more than Lyn has gotten to see Christine.
What does all of that mean? While Christine and Lyn were catching up with each other, and catching up with my dad, singing songs with our father in the basement, trying on his leather Harley vest, and taking turns taking pictures with his cowboy hat on, I was upstairs in the kitchen with my mom making dinner and giving my mom the shoulder she needed to express the fear she’s going through with everything going on with my dad.
“What am I going to do if I lose your father?” That’s what my mom was asking me during some of the dinners we made. What did I do every time my mom confided in me? I assured her that everything would be okay. What did I do every time my family looked at me for my strong face? I assured them that everything would be okay. Then, I’d sneak away to the bathroom and have me a short little spurt cry that I’d shut down after 20 seconds so that my face wouldn’t get red and so that my mother, my father, and my sisters wouldn’t detect that I was just as scared as the rest of them. (How the baby of the family, me, turned out to be the high-strung freak in her life but the rock with her family, I don’t know.)
Did I tell Lyn and Christine how much my mom is going through? Hell no. Every time something goes the hard way in my family and the tears are about to come out, my family looks at me, literally. They all turn their heads towards me to see if I am going to cry. So, I keep my face straight. I don’t cry. I know what they’re looking for; a face without fear which says things will work out. They want to find in my expression the strength we’re all hoping for.
They don’t know they do this, look at me the way they do. They’ve been doing it so long and I’ve been playing the part for just as long, that it’s how our family works.
But, I thank goodness that I have the friends that I do, because when I feel like I am going to go crazy, because I need to cry, too, and when I need somewhere to lean, where I don’t have to be strong, my friends are there. (For how long, shit… if I don’t stop being a pill…who knows.)
Anyway, it was Lyta that had me laughing a couple of weeks ago. She really talked me off the emotional ledge when ASSnonymous sent me into my scooped out cry. Lyta gave me the proverbial reminder, “Hey, honey. Get off the ledge. Come on inside where the wine is.”
Now if I could only figure out which side of the stress eating/stress not-eating pendulum I’m going to swing towards this time. Since I’ve been so tired, so emotionally spent from completely over feeling, I’ve been doing what many of us do to avoid feeling. Eat.
It’s a known fact that everyone comfort eats. It’s a lesser known fact that there is a reason for this. The energy it takes to process emotion and the energy it takes to digest a fattening/big meal is so great that the two processes cannot take place at once. One will take precedent over the other. This would explain why people can vacillate between loosing their appetite during great times of stress to over-eating in order to shut emotion down for awhile.
Over the last year, I’ve experienced both. While dealing with the stress of my last job, it was so constant and on-going I couldn’t eat. Lately, I’ve been going back and forth between not having an appetite to wanting to eat everything in front of me in order to shut down.
The funny part is, if any of this is funny, is that I wonder what my dad, who introduces me as his vegetarian daughter, would think about the fact that I recently horked down an In N Out cheese burger and some fries so fast that I got a knot in my belly. Man, I haven’t eaten meat in I don’t know how long, but I am here to tell you that the lightening speed in which I ate that meal is what accounts for the stomach ache. I barely made it to the second traffic light away from the drive through before half the burger was gone. Well, at least Chad, my old neighbor, who calls me a cut-back-atarian for eating a mostly meat & dairy free diet, would be proud.
What’s worse? After that burger and fries I wanted a cigarette. What the hell? I quit smoking over four years ago. Six weeks after I broke my wrist and had to face my own mortality, I put the ciggies down. Then, after getting through the first six months of habit withdrawal and learning new ways to deal with stress (which obviously haven’t been that successful) I haven’t wanted or craved a cigarette. So why now? Hmm. Something tells me I’m not coping with my life well.
Anyway, I’m too pooped to get out another peep. I’m going to bed early tonight and as I lay my head down I am going to be thankful that my dad is in good spirits, that his first chemo treatment went well, that his labored and breathy speech is probably from recovering from his last surgery, and not the effects of the chemo yet. I am also going to be grateful for the fact that there is wine.
It’s thin. The truth is, the comment by Mr./Miss. Anonymous kinda sent me over the edge. I began questioning why I am even striving to be a writer. I started wondering and asking myself, “What if my writing is the worst kind of suck and I don’t even know it?” And thinking,”Shoot, I know I’ve been lax in my blog, and getting things out there without trying to be perfect, but what if I’m just delusional and my writing is crap beyond my non-edited mistakes?”
Then, it hit me. The fact that someone I don’t even know could have that kind of affect on me, it really showed me how raw I’ve been lately. But, because there have been so many straws weighing on my camel’s back, and so much emotion that has been piling up only to get pent up, I think that comment by Mr./Miss. Anonymous gave me a target for my anger and the release for my emotion that I’ve needed.
I can’t lie. I’ve had some weeps which have worked their way out in little spurts when something tips me, but until I read that comment from the ASSnonymous person, I’d not had a good cry yet. I know myself well enough to understand why I’ve been shutting my emotions down.
I’ve been trying to turn my feelings off the same way I tried to turn off the physical pain I experienced the day I broke my wrist over four years ago. After slipping on a declining slope in the snow, I fell back onto my wrist and I snapped my radius in half. The sharp, vibrating, burning sensation inside my wrist from the immediate break was so excruciating that I was afraid to cry. I thought if I let the tears out that my brain would get the signal of how much pain I was in and that a confirmation of that pain would then make the pain even worse. (I simply could not take any more pain.)
I guess what I am trying to say is that I’ve been feeling so emotionally overtaxed, so tender and exposed from the weight of my emotions wearing me out, that I’m afraid if I acknowledge how beat up and fragile I feel that I might actually break in half. Seriously, if I didn’t already question whether or not I have an anxiety disorder, I am now at least certain that my crazy is showing and that stress is not my best color.
What’s got me constantly on the verge of tears? Fuck. It’s all of it. I’m tired, man. Just plain fucking tired.
I don’t want my dad to have any more heart attacks. To catch you up, a few weeks after my dad’s quadruple bypass, while I was still in Colorado, my dad had two more heart attacks. Two of his graphs didn’t hold from the bypass surgery.
I don’t want my dad to have cancer, either. The whole reason my dad ended up in the bypass surgery in the first place is because he had a growth on his salivary gland and they wanted to do a stress test to find out if he could withstand the surgery to remove that growth. Obviously, my dad failed the stress test. This is what ended him up in the quadruple bypass surgery. He also failed the benign growth test.
By the way, Anonymous, how do you like me now? Am I still too happy for you? Is my dad’s cancer bullshit? Do you still think its nonsense that I needed to write about something positive, such as being happy to be back in California, before I admitted, and then reminded what few readers I have, that the last couple of years have put enough of a strain on me that I feel like I’ve aged more in this time than I’ve aged in the past 10 years?
I’ve heard other people say how a series of events or even a single circumstance can take its toll, but if I didn’t get it before, I get it now. All the things that have collected, first with me feeling forced out of my home of 14 years by the butthead neighbors, then with the bad job, the bully bosses, my dad’s health, feeling displaced and feeling figuratively homeless since I left my old home, and with me learning to be more adaptable and flexible then I actually bend, has turned me into a different person. (Frankly, I don’t even want to be around me right now and I am wondering how my friends are putting up with me.)
It really is incredible how much stress can screw with you. I’ve gotten my first gray hairs and my jowls have now come in. Shit! That sucks! While dating is the last thing on my mind (and the thought of dating makes me want to puke), when I’m ready, how am I supposed to get another young lover if my sagging jaw skin is threatening to make acquaintance with my doubling chin?
(Yeah, I may write things about how a gay man is telling me that I am stunning, but maybe you can see now how that’s not me bragging. That’s me realizing that I’m living on borrowed time. I have to take any compliment I can get right now because I fear I’ve heard the last of the compliments.)
I’ve got another question for you, Anonymous. Do you think that my sisters and I are assholes because we haven’t been able to keep our dad’s cancer diagnosis straight since we’re getting all our information from our dad, a man who is stressed out of his mind and who is afraid of dying, and from my mom, a woman who is afraid to loose her husband of more than 45 years, rather than getting the information straight from our father’s doctors.
Are both my parents jerks because they, in their distress, seem to hear and process the diagnoses and the information about my dad’s cancer different than each other? Then, they seem to give that information to us differently, too. Was it wrong for me to be freaked out and fear the worst because I’d not heard back from my parents for three days after my dad had his first chemo treatment?
One more question, Anonymous. Does my whole family suck because we’re glad that the second opinion my dad got from a doctor at the Mayo clinic told him he had a better chance at life, that he actually had the aggressive kind of cancer which can be treated aggressively, that is rather than the slow growing non-treatable kind of cancer he was told he had in the first opinion which, incidentally, gave him 2-16 years to live?
How’s that for a diagnosis. You could die really soon, or not so soon, but you are going to die from cancer, not old age.
You know what, Anonymous? Now, I am actually feeling bad for you. The fact that you spend your time posting belittling comments on people’s blogs means that you wouldn’t even get how important it was that my sisters and I all got to go visit my dad before he started chemo, and we got to play pool with him, and see all of his new wood carvings, and then take with us a memory of him still healthy (visually, at least) and smiling ear to ear because he got to have all of his daughters together before he gets sick from his chemo treatments.
My sister, Christine, reminded me of how important that would be for all of us to take that visual home and to keep that memory in our hearts rather than to have seen our father when he was already sicker than shit from his chemo.
I never told anyone this, friends or family, but I had a feeling my dad had cancer back before his bypass and back when he and my mother informed us that he had a growth on his face. I also didn’t ask my sisters if it was just as hard for them as it was for me to see most of our father’s left earlobe gone and to see the ½ inch dent, or hole (call it what you will) in the side of his face where his earlobe used to be and from where they removed the cancerous growth, hoping they got all of it, understanding later that the cancer has spread through his body.
Something that made me feel good is that after talking to Christine one night, she admitted that the only word she could also come up with for how it feels to emotionally deal with our father’s health is an overwhelming sense of being tired. Just plain fucking tired.
What I didn’t tell Christine is how exhausting our visit to see our father was for me in a different way than it was for her and for my sister Lyn. Yes, my dad’s health is especially trying for me and both my sister’s, however what added to my tired was the fact that I couldn’t help but take in how much duress my mother has been under. While Christine and Lyn were focused on spending time with my dad, as was I, I was also trying to do double time.
See, my mother is my and Lyn’s mother, not Christine’s. Christine is my father’s daughter from his first marriage. Also, I’ve had the added advantage of getting to see Christine, who lives on the East Coast, way more than Lyn has gotten to see Christine.
What does all of that mean? While Christine and Lyn were catching up with each other, and catching up with my dad, singing songs with our father in the basement, trying on his leather Harley vest, and taking turns taking pictures with his cowboy hat on, I was upstairs in the kitchen with my mom making dinner and giving my mom the shoulder she needed to express the fear she’s going through with everything going on with my dad.
“What am I going to do if I lose your father?” That’s what my mom was asking me during some of the dinners we made. What did I do every time my mom confided in me? I assured her that everything would be okay. What did I do every time my family looked at me for my strong face? I assured them that everything would be okay. Then, I’d sneak away to the bathroom and have me a short little spurt cry that I’d shut down after 20 seconds so that my face wouldn’t get red and so that my mother, my father, and my sisters wouldn’t detect that I was just as scared as the rest of them. (How the baby of the family, me, turned out to be the high-strung freak in her life but the rock with her family, I don’t know.)
Did I tell Lyn and Christine how much my mom is going through? Hell no. Every time something goes the hard way in my family and the tears are about to come out, my family looks at me, literally. They all turn their heads towards me to see if I am going to cry. So, I keep my face straight. I don’t cry. I know what they’re looking for; a face without fear which says things will work out. They want to find in my expression the strength we’re all hoping for.
They don’t know they do this, look at me the way they do. They’ve been doing it so long and I’ve been playing the part for just as long, that it’s how our family works.
But, I thank goodness that I have the friends that I do, because when I feel like I am going to go crazy, because I need to cry, too, and when I need somewhere to lean, where I don’t have to be strong, my friends are there. (For how long, shit… if I don’t stop being a pill…who knows.)
Anyway, it was Lyta that had me laughing a couple of weeks ago. She really talked me off the emotional ledge when ASSnonymous sent me into my scooped out cry. Lyta gave me the proverbial reminder, “Hey, honey. Get off the ledge. Come on inside where the wine is.”
Now if I could only figure out which side of the stress eating/stress not-eating pendulum I’m going to swing towards this time. Since I’ve been so tired, so emotionally spent from completely over feeling, I’ve been doing what many of us do to avoid feeling. Eat.
It’s a known fact that everyone comfort eats. It’s a lesser known fact that there is a reason for this. The energy it takes to process emotion and the energy it takes to digest a fattening/big meal is so great that the two processes cannot take place at once. One will take precedent over the other. This would explain why people can vacillate between loosing their appetite during great times of stress to over-eating in order to shut emotion down for awhile.
Over the last year, I’ve experienced both. While dealing with the stress of my last job, it was so constant and on-going I couldn’t eat. Lately, I’ve been going back and forth between not having an appetite to wanting to eat everything in front of me in order to shut down.
The funny part is, if any of this is funny, is that I wonder what my dad, who introduces me as his vegetarian daughter, would think about the fact that I recently horked down an In N Out cheese burger and some fries so fast that I got a knot in my belly. Man, I haven’t eaten meat in I don’t know how long, but I am here to tell you that the lightening speed in which I ate that meal is what accounts for the stomach ache. I barely made it to the second traffic light away from the drive through before half the burger was gone. Well, at least Chad, my old neighbor, who calls me a cut-back-atarian for eating a mostly meat & dairy free diet, would be proud.
What’s worse? After that burger and fries I wanted a cigarette. What the hell? I quit smoking over four years ago. Six weeks after I broke my wrist and had to face my own mortality, I put the ciggies down. Then, after getting through the first six months of habit withdrawal and learning new ways to deal with stress (which obviously haven’t been that successful) I haven’t wanted or craved a cigarette. So why now? Hmm. Something tells me I’m not coping with my life well.
Anyway, I’m too pooped to get out another peep. I’m going to bed early tonight and as I lay my head down I am going to be thankful that my dad is in good spirits, that his first chemo treatment went well, that his labored and breathy speech is probably from recovering from his last surgery, and not the effects of the chemo yet. I am also going to be grateful for the fact that there is wine.
Saturday, September 3, 2011
My Thin Skin
Turns out, I’m not as tough as I’d like to be. I went to work on one of my blong posts (as my friend Rod calls my long blog posts), in order to catch things up where I left off, and I came upon an anonymous comment, which needed to be moderated, that upset me. The comment, in reference to the post “My love letter to California…” was something to the effect of “ Trololo-lololo-lolololo!!!”
I didn’t know what Trololo… meant, so I looked up possible meanings. It looks like “Trololo” is any speech or B.S. which, while it may have a positive connotation, is not only clueless in it’s delivery but the person delivering the speech doesn’t realize they are full of shit and are too happy.
In my small moment of power, I deleted the comment. But, I couldn’t let it go.
So, this is to you Mr./Miss. Anonymous. I guess I am a Trololo-er, someone committed the ultimate sin of buying into their own bullshit. I like to write. My blog is from my experiences. So, if you do not like what I have to say, don’t read my blog. Go fly a kite. Move on and take your bad energy elsewhere. I don’t have the desire to deal with the cycle that comes when faced with a negative person making derogatory comments anonymously.
And, if you wanted to make me feel bad, if you wanted to hurt my feelings, and wanted to make me question my ability to write, to communicate, to do what makes me happy, and if you wanted to knock me down some punches, then good job; You win. You did it. I hope that’s what you were looking to do, so at least one of us got something out or your comment. Purveyors of bad energy usually do want others to feel bad, so you can now sleep better tonight knowing it worked.
It’s not what I wanted, though, to give you, an asshole, six paragraphs. But, now that I think about it, I am actually happy to do it. These paragraphs are my effort to cycle through the negativity you left me in order to go on to the posts that I have been putting off, sharing about my father’s health, my job search, and about how out of balance I’ve felt for the last year and a half of my life.
Turns out, your negativity has actually served to remind me of why I write. There will be those who don’t like what I write. So be it and be them on their way. (No one is forced to engage.) Then, there will be others who will read something that I have written and they will connect with it. They will know someone else understands what they’ve been through or are going through. So be them with me on our way to knowing we are not alone in this journey as we try to figure out life.
XO – My few readers.
Kiss off – Anonymous
I didn’t know what Trololo… meant, so I looked up possible meanings. It looks like “Trololo” is any speech or B.S. which, while it may have a positive connotation, is not only clueless in it’s delivery but the person delivering the speech doesn’t realize they are full of shit and are too happy.
In my small moment of power, I deleted the comment. But, I couldn’t let it go.
So, this is to you Mr./Miss. Anonymous. I guess I am a Trololo-er, someone committed the ultimate sin of buying into their own bullshit. I like to write. My blog is from my experiences. So, if you do not like what I have to say, don’t read my blog. Go fly a kite. Move on and take your bad energy elsewhere. I don’t have the desire to deal with the cycle that comes when faced with a negative person making derogatory comments anonymously.
And, if you wanted to make me feel bad, if you wanted to hurt my feelings, and wanted to make me question my ability to write, to communicate, to do what makes me happy, and if you wanted to knock me down some punches, then good job; You win. You did it. I hope that’s what you were looking to do, so at least one of us got something out or your comment. Purveyors of bad energy usually do want others to feel bad, so you can now sleep better tonight knowing it worked.
It’s not what I wanted, though, to give you, an asshole, six paragraphs. But, now that I think about it, I am actually happy to do it. These paragraphs are my effort to cycle through the negativity you left me in order to go on to the posts that I have been putting off, sharing about my father’s health, my job search, and about how out of balance I’ve felt for the last year and a half of my life.
Turns out, your negativity has actually served to remind me of why I write. There will be those who don’t like what I write. So be it and be them on their way. (No one is forced to engage.) Then, there will be others who will read something that I have written and they will connect with it. They will know someone else understands what they’ve been through or are going through. So be them with me on our way to knowing we are not alone in this journey as we try to figure out life.
XO – My few readers.
Kiss off – Anonymous
Friday, August 19, 2011
My love letter to California…
By the long gap between posts it appears that I’ve been remiss in writing my return-to-California post. Is that really surprising, though? Some writer I am. Life takes some turns, and I’m too spent from spinning to get it all down. So, here’s the plan. First, I write my love letter to California. Then, in subsequent posts, I get to what’s kept me from my blog. (Some people call what I’ve been going through life.)
I want to start off by saying that the haul to Colorado took me two exhausting days and was mostly uphill (figuratively and literally when it came to the mountain passes), but the return to California started off at 6:30 am in the morning and concluded the same day at 11:30 pm. (Someone wanted to come home. I think it was me.)
The second I hit the Interstate 210, and the cars went whooshing by me and my 4’ x 8’ Uhaul trailer (I got a smaller trailer because I was minus the weight of my bed which I left for Sparrow), I thought, “Fuck! I’ve only been gone a little over two months and I’ve already forgotten how aggressive California drivers can be?” Just seconds after almost being overtaken by a black Mercedes, which zoomed past me and apparently didn’t have time to wait for me to merge into the slow lane that was rightfully mine as a trailer puller, the smell of dead skunk, green hillsides, and cool air filled the cab of my truck. Then I thought, “Man, is it good to be back! I’ll take the stench of rotting hill-side skunk, speeding assholes on the crowded freeways, and the site of year-long green on the freeway banks any day of the week. This is home. I love me my California!”
When I went to live in Colorado I never intended to live there forever. However, what I didn’t expect, within weeks of being there, was to miss California, and everything about it, so much. One of the craters in my soul Colorado couldn’t fill is all my favorite grocery stores with their better-than-most-states produce and can’t-get-it-anywhere-else products. I yearned for Trader Joes, a grocery God amongst West-Coast chains, the most. Where else can you get a bottle of wine for two dollars that doesn’t give you a head ache in the morning? Bless you, two-buck Chuck. Bless you. And bless you, Trader Joe’s, for your four-pack of avocados that always perfectly ripen at different times and for the 4-5 pack of Roma tomatoes you offer which never have mold on them. You really know how to melt a girl’s heart.
It should also be mentioned, Trader Joe’s, that I was not only jonzing for your Tahini sauce (so I could make my own home-made hummus with the best secret ingredient), but I was also feeling pretty lost without your quick packs of snap peas, green beans, and shredded carrots. While I am here, talking produce, can anyone tell me why only 1 out of every 4 grocery stores in Colorado seemed to carry shredded carrots? I never thought of shredded carrots as a luxury item. Well, not until I couldn’t find them and had to chop my own carrots for my salad. (Spoiled, little California girl.)
Convenience. That’s California. I don’t even drink coffee regularly, and haven’t for over 13 years, but if the craving for a cup of coffee hits while your anywhere in So Cal, if you are somewhere near a major intersection, you can pretty much bet there’s a Starbuck’s within three or four city blocks to the left or to the right of where you are standing.
Want to get some of the best Mexican food you can get outside of Mexico? Great. There are enough major-franchise Mexican restaurants around that you’ll not be left wanting. If it’s as close to the real deal you’re looking for, look no further than the incomparable neighborhood hole-in-the-wall joints which better than please the palette when it comes to authentic Mexican food.
Oh, you say you have got a love for Pizza? Me too! I don’t want to piss Colorado off, but Colorado’s altitude just can get it up when it comes to fluffy, flaky pizza crust. Not like California can, anyway.
If it’s not obvious, my love for Southern California goes way beyond the fresh produce and the plethora of great restaurants. I like knowing that when I meet up with a friend for lunch or dinner the opportunity to choose a place that looks out onto the ocean is available to me. I can admit it now. So get your lighters out. Let the lights shine proud. Join me in a circle, and I’ll confess. I’m a California-aholic. I really do love me my California. I’m addicted.
I like that I have made memories throughout my life with my friends and family in every major and not so major city all the way from Eureka right on down to San Diego. I’m proud of the fact that Southern California has been my playground my entire life. It’s okay if the sun shines on Christmas morning. I’ll keep the fireworks on the Forth of July that crack open the sky over the ocean at the beach. I don’t care if most the leaves don’t turn brilliant shades of pink or intense shades of yellow ochre in the fall. Sure, every one here actually thinks Palm trees are indigenous, but I’m fine with that, too.
The fact is, I’m never going to get tired of hitting up all the specialty spots along the coast and finding new ones in all the nooks and crannies of So Cal’s backyard. I want to keep making new memories with all the friends I’ve made over the years who have sprinkled themselves throughout this great state.
Already, since returning, I shared an amazing dinner with Shian at Poseidon on the Beach in Del Mar. Man, the ocean never looked so beautiful as it did when the sun set just as I had my second glass of chardonnay and took a bite of my Seared Ahi Tuna with a cajun rub. Just before that, watching the sun begin to hit the horizon as we shared the Grilled Garden Flat Bread, which had Kalamata olives, goat cheese, tomatoes, balsamic onions, grilled artichokes, and sweet peppers, that wasn’t hard to endure either.
Spending the day on Dana Strand beach under a big shade umbrella with one of my best friends, Tiffany, and listening to the waves crash against the shore as we dished the catch-up on our lives, that was good. Then, meeting up with Tif’s sister, Lana, later, who joined us for dinner at the Beach Fire Bar & Grill in San Clamente was yet another memory I’ve already made in my California. Lana may have met her next boy friend that night (I still have to check back in with her to see how that’s going). Another confession? I am okay with the fact that I didn’t have to pay for any of my drinks that night. Ah, California. We’re just so in love.
I really have been busy since I’ve been back. The weekend after I spent with Tiffany, I went back to visit Shian. We’d met a new friend at the birthday party we’d attended the night after the Poseidon dinner and, can I just say, “Go fun parties held in the back yard of a 10 million dollar house.” I now know what an infinity pool is. Well, I could have lived a good life without knowing that, and money doesn’t buy happiness, but it sure does buy a good view and that party did get us another wonderful meal.
I met the cutest, sexiest, fittest, flirtiest, man who wanted to make dinner for Shian, her boyfriend and me. After leaving a conversation with a Catherine Keener look alike (who was definitely on the quirkier side of the granola and more out there than Catherine’s role as Maxine Lund in Being John Malcovish), and as I approached Shian, who was chatting up our soon-to-be dinner host, a work-out God who Shian had met a couple weeks prior, said to me, as I approached, “Wow! You’re stunning.”
Oh, gosh, thanks for the compliment, Mr. Fine and sexy specimen of age, humor, muscles, smile and wit. No, I didn’t say that out loud to him. Instead, I simply beamed and my reciprocal smile spread from puff-me-up, you hunk, ear to ear. Then I said, “Thank you,” which prompted him to continue with, “My God, you have the best energy.”
Now, I ask you, who wouldn’t want this guy to make them dinner? Alright, I’ll come clean. Even though he told everyone at the party that he and I were running off to Vegas to get married, and that I was his soul mate, and told me that I was one of the sexiest women he’d met in a while, he was off the market. No, he wasn’t married. Not even a girlfriend. He is playing, rather vigorously, for the other team. The wife and daughter he had in closet days were a distant memory.
Still, Mr. Sexy not only boosted my ego, he made me forget about my 3-inch brown roots. (Man, do I ever need to get my hair done. Being jobless can be a mutha…). Also, Mr. Sexy prepared us all, Shian, her boyfriend, the birthday boy, and me, a mean vegetarian meal of rice spaghetti topped with a marinara sauce loaded with myriad of fresh spices and a chopped-thin serving of kale. (Kale? Who’d a thunk?). We also got a hot loaf of sourdough to go with our pasta and our kick-ass fresh salad from an organic garden, which, amongst other mouth-watering delights, included watermelon radishes, a variety of greens, and some lovely, sweet, juicy, and amazing golden-orange cherry tomatoes. Yeah, those suckers bursted in my mouth. I was going to secretly raid the kitchen, to pop the leftovers tomatoes in my mouth, but, thankfully, our host noticed my immediate addiction and brought a bowl out to me.
Our host also wanted to hold my hand during a portion of dinner, even though he’d slept with his best friend the night before. My conclusion? I’m still hot. He’s a sexual being. Eh…
Oh… Did I forget to mention that our host has an one-bedroom apartment on the estate of really rich dude’s property? Okay, that was lame, that description of an estate that takes 14 staffers to keep up, but that was my way of playing down the fact that we got a tour of our host’s boss’s back yard (not the house), and I’ll just say: tennis courts, his and her locker rooms, an outside bar equipped with villa-like tables with an automatic canopy shade system, and yet another infinity pool where the water fell off the edges of the concrete with no discernable beginning or end. (I guess the rich don’t see the horizon as a limitation. Sign me up.)
Am I bragging about someone else’s money? F’ no. They did the work. I just enjoyed their spoils. However, do I love that you never know what California can bring, with its wonderful residents, everyone from the homeless who enjoy the temperate weather to the richer-than-crap doing the same? Can I get a: HELL YES!
I’ll take it all, California. I’ll take your kooks who talk about inventing energy hats which are supposed keep the bad vibes out. (Go Catherine Keener look alikes.) I like their creativity. Give me the aggressive drivers who think they own every road. At least they are getting out of my way just as quick as they got in it. Challenge me with some of the overly-abundant fake breasts, plastic-surgery faces, and misguided image mongrels. It’s amusing to see people take such irrational pride in their appearance. Most of all, please, oh please, continue to honor me with your spiritually evolved, those who understand that mind, body, and spirit is not just a conversation; it’s a way of life.
Yes, California, thanks for keeping most of my friends here. Thanks for giving them the year-round green to grow their hearts. Bless your beautiful beaches which power their souls. I kiss your blue skies that inspire our imaginations. And, I thank you for your temperate weather to help all of us keep our balance.
I love you, my California!
I want to start off by saying that the haul to Colorado took me two exhausting days and was mostly uphill (figuratively and literally when it came to the mountain passes), but the return to California started off at 6:30 am in the morning and concluded the same day at 11:30 pm. (Someone wanted to come home. I think it was me.)
The second I hit the Interstate 210, and the cars went whooshing by me and my 4’ x 8’ Uhaul trailer (I got a smaller trailer because I was minus the weight of my bed which I left for Sparrow), I thought, “Fuck! I’ve only been gone a little over two months and I’ve already forgotten how aggressive California drivers can be?” Just seconds after almost being overtaken by a black Mercedes, which zoomed past me and apparently didn’t have time to wait for me to merge into the slow lane that was rightfully mine as a trailer puller, the smell of dead skunk, green hillsides, and cool air filled the cab of my truck. Then I thought, “Man, is it good to be back! I’ll take the stench of rotting hill-side skunk, speeding assholes on the crowded freeways, and the site of year-long green on the freeway banks any day of the week. This is home. I love me my California!”
When I went to live in Colorado I never intended to live there forever. However, what I didn’t expect, within weeks of being there, was to miss California, and everything about it, so much. One of the craters in my soul Colorado couldn’t fill is all my favorite grocery stores with their better-than-most-states produce and can’t-get-it-anywhere-else products. I yearned for Trader Joes, a grocery God amongst West-Coast chains, the most. Where else can you get a bottle of wine for two dollars that doesn’t give you a head ache in the morning? Bless you, two-buck Chuck. Bless you. And bless you, Trader Joe’s, for your four-pack of avocados that always perfectly ripen at different times and for the 4-5 pack of Roma tomatoes you offer which never have mold on them. You really know how to melt a girl’s heart.
It should also be mentioned, Trader Joe’s, that I was not only jonzing for your Tahini sauce (so I could make my own home-made hummus with the best secret ingredient), but I was also feeling pretty lost without your quick packs of snap peas, green beans, and shredded carrots. While I am here, talking produce, can anyone tell me why only 1 out of every 4 grocery stores in Colorado seemed to carry shredded carrots? I never thought of shredded carrots as a luxury item. Well, not until I couldn’t find them and had to chop my own carrots for my salad. (Spoiled, little California girl.)
Convenience. That’s California. I don’t even drink coffee regularly, and haven’t for over 13 years, but if the craving for a cup of coffee hits while your anywhere in So Cal, if you are somewhere near a major intersection, you can pretty much bet there’s a Starbuck’s within three or four city blocks to the left or to the right of where you are standing.
Want to get some of the best Mexican food you can get outside of Mexico? Great. There are enough major-franchise Mexican restaurants around that you’ll not be left wanting. If it’s as close to the real deal you’re looking for, look no further than the incomparable neighborhood hole-in-the-wall joints which better than please the palette when it comes to authentic Mexican food.
Oh, you say you have got a love for Pizza? Me too! I don’t want to piss Colorado off, but Colorado’s altitude just can get it up when it comes to fluffy, flaky pizza crust. Not like California can, anyway.
If it’s not obvious, my love for Southern California goes way beyond the fresh produce and the plethora of great restaurants. I like knowing that when I meet up with a friend for lunch or dinner the opportunity to choose a place that looks out onto the ocean is available to me. I can admit it now. So get your lighters out. Let the lights shine proud. Join me in a circle, and I’ll confess. I’m a California-aholic. I really do love me my California. I’m addicted.
I like that I have made memories throughout my life with my friends and family in every major and not so major city all the way from Eureka right on down to San Diego. I’m proud of the fact that Southern California has been my playground my entire life. It’s okay if the sun shines on Christmas morning. I’ll keep the fireworks on the Forth of July that crack open the sky over the ocean at the beach. I don’t care if most the leaves don’t turn brilliant shades of pink or intense shades of yellow ochre in the fall. Sure, every one here actually thinks Palm trees are indigenous, but I’m fine with that, too.
The fact is, I’m never going to get tired of hitting up all the specialty spots along the coast and finding new ones in all the nooks and crannies of So Cal’s backyard. I want to keep making new memories with all the friends I’ve made over the years who have sprinkled themselves throughout this great state.
Already, since returning, I shared an amazing dinner with Shian at Poseidon on the Beach in Del Mar. Man, the ocean never looked so beautiful as it did when the sun set just as I had my second glass of chardonnay and took a bite of my Seared Ahi Tuna with a cajun rub. Just before that, watching the sun begin to hit the horizon as we shared the Grilled Garden Flat Bread, which had Kalamata olives, goat cheese, tomatoes, balsamic onions, grilled artichokes, and sweet peppers, that wasn’t hard to endure either.
Spending the day on Dana Strand beach under a big shade umbrella with one of my best friends, Tiffany, and listening to the waves crash against the shore as we dished the catch-up on our lives, that was good. Then, meeting up with Tif’s sister, Lana, later, who joined us for dinner at the Beach Fire Bar & Grill in San Clamente was yet another memory I’ve already made in my California. Lana may have met her next boy friend that night (I still have to check back in with her to see how that’s going). Another confession? I am okay with the fact that I didn’t have to pay for any of my drinks that night. Ah, California. We’re just so in love.
I really have been busy since I’ve been back. The weekend after I spent with Tiffany, I went back to visit Shian. We’d met a new friend at the birthday party we’d attended the night after the Poseidon dinner and, can I just say, “Go fun parties held in the back yard of a 10 million dollar house.” I now know what an infinity pool is. Well, I could have lived a good life without knowing that, and money doesn’t buy happiness, but it sure does buy a good view and that party did get us another wonderful meal.
I met the cutest, sexiest, fittest, flirtiest, man who wanted to make dinner for Shian, her boyfriend and me. After leaving a conversation with a Catherine Keener look alike (who was definitely on the quirkier side of the granola and more out there than Catherine’s role as Maxine Lund in Being John Malcovish), and as I approached Shian, who was chatting up our soon-to-be dinner host, a work-out God who Shian had met a couple weeks prior, said to me, as I approached, “Wow! You’re stunning.”
Oh, gosh, thanks for the compliment, Mr. Fine and sexy specimen of age, humor, muscles, smile and wit. No, I didn’t say that out loud to him. Instead, I simply beamed and my reciprocal smile spread from puff-me-up, you hunk, ear to ear. Then I said, “Thank you,” which prompted him to continue with, “My God, you have the best energy.”
Now, I ask you, who wouldn’t want this guy to make them dinner? Alright, I’ll come clean. Even though he told everyone at the party that he and I were running off to Vegas to get married, and that I was his soul mate, and told me that I was one of the sexiest women he’d met in a while, he was off the market. No, he wasn’t married. Not even a girlfriend. He is playing, rather vigorously, for the other team. The wife and daughter he had in closet days were a distant memory.
Still, Mr. Sexy not only boosted my ego, he made me forget about my 3-inch brown roots. (Man, do I ever need to get my hair done. Being jobless can be a mutha…). Also, Mr. Sexy prepared us all, Shian, her boyfriend, the birthday boy, and me, a mean vegetarian meal of rice spaghetti topped with a marinara sauce loaded with myriad of fresh spices and a chopped-thin serving of kale. (Kale? Who’d a thunk?). We also got a hot loaf of sourdough to go with our pasta and our kick-ass fresh salad from an organic garden, which, amongst other mouth-watering delights, included watermelon radishes, a variety of greens, and some lovely, sweet, juicy, and amazing golden-orange cherry tomatoes. Yeah, those suckers bursted in my mouth. I was going to secretly raid the kitchen, to pop the leftovers tomatoes in my mouth, but, thankfully, our host noticed my immediate addiction and brought a bowl out to me.
Our host also wanted to hold my hand during a portion of dinner, even though he’d slept with his best friend the night before. My conclusion? I’m still hot. He’s a sexual being. Eh…
Oh… Did I forget to mention that our host has an one-bedroom apartment on the estate of really rich dude’s property? Okay, that was lame, that description of an estate that takes 14 staffers to keep up, but that was my way of playing down the fact that we got a tour of our host’s boss’s back yard (not the house), and I’ll just say: tennis courts, his and her locker rooms, an outside bar equipped with villa-like tables with an automatic canopy shade system, and yet another infinity pool where the water fell off the edges of the concrete with no discernable beginning or end. (I guess the rich don’t see the horizon as a limitation. Sign me up.)
Am I bragging about someone else’s money? F’ no. They did the work. I just enjoyed their spoils. However, do I love that you never know what California can bring, with its wonderful residents, everyone from the homeless who enjoy the temperate weather to the richer-than-crap doing the same? Can I get a: HELL YES!
I’ll take it all, California. I’ll take your kooks who talk about inventing energy hats which are supposed keep the bad vibes out. (Go Catherine Keener look alikes.) I like their creativity. Give me the aggressive drivers who think they own every road. At least they are getting out of my way just as quick as they got in it. Challenge me with some of the overly-abundant fake breasts, plastic-surgery faces, and misguided image mongrels. It’s amusing to see people take such irrational pride in their appearance. Most of all, please, oh please, continue to honor me with your spiritually evolved, those who understand that mind, body, and spirit is not just a conversation; it’s a way of life.
Yes, California, thanks for keeping most of my friends here. Thanks for giving them the year-round green to grow their hearts. Bless your beautiful beaches which power their souls. I kiss your blue skies that inspire our imaginations. And, I thank you for your temperate weather to help all of us keep our balance.
I love you, my California!
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Know thyself
My fortune cookie from tonight’s dinner said, “A bold and dashing adventure is in your future within the year.” Gee. Ya think? I’d say the adventure is already afoot. Unfortunately, my cookie’s fortune, a nice little confirmation of the leap I’ve taken, was the best part of the date I just went on.
My date, doing what people do when you are trying to be witty and fun at a Chinese restaurant, said, “You have to add ‘In bed’ after the fortune.”
Little did he know that whatever future adventures I’m going to have in the next year, or in bed, would not involve him. Look. I’ve got no plans for any adventures “in bed” until I have health insurance. (I’m still questioning why I changed the last of my eHarmony subscription/profile to Lakewood, Co when I had little interest in going out with anyone while I was still in Long Beach.)
Yeah… Can you tell health insurance is my big fear demon right now? Seriously, I can’t even think about being “in bed” with anyone until I know I have a regular prescription for birth control coming again. Leave it to me to be adventurous on practical terms. (Friggen wuss.)
Actually, I’m being a bit harsh about the date. The date recap goes like this: Interesting conversation, mostly. Smart, smart guy. COMPLETE gentleman. (Seriously, a total gentleman. He even stood up when I got up to go to the bathroom. Love that!) We had a lot in common, as far as being health conscious and mostly vegetarian. He was tall, Greek, and handsome. He had great lips. Kissable lips, even. And, I could have been physically attracted to him, and wanted to be, and kind of was, but, then again, wasn’t. Mostly, I wasn’t interested because I hardly laughed (which is a major deal breaker for me).
I have to laugh. I must laugh. It’s what I do. If I am not laughing with someone, laughing at life (good or bad) with them, I can’t see myself doing “it” with them. Every man I’ve ever fallen for had me snorting from the start. It’s just how it is. It’s just how it needs to be.
It’s not me. It’s not them. No one is funnier. The funny is just part of what works when it is going to work.
Also, there was that thing he did, where he blew on the straw in his water glass, smelled it (I think), and seemed to need to become one with the straw before he took each sip of his water from that straw. That freaked me out a little.
I’m sure it was an unconscious quirk, and probably not a big deal, and just part of the intensity his overall personality seemed to exhibit. But, to me, the straw thing appeared to be the tip of the personality iceberg. His toe tapping, his calculated conversation, his seemingly obsessive need to be the perfect gentleman—the well executed conversationalist—and the at-the-ready display of knowledge, came off to me as a discomfort in self that goes beyond straw smelling. There was a perfectionist brewing there. And this baby girl, while a comfort and routine craver, ain’t no perfectionist.
Sure. Who am I to judge? I not only have my quirks, I’m basically jobless and so far from my norm, of being set in my ways, that I might just give myself a heart attack. I’m also questioning how durable I am. I had to drive in the rain to get to my date tonight. I wanted to cancel. I don’t like weather.
Yet, I’ve moved to Colorado. Talk about forcing yourself into getting it done, that dream of finishing the book. Tell me that isn’t quirky, and a bit insane, and not exactly attractive, that I am afraid of driving on any road that isn’t dry and offering me sunshine ahead.
Oh, yes. Give me time, maybe even another day; I’m probably going to have some major freak outs about how much I’ve messed with the balance of my life. But, while I am searching for a sense of home, locationally and vocationally, and while I’ve felt homeless in my heart because I have not been pursuing my passions, I’m okay with my mess. (I wish it was fixed yesterday, but, while I am fighting against it, I am not fighting to find me.)
I like who I am. I know who I am. I accept my messy because I accept and know myself enough to know what I want my life to look like on the other side of this adventure.
This guy? You can forget that most of us can’t control how we get somewhere, for the most part. But not even having the slightest idea of where you want to end up, or where you want to go, or who you are while you are getting there, or who you’ve been to end up where you are now, while that’s a normal human experience, and an acceptable plot in life, it’s not an energy I want to combine with my adventure. A man in that state, wondering if he should be a photographer, a psychologist, or a sommelier, is just not “grappling with” material.
Also, in my world, if spending time with a person makes you feel like you are boring, holding back, not even wanting to be yourself, and what few laughs you get feel forced, that means that you and that person are about as suited as a kiwi in a grilled cheese sandwich.
Nuf’ said.
It’s time to sleep and to figure out if I am going to go on the next two dates with the two other fellows that are supposed to call me next week to set a time/place. (Do I really have time to be dating while I’m in the middle of my beautifully orchestrated and chaotic mess?)
Anyway, if I blog nothing more about internet dating… I didn’t go on either date or neither date was interesting enough to report on and I’m over it.
See? At least that part is settled. I know myself. I’ve chosen my messy. But, I still believe that the right people come into your life at the right time. If this is my time for love, it will be. If it is not, it won’t be.
So, thanks, age. It’s nice to wear you as a badge of honor. It’s beautiful that you’ve given me enough of a sense of me that, even with the upended adventure I’ve chosen, I’m good at knowing me and knowing what I want.
That, in and of itself, is fabulous. It is nice to know me.
My date, doing what people do when you are trying to be witty and fun at a Chinese restaurant, said, “You have to add ‘In bed’ after the fortune.”
Little did he know that whatever future adventures I’m going to have in the next year, or in bed, would not involve him. Look. I’ve got no plans for any adventures “in bed” until I have health insurance. (I’m still questioning why I changed the last of my eHarmony subscription/profile to Lakewood, Co when I had little interest in going out with anyone while I was still in Long Beach.)
Yeah… Can you tell health insurance is my big fear demon right now? Seriously, I can’t even think about being “in bed” with anyone until I know I have a regular prescription for birth control coming again. Leave it to me to be adventurous on practical terms. (Friggen wuss.)
Actually, I’m being a bit harsh about the date. The date recap goes like this: Interesting conversation, mostly. Smart, smart guy. COMPLETE gentleman. (Seriously, a total gentleman. He even stood up when I got up to go to the bathroom. Love that!) We had a lot in common, as far as being health conscious and mostly vegetarian. He was tall, Greek, and handsome. He had great lips. Kissable lips, even. And, I could have been physically attracted to him, and wanted to be, and kind of was, but, then again, wasn’t. Mostly, I wasn’t interested because I hardly laughed (which is a major deal breaker for me).
I have to laugh. I must laugh. It’s what I do. If I am not laughing with someone, laughing at life (good or bad) with them, I can’t see myself doing “it” with them. Every man I’ve ever fallen for had me snorting from the start. It’s just how it is. It’s just how it needs to be.
It’s not me. It’s not them. No one is funnier. The funny is just part of what works when it is going to work.
Also, there was that thing he did, where he blew on the straw in his water glass, smelled it (I think), and seemed to need to become one with the straw before he took each sip of his water from that straw. That freaked me out a little.
I’m sure it was an unconscious quirk, and probably not a big deal, and just part of the intensity his overall personality seemed to exhibit. But, to me, the straw thing appeared to be the tip of the personality iceberg. His toe tapping, his calculated conversation, his seemingly obsessive need to be the perfect gentleman—the well executed conversationalist—and the at-the-ready display of knowledge, came off to me as a discomfort in self that goes beyond straw smelling. There was a perfectionist brewing there. And this baby girl, while a comfort and routine craver, ain’t no perfectionist.
Sure. Who am I to judge? I not only have my quirks, I’m basically jobless and so far from my norm, of being set in my ways, that I might just give myself a heart attack. I’m also questioning how durable I am. I had to drive in the rain to get to my date tonight. I wanted to cancel. I don’t like weather.
Yet, I’ve moved to Colorado. Talk about forcing yourself into getting it done, that dream of finishing the book. Tell me that isn’t quirky, and a bit insane, and not exactly attractive, that I am afraid of driving on any road that isn’t dry and offering me sunshine ahead.
Oh, yes. Give me time, maybe even another day; I’m probably going to have some major freak outs about how much I’ve messed with the balance of my life. But, while I am searching for a sense of home, locationally and vocationally, and while I’ve felt homeless in my heart because I have not been pursuing my passions, I’m okay with my mess. (I wish it was fixed yesterday, but, while I am fighting against it, I am not fighting to find me.)
I like who I am. I know who I am. I accept my messy because I accept and know myself enough to know what I want my life to look like on the other side of this adventure.
This guy? You can forget that most of us can’t control how we get somewhere, for the most part. But not even having the slightest idea of where you want to end up, or where you want to go, or who you are while you are getting there, or who you’ve been to end up where you are now, while that’s a normal human experience, and an acceptable plot in life, it’s not an energy I want to combine with my adventure. A man in that state, wondering if he should be a photographer, a psychologist, or a sommelier, is just not “grappling with” material.
Also, in my world, if spending time with a person makes you feel like you are boring, holding back, not even wanting to be yourself, and what few laughs you get feel forced, that means that you and that person are about as suited as a kiwi in a grilled cheese sandwich.
Nuf’ said.
It’s time to sleep and to figure out if I am going to go on the next two dates with the two other fellows that are supposed to call me next week to set a time/place. (Do I really have time to be dating while I’m in the middle of my beautifully orchestrated and chaotic mess?)
Anyway, if I blog nothing more about internet dating… I didn’t go on either date or neither date was interesting enough to report on and I’m over it.
See? At least that part is settled. I know myself. I’ve chosen my messy. But, I still believe that the right people come into your life at the right time. If this is my time for love, it will be. If it is not, it won’t be.
So, thanks, age. It’s nice to wear you as a badge of honor. It’s beautiful that you’ve given me enough of a sense of me that, even with the upended adventure I’ve chosen, I’m good at knowing me and knowing what I want.
That, in and of itself, is fabulous. It is nice to know me.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Crazy Making Day
Jen left for a couple hours. I've been alone with the girls. I can't get any writing done when I am alone with them. I'm freaking out about health insurance. I'm just having crazy making day.
You can F' off, health insurance!
You can F' off, health insurance!
Monday, May 9, 2011
The Long Haul
Family? Friends? Are you there? Check, check, 1 2 3. First, let me start by saying that I could feel your love and support every mile of my journey to Colorado. (I can still feel the love.) Thank you all for remaining in constant contact with Jen and Lyn as I gave them updates on my “road” whereabouts. I also want to thank each and every one of you for being such a great part of my life. Without you I would not have had the strength to take the kind of chance in life that I am taking right now. I honestly don’t know where I’d be without my friendships. (Yeah. Yeah. We’re not at the academy awards here. I know. Enough, already.)
What I didn’t tell you all, and would not have told you, because I didn’t want you to worry, is that, while I put about $800.00 into my Nissan Xterra to get it road ready, even after the full tune up, a new timing belt, a new water pump, and a new radiator, I still wasn’t sure my truck could make the trip.
Turns out, I was wrong, but right. My truck made it all right, but it smelled like truck-working-too-hard-ass most of the time. Plus, because my truck smelled like ass and I was trying to baby it, every mile, I got to be an asshole for most of the drive.
You know what I am talking about, don’t you? You know what it is like when you are on a long drive, and you are so feeling your speed, so in your driving groove, and then, Oh, look. What’s with the asshole going 35 mph, blinking up the road with hazard lights, who is slowing my shit down?
Do you know how much that physically hurt, that every time my little truck tried to climb a steep mountain road I couldn’t even drive 55? There were times my speed got down to 15 mph. It was not only frustrating, it was freaking me out. Each time I was praying that Sammy Hagar wasn’t coming up behind me, going 125 mph, and wouldn’t plow me over.
So if you were traveling on either the I-15 N or the I-70 E last Monday or Tuesday, sorry. That was me you passed and it was me who was jealous as hell of you that you flew by me like lightening when I felt like a turtle in need of an enema. That was also me conducting my mountain-range-preserve-the-truck-towing-a-trailer routine: Roll up the windows. Turn off the radio. Listen to the strain on the engine. Change into the lower gears accordingly. Take a breath. Take another one. Um…now you need to let both of those breaths out. Steady. Steady. You are almost done being the “Slower Traffic Keep Right,” sign.
Actually, I was that “Slower Traffic Keep Right” sign the whole way to Colorado. I was the slowest traffic of them all. There were only three times I passed someone on this haul and each of those passes were made on a decline. One of the passes I made was strategic.
These two guys in a red Datsun truck, who were towing a green Jeep Cherokee behind them, were going a bit slower than me when I first came upon them (which is sad, considering we were both only going about 15-20 mph), so I decided that I’d rather have them in back of me than in front of me, that way they could buffer any Sammy Hagars coming through and they’d get it up their end instead of me.
It wasn’t long before I started to wonder how smart it was, being in front of these guys. It wasn’t just how much they were swaying all over the road. Every time we, our new little group of uphill deficients, hit a decline these jack holes were so far up my ass I could have spit them out through my mouth. I would have had to have gone faster than 55 mph in order to shake them. But, I was too chicken to go faster, which is, obviously, why the drive took responsible me two days. (Going 30-45 mph through most of the mountain range stretches wasn’t doing much for my timing either.)
So there I was, day one and day two, hauling myself to Colorado wearing a pitted out gray t-shirt, a baggy pair of faded jeans, and my favorite black flip flops, and trying to find good radio on the way. And, now that I have officially flipped through several of Utah’s radio stations, I have a question for Utah.
Really? Is this how it’s done? Did I hear your radio commercials correctly, Utah? Did you really ask: “Got a silencer for that kill?” Did another commercial say, “Get out doors this weekend; You know you want to hunt and kill something?” Also, did I understand it correctly, that when yet another commercial, with a voice that was intended to sound like inner thoughts, said, “I will get out doors this weekend. I will use my bow and arrow,” it was meant to be inspirational? Yes? Am I right?
Can I just tell you something, Utah? Your radio commercials freaked this native southern Californian out. I can’t think of any commercial (radio or TV) I’ve ever heard in my entire life which started with a question like: “Got a silencer for that kill?”
I don’t know. Maybe I heard it all wrong. I’m now convinced that sitting/driving too long cuts off the blood to the brain, so I could have just made that part up. Except, I’m pretty sure I didn’t. These commercial quotes, while written in napkin short hand, are in my road notes. Each with question marks after them.
Was it just culture shock I was experiencing? Does it really bother me to hear a commercial about how to hunt things down without making any noise? After all, I can totally appreciate how much a loud gun shot could mess with your ear drums, so killing quietly makes complete sense. But, killing anything isn’t something I think I can ever get used to.
I come from a land where people use re-useable grocery bags and don’t want to talk about how their chicken breast got onto their dinner plate. Non-vegan Californians are sheltered creatures that way. One might even say they’d rather let the Utah hunters do the dirty work and would prefer not to hear, on a radio commercial or otherwise, how it all went down.
But, now I am wondering. Is Utah just more honest than California? Does California prefer to pretend that the meat they eat comes from meat fairies? Maybe it’s better to put it out there. The reason you are eating your meat is because someone killed it for you. We all know I’m not a vegetarian, but, instead, a cut-back-atarian (or, as Jen says, a me-atarian, doing what I want). So, being relatively conflicted I’ll have to give up on this thought on move on.
On a more positive note, Utah’s St. George is beautiful. That’s were I thought I could take a road nap to refresh. Jen never said anything to me when I told her that I was going to try to pull that one off. But, after I arrived at her house, we both laughed at how ridiculous of a notion that was. How the hell is the girl, who needs white noise makers, four pillows, her own bed, a sleep mask, and (on many nights) some kind of a sleep aid to even fall asleep, supposed to get a nap in her car during the middle of the day at a truck stop?
But, I tried. Who cares if I was trying to nap during one of the most stressful road trips of my life? I gave that damn nap a go. I parked along side of a big truck already putting off some decent shade. I climbed into my passenger’s seat, reclined the seat, put my favorite baseball cap over my eyes, and I told myself: Okay. Fall asleep. Get refreshed. Let’s go.
Not one spec of me listened. I actually became a little panicked. My mind started whirling: I can’t fucking sleep here. What am I thinking? I don’t even want to sleep. I just want to get there. But I need to refresh. I’m tired. I’m really, friggen tired. This is BULLSHIT! I’ll find a hotel a little ways more down the road. FUCK! Now I have to back this damn trailer up. Son of a…
It was amazing. Once I got back on the road I felt invigorated. But I am sure I was running on pure adrenaline. Let’s get real. Who puts 90% of their life, all their possessions, into storage, and loads up U-haul with their bed and the remaining 10%, does it in one day, and then thinks she can make a 17 hour drive as a straight shot the very next day? Insane people think that way. Or, people who have forgotten that they are no longer in their 20s, which is when such feats are even remotely possible.
That was my pattern the entire first day traveling to Colorado. Every time I got off the road I felt clobbered. Every time I got back onto the road I felt alive. The most alive I felt was just outside of Grand Junction when Katy Perry’s song “Firework” came onto the radio. I’d never really listened to the words before, but when you’ve got a lot of gray asphalt stretching out in front of you, and you are all alone, there isn’t much else to do but what one does on the road: Drive. Think. Listen.
Then, I cried on the road. I felt the song become a personal anthem. I have been feeling paper thin and wanting to start again. The stress from that job and the life I’ve existed in was making me feel like the house of emotional cards I was stacking could fall at any moment. I have wanted another chance and I have never forgotten how much fire I have inside.
I do want to show what I am worth and believe in what the future holds. There has to be a reason I felt like all the doors in my life were closing. Hopefully I will be opening up one that leads me to the perfect road. (Thanks, Katy Perry, for your song lyrics—which I just switched up—and for your song at the perfect time.)
And thank you, all of Divinity, for Utah’s exit 62 off the I-15 N. Had I not stopped at this Shell station, had I not gone inside to ask the gal working behind the counter, “Where, up the road, is my best bet to stop for the night?” I might have ended up as one of those unfortunate stories, the ones you see in movies, where someone is out of energy, out of civilization, out of gas, out of whatever, and I may just have found myself sleeping (trying to sleep) in my car out in the middle of nowhere whether I liked it or not.
Without hesitation, this cute counter gal, a young, pretty brunette (who looked to be about 17, but turned out to have kids and an ex-husband in Colorado, so I am now putting her to be at least early 20s) told me, “There is lodging just after you make the change from the I-15 N to the I-70 E. Since it was pretty early in the afternoon, I asked, “Is there anything fun to do there?” If I was going take a load off in Richfield I wanted a little min—adventure on my big aventure. “Are you kidding me? This is Utah,” she said.
Partial Stop…
Here is a little advice for anyone traveling alone to Colorado from California on the I-70 E from the I-15 N. After Richfield, you’ve got about four hours of touch-and-go civilization and if you don’t do as I do on all road trips, and get gas everywhere you can, even if you’re just topping off, you might create your own bad story. So, stay in Richfield if you don’t have two drivers. Love up the nothing-is-there-ness of it. Eat, sleep, and top off that gas. It’s just better to be safe than sorry.
Back at it…
A couple of miles before the Richfield exit sign Jen called me. She confirmed Richfield was the place I should stay. Once I got my hotel key from the young blond clerk, McCall, and she said, “Your room is just down the hall. You can park your truck and U-haul along the curb just outside of your room,” my body confirmed Richmond was the place I needed to stay. All of my adrenaline drained out of me. I was so road weary I couldn’t even finish my sentences with clarity. Frankly, I felt as if I was drunk.
I didn’t even care that, because this Comfort Inn did not have room service, I’d have to get something to eat at the Wendy’s fast food restaurant next door. Give me the damn chicken sandwich and the French fries, please. But, spare me the soda and handover the bottled water. I’m dehydrated from stress. My nails are breaking. And, by tomorrow, my lips are going to look like a dry lake bed, all cracked and scaly.
I had no idea how famished I’d become. While sitting on my hotel bed, with my more-than-likely Utah-killed-chicken sandwich being crammed into my mouth, I watched more of the news on the Osama bin Laden kill. Between the news and how fast I was eating, it’s not surprising that I got a belly ache. That’s when it occurred to me that I’d never forget what was going on in my life and where I was when I heard the news about Osama.
The first announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed came the night before I was to start my haul for Colorado. It was about 7:00 pm and I was at my sister’s house sitting on the couch with my 7 year old nephew. After seeing the look on his face from what he was hearing on the television, I asked him if he understood what was going on and if he had any questions that I could answer.
He wanted to know if we were safe. I assured him that he and all of his friends and family were safe. Then I did my best to explain that a very bad man who had hurt a lot of people has just been killed and that while someone’s death should not be good news since so many people were afraid of him doing more bad things we can all feel a little safer now.
Personally, I can’t say that I feel completely safe. I admit that I am afraid of the retaliatory acts that may be coming from Osama’s followers. I do, however, feel wonderful about how much closure this brings to so many people that were affected by 911, including myself and Jen. Jen’s father, who used to be a United Pilot, was working that September 11th day in 2001. He could just as easily have been piloting one of those hi-jacked planes and could have been among the cherished that perished that day.
The next news I’d get about Osama’s death would be in room 124 of the Comfort Inn in Richfield, Utah. A Utah reporter said, “I’m glad they killed him. I don’t care what anyone says.” Yes. Utah tells you like it is. So thank you, Utah. Thank you for your magnificently beautiful red rocks. Thank you for a place to stay so I could get a fresh start in the morning and be way more invigorated the whole second day of my road haul to Colorado. Thank you for being so real. And, thank you for being a part of the journey I am on in life.
Now, having this road haul behind me, I have made a few observations…
Observation #1: Never expect to get fresh fruit from a gas station or convenience stop. Observation # 2: Those are not hay-fever (seasonal) boogars in your nose. Those are road boogers. You can’t drive over 1,000 miles with the windows open and expect to keep a clean nose. It ain’t gonna happen.
Okay, I can’t continue to name my other observations and road experience collections, so I am just going to put a couple more of them out there…
* It was awesome talking to a couple of bikers just out of Vegas. It was even better to learn that one of them was a blogger, like me. (That’s just bitchen.) Paul? Are you out there? Did I get your name right? (Shit. That was one of the stops where the convenience clerk told me that I looked like I needed sleep. This she tells me without even knowing what I’d packed up the day before or how I got a 3:30 am start.)
* I need to watch that Oprah episode again where Oprah and Gayle hauled a trailer. What I especially want to know is: Did Oprah and Gayle have 50 people, a crew, around them who could help at any time? Just curious, because they didn’t seem that stressed pulling an even bigger trailer than what I just pulled.
*I now want it noted that I never want to have to need to use my hazard lights again.
*I am also amazed at how much I wanted to file my broken nails during the whole drive. I just wanted to have a moment to breathe and to file. That’s all. Incidentally, between packing up the last of my stuff, moving it all into storage, packing up a U-Haul, and driving to a dryer climate, I only have one nail left to break. (So, there’s that.) The worst part of it? I don’t think of myself as persnickety. But, apparently I am. I don’t like jagged nails. Short nails are fine. Jagged nails on the road: not so much.
*Maybe Chad and Heather’s friend—what the f’ did I name him, Ike? Is that right?—was right about me. I’ve been set in my ways for way too long. Well, then, Ike. How do you like me now?
*I’m glad that Jen didn’t tell me ahead of time that there would be road construction between Georgetown and Idaho Springs and that I could expect at least a 20 minute delay where I would be at a dead standstill on a 6% decline for, exactly that, 20 minutes. Question: Why is it that your bladder is fine and you don’t have to go pee when your car is moving, but, the second your car stops it’s code yellow?
Observations over. Changing gears now. And, as you may have already figured it out, I am doing one of my blong posts.
I was going to separate “The Long Haul” post and what’s coming next (which I have not officially titled), but, I’m think’n: No. Emotionally, this next part feels like an equally long haul, so let’s just call this “Part II” and name it the “The Emotional Haul.”
Part II-The Emotional Haul
Since I have gotten here, to Lakewood Colorado, to Jen’s house, Jen has been worried about killing/spraying the dandelions in her front yard. (She’s now Utah and want’s those dandelions gone.) That said, I realize that so much of what I write from now on in this blog is going to be influenced by Jen and by her two little girls, Summer and Sparrow.
So here goes the gear shift…
Life takes your breath away, doesn’t it? Every bit of it. There are those seemingly small moments, like when you were a kid and you blew on the delicate, white cloud of a dried out dandelion, on what used to be the bloom of a wild yellow flower, brighter than your innocent, young, sunlight smile, and you hoped on hope for a wish to come true, but you didn’t follow through. The wish was done. You were a kid. When that spray of a thousand fairy white flowers went to the wind, you let go.
You didn’t question divinity. There was no asking for signs above. Did I wish it right? Do I have the might?
You weren’t even thinking about the fact that your one little blow of a wish on a puffy cloud at the end of a green stem, nature’s perfect representation of the cycle of life, started something. Sure, those fairy white flowers would have found a gust of wind soon enough to come along and help them spread their seeds. (In the scheme of things, a bigger picture is always in play.) But all you knew, in your youth’s mind, was that your wish, a sweet, solitary whisper into the wind, was just your prayer.
Then, as you got older and you took worry onto your back, and you started to weigh the sum of things, you didn’t wish any more. Instead, you started to fret. You stopped trusting and you began questioning. Is this, my Now, the crux of me? Why don’t life’s moments seem small anymore? Am I the one making everything seem so large, sometimes insurmountable?
Sigh… Youth has taken a back seat and life has gotten heavy. Gone, baby, gone are the days of dandelion wishes and mom’s kisses on boo boos. It’s on you now; all of it. You’re older.
I know. It’s a lot. Trust me. I get it. Sometimes it’s hard to breath. Welcome to life.
In my case, I guess I should be saying: Welcome to changing your life. No. That doesn’t seem like enough to say. How about: Welcome to turning your life upside down so you can see what shakes out of the pockets you’ve been to afraid to look into.
Change is still change, though, isn’t it? Whether the change is big or small, and whether you are five or fifty years old, when a metamorphous becomes necessary, I don’t think we are any different than a dandelion or a weed. We have the same needs. Like a weed, we will push through a crack in sidewalk to find a way to live and to find the best way to Be. We will kick ass to persevere.
Who are we kidding? This blog post, from the beginning, has so been about the physically long haul I just took moving from California to Colorado, but, equally, and just as, if not more, importantly, about the emotional haul I have ahead of me to get to where I am going.
I know I am going to find myself in some emotionally uncomfortable moments where I feel like I’m getting swallowed up by the journey my soul has yearned to take in order for me to follow my dreams, but I am okay with that. I’ve been asking all along: Are life’s challenges not here to teach us, to remind us, that nothing is bigger than our connection, bigger than us?
And, one rarely gets to where they want to be without effort. I have always known that I wasn’t going to find that place in life, where I am living from my passion instead of my fear, until I faced and conquered some of my biggest fears.
If only pulling a 5’ x 8’ U-Haul Cargo trailer behind my silver, 6 cylinder Nissan Xterra, as I went up and down several winding roads, was what scared me the most about changing my life. Yes. For me, pulling a trailer was really fucking stressful, but easy-peasy compared to what I know I have ahead of me emotionally.
I know me. I am already challenging myself in ways I never have so I will be facing things I’ve never faced. My demons will come out and my hope is that I will slay them.
More importantly: Will I ever pull a trailer again? Yeah…not unless the truck I’m driving has a powerful engine and I’ve got someone with me who will do all the backing up. You should know, I’m still marveling at the fact that I was able to drive over a thousand miles, from California to Colorado, and, by my design, I only had to back up two times.
What now scares me more than hauling a trailer is how much faith and trust I have found to step into my wish. While I am a very spiritual person, and always see the connectivity in things, there is just as much of my nature that fights against me and that doesn’t always know how to believe or to accept that things will all work out.
And, for an independent girl who has always done it on her own, it’s a big deal to put myself in the position of counting on someone’s generosity. It’s a gift that Jen has let me move in rent free so I can just get a part time job, which will be enough to cover my personal basic bills, and will have the time to finish my book. But, now, barely a week into this shift, it’s a gift I still don’t know how to completely accept.
Not being the one to always do it all for me and instead rely on others, really, that is one of my biggest fears. This is something I need to face. I need to fight off every last residue of resistance and embrace what Jen has done for me by believing in my dream even more than I do.
Plus, I’ve read Stephen R. Covey's book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” and I know that in order to be interdependent, in order to achieve that which cannot be achieved alone, I must learn to work within the paradigm of cooperation. I can get my book done on my own. But, something I have not been able to do on my own is believe in myself enough to do what it takes.
This move to Colorado, this allowing of interdependence in my life, this is forcing me into doing what it takes and into believing that I have what it takes. Soon enough I will have my editor, my fact checker, and my found-that-jacked and wayward grammar checker.
Until then, I can no longer escape the reality that every human being is an interdependent creature. I have to accept what I’ve known all along. People need each other. At this time in my life, and because of where my life has been going, I can now admit without reservation that I needed not to be alone anymore. I have needed my friends to believe in me more than I have believed in myself.
I can also admit that this is the scariest thing I have ever done, and I don’t mean the moving part. A city, is a city, is a city. You can change your city any time you want. I’ve done it many times. Not lately. Not in 13 years. But I did move plenty when I was younger.
No… what terrifies me more is following my dream of being a writer, especially of being the kind of writer I am and want to be. Everything I write has me on the page. And here I am again, exposing myself, asking myself if I have the talent, or if I just have the guts and I am also a little bit nuts.
But the reality I’ve come to is that I’d rather fail at trying then fail to try. I’d rather fall on my ass in front of everyone than face myself alone at night knowing I have never given myself a chance.
I think I’ve known all along that if I didn’t attempt this leap of faith, if I didn’t put myself into the position of having nowhere to turn but to my writing, to my dream, I would have kept my dream as a place to escape rather than as a place to live.
I want to live my dreams not dream about another way to live.
But, again, being this daring, this brave, or this fucking stupid, has a price. I will have my moments. I’ve already had several of them including the first night I got to Jen’s house.
I arrived to an empty house. Jen was picking up the girls at their day care. I knew I was drained, but I’d made it. That’s when, even with wobbly legs and a new altitude high, I couldn’t wait until 6:30 pm, for Jen’s boyfriend Dirk to get off work and for him to help me unload my U-Haul.
It was 4:ll pm and I wanted it done. So, with the exception of unloading my bed, which Dirk did do for me around 7:00 pm, I got all of my shit out of my truck and trailer in slightly less than an hour. I was already feeling that thing I feel where I need things just so. (In other words, I needed to set down my ways.)
Once Jen got home, and Dirk got off of work and set my bed up for me, that’s when it hit, what I’d just done. I had just up-ended my life. I felt like I was going to have a panic attack.
Attack averted. It was time for Summer and Sparrow to go to bed. The story was read. The girls were tucked in. The good-night kisses were exchanged. I was about to combust, but, instead, a 5 year old girl, Summer, broke through the frantic fear that almost over took me.
As I lay next to her on her pink patch-work quilt, and just after I told her “Goodnight, my love,” she brought her petite little hand up to my right cheek, cupped it, and said, “Aunt Lev? I love you staying here.”
So now I ask you: No matter how afraid we are, doesn’t divinity always give us what we need in each moment? That little girl saw through to me and knew what to say. So why shouldn’t we trust a little more and worry a little less?
I’ll try to be fabulous at it if you will…
Ready?
What I didn’t tell you all, and would not have told you, because I didn’t want you to worry, is that, while I put about $800.00 into my Nissan Xterra to get it road ready, even after the full tune up, a new timing belt, a new water pump, and a new radiator, I still wasn’t sure my truck could make the trip.
Turns out, I was wrong, but right. My truck made it all right, but it smelled like truck-working-too-hard-ass most of the time. Plus, because my truck smelled like ass and I was trying to baby it, every mile, I got to be an asshole for most of the drive.
You know what I am talking about, don’t you? You know what it is like when you are on a long drive, and you are so feeling your speed, so in your driving groove, and then, Oh, look. What’s with the asshole going 35 mph, blinking up the road with hazard lights, who is slowing my shit down?
Do you know how much that physically hurt, that every time my little truck tried to climb a steep mountain road I couldn’t even drive 55? There were times my speed got down to 15 mph. It was not only frustrating, it was freaking me out. Each time I was praying that Sammy Hagar wasn’t coming up behind me, going 125 mph, and wouldn’t plow me over.
So if you were traveling on either the I-15 N or the I-70 E last Monday or Tuesday, sorry. That was me you passed and it was me who was jealous as hell of you that you flew by me like lightening when I felt like a turtle in need of an enema. That was also me conducting my mountain-range-preserve-the-truck-towing-a-trailer routine: Roll up the windows. Turn off the radio. Listen to the strain on the engine. Change into the lower gears accordingly. Take a breath. Take another one. Um…now you need to let both of those breaths out. Steady. Steady. You are almost done being the “Slower Traffic Keep Right,” sign.
Actually, I was that “Slower Traffic Keep Right” sign the whole way to Colorado. I was the slowest traffic of them all. There were only three times I passed someone on this haul and each of those passes were made on a decline. One of the passes I made was strategic.
These two guys in a red Datsun truck, who were towing a green Jeep Cherokee behind them, were going a bit slower than me when I first came upon them (which is sad, considering we were both only going about 15-20 mph), so I decided that I’d rather have them in back of me than in front of me, that way they could buffer any Sammy Hagars coming through and they’d get it up their end instead of me.
It wasn’t long before I started to wonder how smart it was, being in front of these guys. It wasn’t just how much they were swaying all over the road. Every time we, our new little group of uphill deficients, hit a decline these jack holes were so far up my ass I could have spit them out through my mouth. I would have had to have gone faster than 55 mph in order to shake them. But, I was too chicken to go faster, which is, obviously, why the drive took responsible me two days. (Going 30-45 mph through most of the mountain range stretches wasn’t doing much for my timing either.)
So there I was, day one and day two, hauling myself to Colorado wearing a pitted out gray t-shirt, a baggy pair of faded jeans, and my favorite black flip flops, and trying to find good radio on the way. And, now that I have officially flipped through several of Utah’s radio stations, I have a question for Utah.
Really? Is this how it’s done? Did I hear your radio commercials correctly, Utah? Did you really ask: “Got a silencer for that kill?” Did another commercial say, “Get out doors this weekend; You know you want to hunt and kill something?” Also, did I understand it correctly, that when yet another commercial, with a voice that was intended to sound like inner thoughts, said, “I will get out doors this weekend. I will use my bow and arrow,” it was meant to be inspirational? Yes? Am I right?
Can I just tell you something, Utah? Your radio commercials freaked this native southern Californian out. I can’t think of any commercial (radio or TV) I’ve ever heard in my entire life which started with a question like: “Got a silencer for that kill?”
I don’t know. Maybe I heard it all wrong. I’m now convinced that sitting/driving too long cuts off the blood to the brain, so I could have just made that part up. Except, I’m pretty sure I didn’t. These commercial quotes, while written in napkin short hand, are in my road notes. Each with question marks after them.
Was it just culture shock I was experiencing? Does it really bother me to hear a commercial about how to hunt things down without making any noise? After all, I can totally appreciate how much a loud gun shot could mess with your ear drums, so killing quietly makes complete sense. But, killing anything isn’t something I think I can ever get used to.
I come from a land where people use re-useable grocery bags and don’t want to talk about how their chicken breast got onto their dinner plate. Non-vegan Californians are sheltered creatures that way. One might even say they’d rather let the Utah hunters do the dirty work and would prefer not to hear, on a radio commercial or otherwise, how it all went down.
But, now I am wondering. Is Utah just more honest than California? Does California prefer to pretend that the meat they eat comes from meat fairies? Maybe it’s better to put it out there. The reason you are eating your meat is because someone killed it for you. We all know I’m not a vegetarian, but, instead, a cut-back-atarian (or, as Jen says, a me-atarian, doing what I want). So, being relatively conflicted I’ll have to give up on this thought on move on.
On a more positive note, Utah’s St. George is beautiful. That’s were I thought I could take a road nap to refresh. Jen never said anything to me when I told her that I was going to try to pull that one off. But, after I arrived at her house, we both laughed at how ridiculous of a notion that was. How the hell is the girl, who needs white noise makers, four pillows, her own bed, a sleep mask, and (on many nights) some kind of a sleep aid to even fall asleep, supposed to get a nap in her car during the middle of the day at a truck stop?
But, I tried. Who cares if I was trying to nap during one of the most stressful road trips of my life? I gave that damn nap a go. I parked along side of a big truck already putting off some decent shade. I climbed into my passenger’s seat, reclined the seat, put my favorite baseball cap over my eyes, and I told myself: Okay. Fall asleep. Get refreshed. Let’s go.
Not one spec of me listened. I actually became a little panicked. My mind started whirling: I can’t fucking sleep here. What am I thinking? I don’t even want to sleep. I just want to get there. But I need to refresh. I’m tired. I’m really, friggen tired. This is BULLSHIT! I’ll find a hotel a little ways more down the road. FUCK! Now I have to back this damn trailer up. Son of a…
It was amazing. Once I got back on the road I felt invigorated. But I am sure I was running on pure adrenaline. Let’s get real. Who puts 90% of their life, all their possessions, into storage, and loads up U-haul with their bed and the remaining 10%, does it in one day, and then thinks she can make a 17 hour drive as a straight shot the very next day? Insane people think that way. Or, people who have forgotten that they are no longer in their 20s, which is when such feats are even remotely possible.
That was my pattern the entire first day traveling to Colorado. Every time I got off the road I felt clobbered. Every time I got back onto the road I felt alive. The most alive I felt was just outside of Grand Junction when Katy Perry’s song “Firework” came onto the radio. I’d never really listened to the words before, but when you’ve got a lot of gray asphalt stretching out in front of you, and you are all alone, there isn’t much else to do but what one does on the road: Drive. Think. Listen.
Then, I cried on the road. I felt the song become a personal anthem. I have been feeling paper thin and wanting to start again. The stress from that job and the life I’ve existed in was making me feel like the house of emotional cards I was stacking could fall at any moment. I have wanted another chance and I have never forgotten how much fire I have inside.
I do want to show what I am worth and believe in what the future holds. There has to be a reason I felt like all the doors in my life were closing. Hopefully I will be opening up one that leads me to the perfect road. (Thanks, Katy Perry, for your song lyrics—which I just switched up—and for your song at the perfect time.)
And thank you, all of Divinity, for Utah’s exit 62 off the I-15 N. Had I not stopped at this Shell station, had I not gone inside to ask the gal working behind the counter, “Where, up the road, is my best bet to stop for the night?” I might have ended up as one of those unfortunate stories, the ones you see in movies, where someone is out of energy, out of civilization, out of gas, out of whatever, and I may just have found myself sleeping (trying to sleep) in my car out in the middle of nowhere whether I liked it or not.
Without hesitation, this cute counter gal, a young, pretty brunette (who looked to be about 17, but turned out to have kids and an ex-husband in Colorado, so I am now putting her to be at least early 20s) told me, “There is lodging just after you make the change from the I-15 N to the I-70 E. Since it was pretty early in the afternoon, I asked, “Is there anything fun to do there?” If I was going take a load off in Richfield I wanted a little min—adventure on my big aventure. “Are you kidding me? This is Utah,” she said.
Partial Stop…
Here is a little advice for anyone traveling alone to Colorado from California on the I-70 E from the I-15 N. After Richfield, you’ve got about four hours of touch-and-go civilization and if you don’t do as I do on all road trips, and get gas everywhere you can, even if you’re just topping off, you might create your own bad story. So, stay in Richfield if you don’t have two drivers. Love up the nothing-is-there-ness of it. Eat, sleep, and top off that gas. It’s just better to be safe than sorry.
Back at it…
A couple of miles before the Richfield exit sign Jen called me. She confirmed Richfield was the place I should stay. Once I got my hotel key from the young blond clerk, McCall, and she said, “Your room is just down the hall. You can park your truck and U-haul along the curb just outside of your room,” my body confirmed Richmond was the place I needed to stay. All of my adrenaline drained out of me. I was so road weary I couldn’t even finish my sentences with clarity. Frankly, I felt as if I was drunk.
I didn’t even care that, because this Comfort Inn did not have room service, I’d have to get something to eat at the Wendy’s fast food restaurant next door. Give me the damn chicken sandwich and the French fries, please. But, spare me the soda and handover the bottled water. I’m dehydrated from stress. My nails are breaking. And, by tomorrow, my lips are going to look like a dry lake bed, all cracked and scaly.
I had no idea how famished I’d become. While sitting on my hotel bed, with my more-than-likely Utah-killed-chicken sandwich being crammed into my mouth, I watched more of the news on the Osama bin Laden kill. Between the news and how fast I was eating, it’s not surprising that I got a belly ache. That’s when it occurred to me that I’d never forget what was going on in my life and where I was when I heard the news about Osama.
The first announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed came the night before I was to start my haul for Colorado. It was about 7:00 pm and I was at my sister’s house sitting on the couch with my 7 year old nephew. After seeing the look on his face from what he was hearing on the television, I asked him if he understood what was going on and if he had any questions that I could answer.
He wanted to know if we were safe. I assured him that he and all of his friends and family were safe. Then I did my best to explain that a very bad man who had hurt a lot of people has just been killed and that while someone’s death should not be good news since so many people were afraid of him doing more bad things we can all feel a little safer now.
Personally, I can’t say that I feel completely safe. I admit that I am afraid of the retaliatory acts that may be coming from Osama’s followers. I do, however, feel wonderful about how much closure this brings to so many people that were affected by 911, including myself and Jen. Jen’s father, who used to be a United Pilot, was working that September 11th day in 2001. He could just as easily have been piloting one of those hi-jacked planes and could have been among the cherished that perished that day.
The next news I’d get about Osama’s death would be in room 124 of the Comfort Inn in Richfield, Utah. A Utah reporter said, “I’m glad they killed him. I don’t care what anyone says.” Yes. Utah tells you like it is. So thank you, Utah. Thank you for your magnificently beautiful red rocks. Thank you for a place to stay so I could get a fresh start in the morning and be way more invigorated the whole second day of my road haul to Colorado. Thank you for being so real. And, thank you for being a part of the journey I am on in life.
Now, having this road haul behind me, I have made a few observations…
Observation #1: Never expect to get fresh fruit from a gas station or convenience stop. Observation # 2: Those are not hay-fever (seasonal) boogars in your nose. Those are road boogers. You can’t drive over 1,000 miles with the windows open and expect to keep a clean nose. It ain’t gonna happen.
Okay, I can’t continue to name my other observations and road experience collections, so I am just going to put a couple more of them out there…
* It was awesome talking to a couple of bikers just out of Vegas. It was even better to learn that one of them was a blogger, like me. (That’s just bitchen.) Paul? Are you out there? Did I get your name right? (Shit. That was one of the stops where the convenience clerk told me that I looked like I needed sleep. This she tells me without even knowing what I’d packed up the day before or how I got a 3:30 am start.)
* I need to watch that Oprah episode again where Oprah and Gayle hauled a trailer. What I especially want to know is: Did Oprah and Gayle have 50 people, a crew, around them who could help at any time? Just curious, because they didn’t seem that stressed pulling an even bigger trailer than what I just pulled.
*I now want it noted that I never want to have to need to use my hazard lights again.
*I am also amazed at how much I wanted to file my broken nails during the whole drive. I just wanted to have a moment to breathe and to file. That’s all. Incidentally, between packing up the last of my stuff, moving it all into storage, packing up a U-Haul, and driving to a dryer climate, I only have one nail left to break. (So, there’s that.) The worst part of it? I don’t think of myself as persnickety. But, apparently I am. I don’t like jagged nails. Short nails are fine. Jagged nails on the road: not so much.
*Maybe Chad and Heather’s friend—what the f’ did I name him, Ike? Is that right?—was right about me. I’ve been set in my ways for way too long. Well, then, Ike. How do you like me now?
*I’m glad that Jen didn’t tell me ahead of time that there would be road construction between Georgetown and Idaho Springs and that I could expect at least a 20 minute delay where I would be at a dead standstill on a 6% decline for, exactly that, 20 minutes. Question: Why is it that your bladder is fine and you don’t have to go pee when your car is moving, but, the second your car stops it’s code yellow?
Observations over. Changing gears now. And, as you may have already figured it out, I am doing one of my blong posts.
I was going to separate “The Long Haul” post and what’s coming next (which I have not officially titled), but, I’m think’n: No. Emotionally, this next part feels like an equally long haul, so let’s just call this “Part II” and name it the “The Emotional Haul.”
Part II-The Emotional Haul
Since I have gotten here, to Lakewood Colorado, to Jen’s house, Jen has been worried about killing/spraying the dandelions in her front yard. (She’s now Utah and want’s those dandelions gone.) That said, I realize that so much of what I write from now on in this blog is going to be influenced by Jen and by her two little girls, Summer and Sparrow.
So here goes the gear shift…
Life takes your breath away, doesn’t it? Every bit of it. There are those seemingly small moments, like when you were a kid and you blew on the delicate, white cloud of a dried out dandelion, on what used to be the bloom of a wild yellow flower, brighter than your innocent, young, sunlight smile, and you hoped on hope for a wish to come true, but you didn’t follow through. The wish was done. You were a kid. When that spray of a thousand fairy white flowers went to the wind, you let go.
You didn’t question divinity. There was no asking for signs above. Did I wish it right? Do I have the might?
You weren’t even thinking about the fact that your one little blow of a wish on a puffy cloud at the end of a green stem, nature’s perfect representation of the cycle of life, started something. Sure, those fairy white flowers would have found a gust of wind soon enough to come along and help them spread their seeds. (In the scheme of things, a bigger picture is always in play.) But all you knew, in your youth’s mind, was that your wish, a sweet, solitary whisper into the wind, was just your prayer.
Then, as you got older and you took worry onto your back, and you started to weigh the sum of things, you didn’t wish any more. Instead, you started to fret. You stopped trusting and you began questioning. Is this, my Now, the crux of me? Why don’t life’s moments seem small anymore? Am I the one making everything seem so large, sometimes insurmountable?
Sigh… Youth has taken a back seat and life has gotten heavy. Gone, baby, gone are the days of dandelion wishes and mom’s kisses on boo boos. It’s on you now; all of it. You’re older.
I know. It’s a lot. Trust me. I get it. Sometimes it’s hard to breath. Welcome to life.
In my case, I guess I should be saying: Welcome to changing your life. No. That doesn’t seem like enough to say. How about: Welcome to turning your life upside down so you can see what shakes out of the pockets you’ve been to afraid to look into.
Change is still change, though, isn’t it? Whether the change is big or small, and whether you are five or fifty years old, when a metamorphous becomes necessary, I don’t think we are any different than a dandelion or a weed. We have the same needs. Like a weed, we will push through a crack in sidewalk to find a way to live and to find the best way to Be. We will kick ass to persevere.
Who are we kidding? This blog post, from the beginning, has so been about the physically long haul I just took moving from California to Colorado, but, equally, and just as, if not more, importantly, about the emotional haul I have ahead of me to get to where I am going.
I know I am going to find myself in some emotionally uncomfortable moments where I feel like I’m getting swallowed up by the journey my soul has yearned to take in order for me to follow my dreams, but I am okay with that. I’ve been asking all along: Are life’s challenges not here to teach us, to remind us, that nothing is bigger than our connection, bigger than us?
And, one rarely gets to where they want to be without effort. I have always known that I wasn’t going to find that place in life, where I am living from my passion instead of my fear, until I faced and conquered some of my biggest fears.
If only pulling a 5’ x 8’ U-Haul Cargo trailer behind my silver, 6 cylinder Nissan Xterra, as I went up and down several winding roads, was what scared me the most about changing my life. Yes. For me, pulling a trailer was really fucking stressful, but easy-peasy compared to what I know I have ahead of me emotionally.
I know me. I am already challenging myself in ways I never have so I will be facing things I’ve never faced. My demons will come out and my hope is that I will slay them.
More importantly: Will I ever pull a trailer again? Yeah…not unless the truck I’m driving has a powerful engine and I’ve got someone with me who will do all the backing up. You should know, I’m still marveling at the fact that I was able to drive over a thousand miles, from California to Colorado, and, by my design, I only had to back up two times.
What now scares me more than hauling a trailer is how much faith and trust I have found to step into my wish. While I am a very spiritual person, and always see the connectivity in things, there is just as much of my nature that fights against me and that doesn’t always know how to believe or to accept that things will all work out.
And, for an independent girl who has always done it on her own, it’s a big deal to put myself in the position of counting on someone’s generosity. It’s a gift that Jen has let me move in rent free so I can just get a part time job, which will be enough to cover my personal basic bills, and will have the time to finish my book. But, now, barely a week into this shift, it’s a gift I still don’t know how to completely accept.
Not being the one to always do it all for me and instead rely on others, really, that is one of my biggest fears. This is something I need to face. I need to fight off every last residue of resistance and embrace what Jen has done for me by believing in my dream even more than I do.
Plus, I’ve read Stephen R. Covey's book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” and I know that in order to be interdependent, in order to achieve that which cannot be achieved alone, I must learn to work within the paradigm of cooperation. I can get my book done on my own. But, something I have not been able to do on my own is believe in myself enough to do what it takes.
This move to Colorado, this allowing of interdependence in my life, this is forcing me into doing what it takes and into believing that I have what it takes. Soon enough I will have my editor, my fact checker, and my found-that-jacked and wayward grammar checker.
Until then, I can no longer escape the reality that every human being is an interdependent creature. I have to accept what I’ve known all along. People need each other. At this time in my life, and because of where my life has been going, I can now admit without reservation that I needed not to be alone anymore. I have needed my friends to believe in me more than I have believed in myself.
I can also admit that this is the scariest thing I have ever done, and I don’t mean the moving part. A city, is a city, is a city. You can change your city any time you want. I’ve done it many times. Not lately. Not in 13 years. But I did move plenty when I was younger.
No… what terrifies me more is following my dream of being a writer, especially of being the kind of writer I am and want to be. Everything I write has me on the page. And here I am again, exposing myself, asking myself if I have the talent, or if I just have the guts and I am also a little bit nuts.
But the reality I’ve come to is that I’d rather fail at trying then fail to try. I’d rather fall on my ass in front of everyone than face myself alone at night knowing I have never given myself a chance.
I think I’ve known all along that if I didn’t attempt this leap of faith, if I didn’t put myself into the position of having nowhere to turn but to my writing, to my dream, I would have kept my dream as a place to escape rather than as a place to live.
I want to live my dreams not dream about another way to live.
But, again, being this daring, this brave, or this fucking stupid, has a price. I will have my moments. I’ve already had several of them including the first night I got to Jen’s house.
I arrived to an empty house. Jen was picking up the girls at their day care. I knew I was drained, but I’d made it. That’s when, even with wobbly legs and a new altitude high, I couldn’t wait until 6:30 pm, for Jen’s boyfriend Dirk to get off work and for him to help me unload my U-Haul.
It was 4:ll pm and I wanted it done. So, with the exception of unloading my bed, which Dirk did do for me around 7:00 pm, I got all of my shit out of my truck and trailer in slightly less than an hour. I was already feeling that thing I feel where I need things just so. (In other words, I needed to set down my ways.)
Once Jen got home, and Dirk got off of work and set my bed up for me, that’s when it hit, what I’d just done. I had just up-ended my life. I felt like I was going to have a panic attack.
Attack averted. It was time for Summer and Sparrow to go to bed. The story was read. The girls were tucked in. The good-night kisses were exchanged. I was about to combust, but, instead, a 5 year old girl, Summer, broke through the frantic fear that almost over took me.
As I lay next to her on her pink patch-work quilt, and just after I told her “Goodnight, my love,” she brought her petite little hand up to my right cheek, cupped it, and said, “Aunt Lev? I love you staying here.”
So now I ask you: No matter how afraid we are, doesn’t divinity always give us what we need in each moment? That little girl saw through to me and knew what to say. So why shouldn’t we trust a little more and worry a little less?
I’ll try to be fabulous at it if you will…
Ready?
Thursday, April 28, 2011
I won't let you fall
Today I had an appointment for U-haul to wire me up. Translation? I needed to get the Remote Power Vehicle Towing installation taken care of so I’ve got me some legal stop-and-go lights on the 5’-8” U-Haul trailer my little SUV will be pulling to Colorado. While I was waiting to get wired, I decided to hop over to the storage place where I am going to be leaving 95% of my possessions. I wanted to settle up my reservation.
Thankfully I am a follow up girl. My reservation had been lost. Eh, no big deal. I’m moving in on a day where the office won’t be open. I almost didn’t get the original quote/price they gave me. I was never informed about how the monthly rent will hike after the intro offer. The girl trying to re-do my reservation botched up my information three times. And, they doubled the penalty if I end my storage unit lease early. But, hey, this is just my life I’m putting in storage. No worries here. They fixed the charges, all ended up well, and that part of my day, getting wires and settling my storage, only took me close to three unsettling hours to settle. Who says packing up your life is stressful. This is a cinch. (Sigh.)
I didn’t feel any stress after that when I went home and continued with my private health insurance shopping. Why should it bother me that, because of my existing conditions, the High blood pressure and the hypothyroidism, I could be denied or be charged out the wazoo? If I wasn’t so afraid of the semantics of health insurance I would have ditched my job a long time ago. Again, easy. (Sigh.)
I guess what I am trying to say is that I may have gotten some balls back in deciding to write my life in pen, but I never said dragging around these new big balls would be easy breezy all the time and today was a toughy.
It’s all still worth it, though, and I will tell you why. When you call up the best friend you are about to move in with and tell her about your difficult day, while she gets interrupted on the phone by one of her daughters, but still, minutes later, texts you and says, “Don’t worry too much. I know you have always been on your own, but you have to remember that I’ve got your back, always. I won’t let you fall,” that's when you know you are doing the right thing.
Guess how Jen signed the text? She signed it Gayle. If that doesn’t make sense, let me explain. Jen and I both record the Oprah show. We had also both started to watch the episode about best friends, about Gayle and Oprah’s friendship, when Jen decided to text me and see if I’d seen it. I was watching it at that moment and that’s when I called her to tell her about my day.
There’s really nothing more I need to say about that.
Thankfully I am a follow up girl. My reservation had been lost. Eh, no big deal. I’m moving in on a day where the office won’t be open. I almost didn’t get the original quote/price they gave me. I was never informed about how the monthly rent will hike after the intro offer. The girl trying to re-do my reservation botched up my information three times. And, they doubled the penalty if I end my storage unit lease early. But, hey, this is just my life I’m putting in storage. No worries here. They fixed the charges, all ended up well, and that part of my day, getting wires and settling my storage, only took me close to three unsettling hours to settle. Who says packing up your life is stressful. This is a cinch. (Sigh.)
I didn’t feel any stress after that when I went home and continued with my private health insurance shopping. Why should it bother me that, because of my existing conditions, the High blood pressure and the hypothyroidism, I could be denied or be charged out the wazoo? If I wasn’t so afraid of the semantics of health insurance I would have ditched my job a long time ago. Again, easy. (Sigh.)
I guess what I am trying to say is that I may have gotten some balls back in deciding to write my life in pen, but I never said dragging around these new big balls would be easy breezy all the time and today was a toughy.
It’s all still worth it, though, and I will tell you why. When you call up the best friend you are about to move in with and tell her about your difficult day, while she gets interrupted on the phone by one of her daughters, but still, minutes later, texts you and says, “Don’t worry too much. I know you have always been on your own, but you have to remember that I’ve got your back, always. I won’t let you fall,” that's when you know you are doing the right thing.
Guess how Jen signed the text? She signed it Gayle. If that doesn’t make sense, let me explain. Jen and I both record the Oprah show. We had also both started to watch the episode about best friends, about Gayle and Oprah’s friendship, when Jen decided to text me and see if I’d seen it. I was watching it at that moment and that’s when I called her to tell her about my day.
There’s really nothing more I need to say about that.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Get Out of Jail Free card
Wikipedia defines “A Get Out of Jail Free card” as an element of the board game Monopoly which has become a popular metaphor for something that will get one out of an undesired situation.
Heard that!
Backing up, but only every so slightly, what I didn't say in my last post is that I’ve quit my job. They don’t know it yet, and I was afraid to come straight out with it in the previous “…write my life in pen..” blog post, because the responsible me thought if I wrote it outright, and somehow "the man" (my work) figured it out, that at the end of my medical leave I’ll be resigning my position, I'd be screwed.
Jo, my neighbor, helped me change my mind. She said something like, “Nah, they can’t touch you. You’re doing it by the book. Relax. Enjoy this.”
So, here is the correction: I’ve been screwed in that job. Now, that I’ve quit? Not so much. And that, my friends, is how you reshuffle life’s Monopoly deck and put the Get Out of Jail Free card on top.
There hasn’t been one day since I’ve made this decision, to store the life I’ve been living and start living another way, that I thought it was the wrong decision to make. Now, the packing, the getting together all the administrative details that are involved with moving one’s life from one state to another, oh that can take a flying flip.
Everything else involved with this decision, where this bold move feels like my own, cool, 1980s movie moment, is gelling quit nicely in my psyche. Err, wait... is it a Jerry Maguire moment that every one has now? Am I the crazy guy, like Jerry Maguire, who walks off his job with a new mission and takes the fish with him? (Go crazy! Get the fish!)
Whatever this is, I'm it. I’m picking me, sane or crazy. I have to admit, though, while there have been a lot of shitty jobs leading up to this last one, which have stacked themselves on top of life circumstances that have been culminating over the years, a more acute chain of events lead to my snapping point the day I quietly walked off the job.
The Wednesday after my father’s quadruple bypass surgery, shortly after I got called into that aforementioned, berating and impromptu meeting with Bitch #1 and the New Boss Man, is when I made my exit.
Minutes after that meeting, I had gone outside to call my sister, Lyn. I wanted to know how my father was doing. I wanted to know if they’d removed his breathing tube yet and if he was well enough to be transported out of the intensive critical care unit and into a regular room.
My sister, not comfortable with the sound of my voice asked, “You okay?” “Not really,” I said.
“Are you worried about dad?” “Yes,” I said, “But it’s not just that.”
“Is it your job again?” she asked. I didn’t answer, I just started crying.
“You need to get the hell out of there,” my sister ordered me. “Call your doctor. Get the medical leave note. Just get out of there. I can’t watch what this place is doing to you anymore. You need to move in with Jen like you’ve been talking about and finish your book and become your old self again.”
Up until that point, my sister has been standing back, watching and accepting my choices as I have continued to live the life of my making that hasn’t made me happy. Then, that Wednesday, when I was ready not to live that life any more, but, because I’d been so beaten down by my work, and had so much fear piled up in my life, and my sister knew I’d essentially become paralyzed, my big sister did what a big sister does. She basically ordered me to change my life. I’d needed that.
Immediately after I got off the phone with Lyn I called my doctor and got an appointment for 5:15 pm later that day. Then, I went back in for round 1 of my desk clearing. As I sat there in my uncomfortable office chair, surrounded by stacked paper and project binder piles, I asked myself What do I really need? I didn’t need anything, but I didn’t want any personal part of me to be left behind in that cube, so I took down the few pictures I had: The picture of me with my sister Lyn and all my friends on my 40th birthday and the shot of the Eiffel tower I took while I was on a European tour with my mom.
Then I went outside to call one of the few co-workers I’d become close with, a co-worker I’d made a promise to. She answered her cell after two rings. “Remember I told you that if I was ever to leave this place you’d be the first to know?” I asked. “Yes,” she said, tentatively.
“Well, you are the first to know. I’m leaving at lunch and I am not coming back.”
She wasn’t shocked. She’d known how they’d been treating everyone in the current budget climate. None of us could prove we were being used, abused, and harassed, or that some of us were slated for possible lay offs and being documented out. But, whether a theory is in play or is not, if all the components of that theory are in practice, and you are in a shitty situation, it doesn’t matter what the origin is. Shit is still shit no matter where the shit comes from, right?
Next I called my dear Ava, the one who has truly been a savior to me at work. Were it not for all of our walks under our trees, and all of our talks blowing off steam, I might not have kept what little sanity has remained. I can’t even remember my conversation with Ava. I just remember hanging up the phone and feeling a sense of calm, knowing Ava would always be in my life, she would always be a part of my spiritual sanity, reminding me that everything happens for a reason, and she would always be a friend, a true one.
What I hadn’t noticed, while I was outside on the phone with Ava, is that, because of a peaceable protest that was about to start, the entire building I worked in had gone on lock-down to keep the staff inside safe. Poetic I thought. Every entry/exit is now gated with bars and manned with a policeman. I feel like I am trying to break into Jail to get the remainder of my belongings from my desk and to get myself out of hell.
Turns out, clearing the rest of my desk was easy. I took one last look around, grabbed my personal work file, which had all my benefits information, performance reviews, and offer letters from both divisions in it, and I didn’t want anything else. I didn’t want that file, either, but I knew it would be necessary. Then, I left my desk exactly as it would be if I were returning after lunch, with the computer on and the work piles stacked about.
The same policeman, who questioned my employee status, just 20 minutes before to let me back into the building, informed me that I would need to show my staff ID if I wanted to re-enter the building. While he unlocked the barred gate to let me out, I said, “I won’t need my ID. I’m never coming back to this place again.”
Then, I thought: Damn. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. They might think I’ve set off a bomb or something related to the protest and radio a cop to stop me in the parking lot.
But, aside from the one other person I told I was leaving, the guy in the office across from my cube, someone who is one of the most mild mannered and incredibly decent human beings on the face of the earth, no one seemed to care that the girl who was brought to tears from work 2-3 nights a week was leaving the building. Nope. With the exception of Ava, and a precious few other co-workers I’ve cherished, all the people who cared about me were on the other side of those bars.
All along all the people who have cared about me have been there, on the other end of phone lines, across restaurant dining tables, and in my living room or in theirs. So I called one of my ‘cares about me’ friends, Lyta. (You may recall Lyta, who, along with Jo, was a big part of getting me through the panic attack I wrote about in the post “Surrender” dated: Thursday, December 16, 2010.)
Don’t worry. Leaving the job didn’t spur another panic attack, quite the opposite. But, I did need to share my decision with someone. For two hours Lyta and I discussed how necessary the life adjustments I was beginning to make have been.
After my doctor’s appointment, I went to my neighbor Jo’s place to also share my news. Jo’s response was: “Good for you!” Jo has been there on so many days I’ve come home from work totally affected by the day and by the people.
(BTW, if you are trying to figure out who the hell Jo is, Jo is Jean, also from the December 16th “Surrender” post. Jo, however, thought the name Jean sucked. So, “Jo” it is. She’s right. Jo does fit her better. If I am going to choose a name that protects a friend’s identify/privacy, I’m all for them having a hand in it.
Anyway, since leaving work that Wednesday, I haven’t been back. I have had some stressed days, but not because I am questioning my decision. I don’t. Not one bit. But, responsible me, who knows that at the end of this medical leave I will need health insurance and a new less-stressful source of income, does need to have her voice heard. She needs to call attention to the fact that the stars need to continue to line up.
This is what I have to say to responsible me: The stars will align. Have faith. I’m already living more fully in my Now. Isn’t that as it should be?
I like Now. It’s a great place. The other day, when Jo was helping me with the mechanic drop off/pick up, to get my car road-ready for my long-haul move, we did a lot of asking: What would be fun Now?
First, getting a beer and splitting a burger at the 49er, a local dive bar famous for its legendary burgers, was fun. Next, hitting up another local institution, that was going to be fun.
So, we hopped over to Jo Josts, one of Long Beach’s oldest bars which used to be a barber shop. While we didn’t have one of the special pickled eggs Jo Josts is known for, we each did have a beer. Jo bought me a Jo Josts T-shirt. Now, I can take a little bit of the city I’ve lived in for the last 14 years with me. I’ll tell people Jo Josts is famous for serving up the coldest beer in Long Beach.
As you can see, and as it turns out, were this blog is concerned, I am not gone and I won’t be. I think I am going to need to keep up on posting this adventure I’ve started.
I will also need to keep up on this writing venue, this blog, a venue which has given me the freedom to not need to be perfect. This blog has taught me that I have something to share and until I get an editor, the occasional repeated word, where I start a sentence then rearrange my thought, that’s okay. When I get my editor for my book, the intermittent inscrutable series of words will disappear. Until then, I am just going to continue to do what I know how to do: Share my self and my voice.
Oh, since I am throwing all my shit in storage, and just bringing my bed, ¼ of my clothes, and my painting and writing supplies, I’m also bringing my beach cruiser. I don’t care if that’s impractical or if the side of my bike has a logo that reads: Point Beach when I am headed to the mountains. I am not moving to Colorado forever. I am starting my adventure there.
My bike is my Jerry Maguire office fish. I am starting a new life and the damn bike is coming with me. (I’m taking the fish.) I’m already imagining myself on my bike, ringing my bike bell, and getting looks from the neighbors wondering who the damn blondie is with the ridiculous California beach cruiser.
When I come back to get my stuff out of Long Beach storage, my plan is that it will be because my book is being published, or I am getting married, or I can afford to buy real estate (or all three).
If all of those plans work out, great. If other plans take me somewhere else, great, too. My only real plan is to never work so hard at doing something that I don’t love for people who don’t care about me again.
Life shouldn’t feel like a jail cell. It should feel fabulous, free, and without fear, and right now it does.
Heard that!
Backing up, but only every so slightly, what I didn't say in my last post is that I’ve quit my job. They don’t know it yet, and I was afraid to come straight out with it in the previous “…write my life in pen..” blog post, because the responsible me thought if I wrote it outright, and somehow "the man" (my work) figured it out, that at the end of my medical leave I’ll be resigning my position, I'd be screwed.
Jo, my neighbor, helped me change my mind. She said something like, “Nah, they can’t touch you. You’re doing it by the book. Relax. Enjoy this.”
So, here is the correction: I’ve been screwed in that job. Now, that I’ve quit? Not so much. And that, my friends, is how you reshuffle life’s Monopoly deck and put the Get Out of Jail Free card on top.
There hasn’t been one day since I’ve made this decision, to store the life I’ve been living and start living another way, that I thought it was the wrong decision to make. Now, the packing, the getting together all the administrative details that are involved with moving one’s life from one state to another, oh that can take a flying flip.
Everything else involved with this decision, where this bold move feels like my own, cool, 1980s movie moment, is gelling quit nicely in my psyche. Err, wait... is it a Jerry Maguire moment that every one has now? Am I the crazy guy, like Jerry Maguire, who walks off his job with a new mission and takes the fish with him? (Go crazy! Get the fish!)
Whatever this is, I'm it. I’m picking me, sane or crazy. I have to admit, though, while there have been a lot of shitty jobs leading up to this last one, which have stacked themselves on top of life circumstances that have been culminating over the years, a more acute chain of events lead to my snapping point the day I quietly walked off the job.
The Wednesday after my father’s quadruple bypass surgery, shortly after I got called into that aforementioned, berating and impromptu meeting with Bitch #1 and the New Boss Man, is when I made my exit.
Minutes after that meeting, I had gone outside to call my sister, Lyn. I wanted to know how my father was doing. I wanted to know if they’d removed his breathing tube yet and if he was well enough to be transported out of the intensive critical care unit and into a regular room.
My sister, not comfortable with the sound of my voice asked, “You okay?” “Not really,” I said.
“Are you worried about dad?” “Yes,” I said, “But it’s not just that.”
“Is it your job again?” she asked. I didn’t answer, I just started crying.
“You need to get the hell out of there,” my sister ordered me. “Call your doctor. Get the medical leave note. Just get out of there. I can’t watch what this place is doing to you anymore. You need to move in with Jen like you’ve been talking about and finish your book and become your old self again.”
Up until that point, my sister has been standing back, watching and accepting my choices as I have continued to live the life of my making that hasn’t made me happy. Then, that Wednesday, when I was ready not to live that life any more, but, because I’d been so beaten down by my work, and had so much fear piled up in my life, and my sister knew I’d essentially become paralyzed, my big sister did what a big sister does. She basically ordered me to change my life. I’d needed that.
Immediately after I got off the phone with Lyn I called my doctor and got an appointment for 5:15 pm later that day. Then, I went back in for round 1 of my desk clearing. As I sat there in my uncomfortable office chair, surrounded by stacked paper and project binder piles, I asked myself What do I really need? I didn’t need anything, but I didn’t want any personal part of me to be left behind in that cube, so I took down the few pictures I had: The picture of me with my sister Lyn and all my friends on my 40th birthday and the shot of the Eiffel tower I took while I was on a European tour with my mom.
Then I went outside to call one of the few co-workers I’d become close with, a co-worker I’d made a promise to. She answered her cell after two rings. “Remember I told you that if I was ever to leave this place you’d be the first to know?” I asked. “Yes,” she said, tentatively.
“Well, you are the first to know. I’m leaving at lunch and I am not coming back.”
She wasn’t shocked. She’d known how they’d been treating everyone in the current budget climate. None of us could prove we were being used, abused, and harassed, or that some of us were slated for possible lay offs and being documented out. But, whether a theory is in play or is not, if all the components of that theory are in practice, and you are in a shitty situation, it doesn’t matter what the origin is. Shit is still shit no matter where the shit comes from, right?
Next I called my dear Ava, the one who has truly been a savior to me at work. Were it not for all of our walks under our trees, and all of our talks blowing off steam, I might not have kept what little sanity has remained. I can’t even remember my conversation with Ava. I just remember hanging up the phone and feeling a sense of calm, knowing Ava would always be in my life, she would always be a part of my spiritual sanity, reminding me that everything happens for a reason, and she would always be a friend, a true one.
What I hadn’t noticed, while I was outside on the phone with Ava, is that, because of a peaceable protest that was about to start, the entire building I worked in had gone on lock-down to keep the staff inside safe. Poetic I thought. Every entry/exit is now gated with bars and manned with a policeman. I feel like I am trying to break into Jail to get the remainder of my belongings from my desk and to get myself out of hell.
Turns out, clearing the rest of my desk was easy. I took one last look around, grabbed my personal work file, which had all my benefits information, performance reviews, and offer letters from both divisions in it, and I didn’t want anything else. I didn’t want that file, either, but I knew it would be necessary. Then, I left my desk exactly as it would be if I were returning after lunch, with the computer on and the work piles stacked about.
The same policeman, who questioned my employee status, just 20 minutes before to let me back into the building, informed me that I would need to show my staff ID if I wanted to re-enter the building. While he unlocked the barred gate to let me out, I said, “I won’t need my ID. I’m never coming back to this place again.”
Then, I thought: Damn. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. They might think I’ve set off a bomb or something related to the protest and radio a cop to stop me in the parking lot.
But, aside from the one other person I told I was leaving, the guy in the office across from my cube, someone who is one of the most mild mannered and incredibly decent human beings on the face of the earth, no one seemed to care that the girl who was brought to tears from work 2-3 nights a week was leaving the building. Nope. With the exception of Ava, and a precious few other co-workers I’ve cherished, all the people who cared about me were on the other side of those bars.
All along all the people who have cared about me have been there, on the other end of phone lines, across restaurant dining tables, and in my living room or in theirs. So I called one of my ‘cares about me’ friends, Lyta. (You may recall Lyta, who, along with Jo, was a big part of getting me through the panic attack I wrote about in the post “Surrender” dated: Thursday, December 16, 2010.)
Don’t worry. Leaving the job didn’t spur another panic attack, quite the opposite. But, I did need to share my decision with someone. For two hours Lyta and I discussed how necessary the life adjustments I was beginning to make have been.
After my doctor’s appointment, I went to my neighbor Jo’s place to also share my news. Jo’s response was: “Good for you!” Jo has been there on so many days I’ve come home from work totally affected by the day and by the people.
(BTW, if you are trying to figure out who the hell Jo is, Jo is Jean, also from the December 16th “Surrender” post. Jo, however, thought the name Jean sucked. So, “Jo” it is. She’s right. Jo does fit her better. If I am going to choose a name that protects a friend’s identify/privacy, I’m all for them having a hand in it.
Anyway, since leaving work that Wednesday, I haven’t been back. I have had some stressed days, but not because I am questioning my decision. I don’t. Not one bit. But, responsible me, who knows that at the end of this medical leave I will need health insurance and a new less-stressful source of income, does need to have her voice heard. She needs to call attention to the fact that the stars need to continue to line up.
This is what I have to say to responsible me: The stars will align. Have faith. I’m already living more fully in my Now. Isn’t that as it should be?
I like Now. It’s a great place. The other day, when Jo was helping me with the mechanic drop off/pick up, to get my car road-ready for my long-haul move, we did a lot of asking: What would be fun Now?
First, getting a beer and splitting a burger at the 49er, a local dive bar famous for its legendary burgers, was fun. Next, hitting up another local institution, that was going to be fun.
So, we hopped over to Jo Josts, one of Long Beach’s oldest bars which used to be a barber shop. While we didn’t have one of the special pickled eggs Jo Josts is known for, we each did have a beer. Jo bought me a Jo Josts T-shirt. Now, I can take a little bit of the city I’ve lived in for the last 14 years with me. I’ll tell people Jo Josts is famous for serving up the coldest beer in Long Beach.
As you can see, and as it turns out, were this blog is concerned, I am not gone and I won’t be. I think I am going to need to keep up on posting this adventure I’ve started.
I will also need to keep up on this writing venue, this blog, a venue which has given me the freedom to not need to be perfect. This blog has taught me that I have something to share and until I get an editor, the occasional repeated word, where I start a sentence then rearrange my thought, that’s okay. When I get my editor for my book, the intermittent inscrutable series of words will disappear. Until then, I am just going to continue to do what I know how to do: Share my self and my voice.
Oh, since I am throwing all my shit in storage, and just bringing my bed, ¼ of my clothes, and my painting and writing supplies, I’m also bringing my beach cruiser. I don’t care if that’s impractical or if the side of my bike has a logo that reads: Point Beach when I am headed to the mountains. I am not moving to Colorado forever. I am starting my adventure there.
My bike is my Jerry Maguire office fish. I am starting a new life and the damn bike is coming with me. (I’m taking the fish.) I’m already imagining myself on my bike, ringing my bike bell, and getting looks from the neighbors wondering who the damn blondie is with the ridiculous California beach cruiser.
When I come back to get my stuff out of Long Beach storage, my plan is that it will be because my book is being published, or I am getting married, or I can afford to buy real estate (or all three).
If all of those plans work out, great. If other plans take me somewhere else, great, too. My only real plan is to never work so hard at doing something that I don’t love for people who don’t care about me again.
Life shouldn’t feel like a jail cell. It should feel fabulous, free, and without fear, and right now it does.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
I am going to write my life in pen from now on!
When I started my undergraduate education (I think I was about 22 years old), I kicked it all off with taking classes at the Jr. College in the city where I grew up. In one of the first art classes I’ve ever taken there was an assignment given that I never forgot. “Draw this still life,” the professor instructed us. “Oh, I am sorry,” she went on. “Did I not mention that you are not to use your pencils? You will be using pen for this drawing. There is no erasing with this assignment. If you make a mistake, figure out how to make it work.” That’s what art is all about.”
When I was 18 years old, just two weeks after graduating high school, and about 4-5 years before ever taking that art class with the unforgettable lesson, Jen’s older sister and I moved to Lake Tahoe (I think I’ve mentioned this before). I had two jobs while living in Lake Tahoe.
The first job I held was bagging groceries at a major super market. Yup, I was a courtesy clerk. That job ended when my manager told me that I needed to go next door to the drug store and buy a new white dress shirt, because mine wasn’t clean enough. (There was some dirt on the front of my Oxford from putting my shoulders into it when I was pushing a row of carts in the parking lot the day before.)
“If you haven’t scheduled me for enough shifts to afford to do my laundry, how do you expect me to come up with the money to buy a new shirt?” I asked. My manager, a real piece of work, wasn’t sympathetic. “Figure it out,” she said, “Just come back with a clean shirt.”
So, I left. I rode my bike home, called the super market main phone line, and I asked to speak to the manager. When the piece of sh— , piece of work, said, “Hello, this is the manager,” I said, “This is Leven. I quit.” I hung up the phone. Then, I put my bikini on, got back on my bike, and I went to the lake—King’s beach—for the rest of the day. In three days, I got a new job waiting tables at one of the major family dining restaurant chains which was located even closer to my apartment. Thus, waiting tables for the grave yard shift was my second job in Lake Tahoe.
But then, after a year taking orders, even though I’d moved to getting bossed around by customers on regular day and night shifts, I needed a break. I asked the restaurant manager for time off so I could go to Mazatlan, Mexico with a friend for Spring Break vacation. His answer was no. He said, “Absolutely not,” to be exact. So, I quit. I went to Mexico, and I had a blast. I even went parasailing, except that was scary as hell.
Now, let’s cut to how I am doing now. As you already know, I’ve been pretty miserable at work. For me, it has been a very stressful thing to be under the management of one of the most wretched and unconscious individuals I have ever met in my life (Bull #2).
As much as I understand that the pain and misery Bull # 2 inflicts on others has everything to do with the internal pain Bull # 2 must personally posses deep inside, I do not excuse a person’s pain as a good enough reason to become such a generally feared and hated supervisor. I’ve said it before, wielding one’s position of power over others, and thereby making them feel bullied, powerless, constantly threatened, and stressed, is not acceptable behavior from a being.
Sure, as you know, recently I got a new boss. However, if that New Boss Man ultimately reports to the same Bull #2 I’ve been dealing with for the last year, than how does that change what and who I’ve been dealing with? It doesn’t. It makes it so I have two people I have to answer to. No, wait. There have been three people I’ve been answering to since New Boss Man started. Have I ever mentioned Bitch #1?
Bitch #1 is one of those know-it-all, but-knows-nothing, loves-the-sound-of-her-own-voice (even though everyone else can’t stand it—really can’t stand it), yammering, annoying bitches who also happens to be one of the higher up bosses where I work. But, I’ve never reported to the bitch, and, up until recently, rarely had to deal with her. My New Boss Man recently started to report to her, so that has put me into the position of answering to three people who don’t know how to do what I do for a living but think I should be doing it better.
Put succinctly, in this position, in this place, every expectation put forth, every deadline set, and all scrutiny of the process that my job requires, has been unrealistic. Aside from some of the amazing people I’ve come to know, and get to know better (my dear Ava among the select and wonderful few), every second of every moment I’ve spent working for this place (I’m still not mentioning the name), has been pretty close to tortuous.
Do you know what it is like, when, as a professional trainer, putting together the documentation for, and conducting the training of, various policies, procedures, and softwares, nothing about what it takes to accomplish this is understood by the people asking you to do it?
They know nothing of taking just the right screen shot of a software page, drop-down menu, pop-up screen, login navigational reference, etc. They don’t get positioning the cursor, cropping the image just so, circling or pointing to the aspect of the image which correlates to the steps or directions listed just below that representational picture. They don’t know how to rearrange or cut out certain information so as not to give out any personal or proprietary data in a visual reference. They don’t get how much of the afore-mentioned effort, and more, it takes to get and/or create just the right image that will match up with the language which the image is supposed to represent.
They’ve also got no idea what it takes in creating a consistency in language throughout bulleted lists which may span over 50 pages of a manual or 25+ pages of a presentation. Oh, and could they maintain a similar type of action verbiage throughout their step-by-step direction/instructional sets, including which words to quote and/or put in bold? Would they remember every step that needs to be changed if something in the software or the policy changes? No.
Do any of them have half of my personality in order to be able to train others, to be deft at working a room, and to be comfortable enough in one’s self to be in front of a crowd so that the crowd, the trainees, can be put to ease while they, as learners, are given the task of taking on something new which, inevitably, makes everyone feel stupid? Do they care about how much change devastates people and how threatening them with change in their job is what makes change still more frightening yet? Will they take any of that into consideration in each way that they present new information? Let’s go with “no” again.
Oh shit. I’m sorry. I just realized this is one of the most boring complaints I’ve ever outlined. I’m stopping now, but I think, without mentioning even one more aspect of what it takes to learn, put together documentation for, then teach anything, you get the point that it takes a lot. Thus, I’ve been working at a job, giving my best, which was not good enough, and killing myself for people who want more blood out of me.
That’s why, the day after my dad had quadruple bypass surgery, which was a little over a week ago, I started to question my own hand in my misery. When my father goes in for a stress test for one surgery, then his doctors realize there is a 70% blockage in all but one of the veins leading to and from my father’s heart, and he ends up having another surgery, a quadruple bypass, and they discover the blockages were closer to 90%, the two questions in my mind are 1) Is my father going to be okay? And, 2) Because of the stress in my life, am I going to end up like my father?
I’d already gone home sick the Monday before, because of a B.S. stressful meeting I was in with Bull #2, Bitch # 1, New Boss Man, and two other Managers. Then, adding to my stress, and worried about my dad, I’d called in sick the next day.
What happened when I went back in on Wednesday, the day after the day I called in sick and had explained that my father had just undergone quadruple bypass surgery? I got called into an impromptu meeting with Bitch # 1 and my New Boss man where they proceeded to berate my work and re-dictate the deadlines for my projects.
Did anyone ask me how my father was doing? No. New Boss man, who tries to come off as the Deepak Chopra of managers, but has proven himself to be nothing more than a lip-service fraud, just sat there with Bitch #1 as they pointed out the various changes my 63 page technical how-to manual needed. Really? There are mistakes, corrections, or necessary changes on a manual I spent how many hours/weeks working on? Fuck. Isn’t that what proofing is for? Seriously, thanks for finding the mistakes. That’s how it is supposed to work on a team, you idiots!
Ah, shit. I forgot again. I am not supposed to require the assistance of others to proof my work. I am supposed to do it all on my own. No. Wrong again. I need to exert more initiative and fix my own mistakes and find my own answers. Still wrong. If I need help on anything I have to go through the bureaucratic channels before using anyone else as a resource. No, no, no. I’ve just got it all wrong and I am not up to par.
Oh, and then there is that fact where the replication and data validation of 25+ financial reports hasn’t been completed by me yet, even though that’s not work a production trainer usually does, but generally speaking what a team comprised of a business analysts, a developer, and an accountant would accomplish, so I shouldn’t forget that I still suck on that account, too.
BTW, it is worth mentioning that the entire division I have been working in has been under similar stress, working with just as tight of deadlines, and all equally detest the management, but they are not me so I cannot begin to account for how they want to handle how they are affected.
I am now truly sorry. I did it again. If just writing the last “how many?” paragraphs made you want to stick a drill in you left ear, like me, I shouldn’t have driven you there.
What’s been my point? It’s not worth it, doing work that doesn’t fulfill you for people who are basically killing you. And, while I previously mentioned two jobs that I gave up over a dirty shirt and a Spring break, I would like you to understand that I have never quit anything in my life. I have chosen.
Sometimes life asks you to choose between slowly dieing or consciously living. I choose to live, to turn a corner, make a change, and take a chance. It’s taken me a year of misery, a lot of crying, and even more stress to realize that I’ve never regretted any leap of faith I have ever taken.
That’s why I know I won’t regret putting my entire life in storage so I can minimize my stress. I am giving up this bat-cave condo and I am going to start living just as fearlessly as I did in my youth. I am not going to give all the details now, because I don’t know what route I will take with work to make sure I have continued health insurance to deal with my existing medical conditions, the damn thyroid thing and the blood pressure, but I am saying enough for you to figure it out.
What’s paramount, is that my dad is okay. He was up and walking within a day and a half of his surgery, and when I was talking to him on the phone the other day, he was slowly ascending the stairs (something the doctors told him not to do unless my mom was home, and she wasn’t). But I know in my heart if I keep going at this pace, keep working for this place, if I keep coming home and giving up my dreams to tears, tuning out, and television, I am not going to be okay.
Am I afraid of the changes I am planning ahead? What do you think? But, again, I am more afraid of living the way I have been. I’ve am growing back the back the balls of the 20 year old in me who took off to Mexico.
My truth is now this: I don’t want to live so tentatively that I’m always living in pencil, afraid to make a mistake, afraid to take any chance that won’t give me the room to erase. I may have more furniture, and may need a little more health insurance, now that I am older, but I’m going back to drawing in pen.
Isn’t that what life is about?
(To my big sister: I love you. Thank you for being so fabulous and for helping me find my strength again! There are leaps in life I would not have been able to make were it not for you!)
When I was 18 years old, just two weeks after graduating high school, and about 4-5 years before ever taking that art class with the unforgettable lesson, Jen’s older sister and I moved to Lake Tahoe (I think I’ve mentioned this before). I had two jobs while living in Lake Tahoe.
The first job I held was bagging groceries at a major super market. Yup, I was a courtesy clerk. That job ended when my manager told me that I needed to go next door to the drug store and buy a new white dress shirt, because mine wasn’t clean enough. (There was some dirt on the front of my Oxford from putting my shoulders into it when I was pushing a row of carts in the parking lot the day before.)
“If you haven’t scheduled me for enough shifts to afford to do my laundry, how do you expect me to come up with the money to buy a new shirt?” I asked. My manager, a real piece of work, wasn’t sympathetic. “Figure it out,” she said, “Just come back with a clean shirt.”
So, I left. I rode my bike home, called the super market main phone line, and I asked to speak to the manager. When the piece of sh— , piece of work, said, “Hello, this is the manager,” I said, “This is Leven. I quit.” I hung up the phone. Then, I put my bikini on, got back on my bike, and I went to the lake—King’s beach—for the rest of the day. In three days, I got a new job waiting tables at one of the major family dining restaurant chains which was located even closer to my apartment. Thus, waiting tables for the grave yard shift was my second job in Lake Tahoe.
But then, after a year taking orders, even though I’d moved to getting bossed around by customers on regular day and night shifts, I needed a break. I asked the restaurant manager for time off so I could go to Mazatlan, Mexico with a friend for Spring Break vacation. His answer was no. He said, “Absolutely not,” to be exact. So, I quit. I went to Mexico, and I had a blast. I even went parasailing, except that was scary as hell.
Now, let’s cut to how I am doing now. As you already know, I’ve been pretty miserable at work. For me, it has been a very stressful thing to be under the management of one of the most wretched and unconscious individuals I have ever met in my life (Bull #2).
As much as I understand that the pain and misery Bull # 2 inflicts on others has everything to do with the internal pain Bull # 2 must personally posses deep inside, I do not excuse a person’s pain as a good enough reason to become such a generally feared and hated supervisor. I’ve said it before, wielding one’s position of power over others, and thereby making them feel bullied, powerless, constantly threatened, and stressed, is not acceptable behavior from a being.
Sure, as you know, recently I got a new boss. However, if that New Boss Man ultimately reports to the same Bull #2 I’ve been dealing with for the last year, than how does that change what and who I’ve been dealing with? It doesn’t. It makes it so I have two people I have to answer to. No, wait. There have been three people I’ve been answering to since New Boss Man started. Have I ever mentioned Bitch #1?
Bitch #1 is one of those know-it-all, but-knows-nothing, loves-the-sound-of-her-own-voice (even though everyone else can’t stand it—really can’t stand it), yammering, annoying bitches who also happens to be one of the higher up bosses where I work. But, I’ve never reported to the bitch, and, up until recently, rarely had to deal with her. My New Boss Man recently started to report to her, so that has put me into the position of answering to three people who don’t know how to do what I do for a living but think I should be doing it better.
Put succinctly, in this position, in this place, every expectation put forth, every deadline set, and all scrutiny of the process that my job requires, has been unrealistic. Aside from some of the amazing people I’ve come to know, and get to know better (my dear Ava among the select and wonderful few), every second of every moment I’ve spent working for this place (I’m still not mentioning the name), has been pretty close to tortuous.
Do you know what it is like, when, as a professional trainer, putting together the documentation for, and conducting the training of, various policies, procedures, and softwares, nothing about what it takes to accomplish this is understood by the people asking you to do it?
They know nothing of taking just the right screen shot of a software page, drop-down menu, pop-up screen, login navigational reference, etc. They don’t get positioning the cursor, cropping the image just so, circling or pointing to the aspect of the image which correlates to the steps or directions listed just below that representational picture. They don’t know how to rearrange or cut out certain information so as not to give out any personal or proprietary data in a visual reference. They don’t get how much of the afore-mentioned effort, and more, it takes to get and/or create just the right image that will match up with the language which the image is supposed to represent.
They’ve also got no idea what it takes in creating a consistency in language throughout bulleted lists which may span over 50 pages of a manual or 25+ pages of a presentation. Oh, and could they maintain a similar type of action verbiage throughout their step-by-step direction/instructional sets, including which words to quote and/or put in bold? Would they remember every step that needs to be changed if something in the software or the policy changes? No.
Do any of them have half of my personality in order to be able to train others, to be deft at working a room, and to be comfortable enough in one’s self to be in front of a crowd so that the crowd, the trainees, can be put to ease while they, as learners, are given the task of taking on something new which, inevitably, makes everyone feel stupid? Do they care about how much change devastates people and how threatening them with change in their job is what makes change still more frightening yet? Will they take any of that into consideration in each way that they present new information? Let’s go with “no” again.
Oh shit. I’m sorry. I just realized this is one of the most boring complaints I’ve ever outlined. I’m stopping now, but I think, without mentioning even one more aspect of what it takes to learn, put together documentation for, then teach anything, you get the point that it takes a lot. Thus, I’ve been working at a job, giving my best, which was not good enough, and killing myself for people who want more blood out of me.
That’s why, the day after my dad had quadruple bypass surgery, which was a little over a week ago, I started to question my own hand in my misery. When my father goes in for a stress test for one surgery, then his doctors realize there is a 70% blockage in all but one of the veins leading to and from my father’s heart, and he ends up having another surgery, a quadruple bypass, and they discover the blockages were closer to 90%, the two questions in my mind are 1) Is my father going to be okay? And, 2) Because of the stress in my life, am I going to end up like my father?
I’d already gone home sick the Monday before, because of a B.S. stressful meeting I was in with Bull #2, Bitch # 1, New Boss Man, and two other Managers. Then, adding to my stress, and worried about my dad, I’d called in sick the next day.
What happened when I went back in on Wednesday, the day after the day I called in sick and had explained that my father had just undergone quadruple bypass surgery? I got called into an impromptu meeting with Bitch # 1 and my New Boss man where they proceeded to berate my work and re-dictate the deadlines for my projects.
Did anyone ask me how my father was doing? No. New Boss man, who tries to come off as the Deepak Chopra of managers, but has proven himself to be nothing more than a lip-service fraud, just sat there with Bitch #1 as they pointed out the various changes my 63 page technical how-to manual needed. Really? There are mistakes, corrections, or necessary changes on a manual I spent how many hours/weeks working on? Fuck. Isn’t that what proofing is for? Seriously, thanks for finding the mistakes. That’s how it is supposed to work on a team, you idiots!
Ah, shit. I forgot again. I am not supposed to require the assistance of others to proof my work. I am supposed to do it all on my own. No. Wrong again. I need to exert more initiative and fix my own mistakes and find my own answers. Still wrong. If I need help on anything I have to go through the bureaucratic channels before using anyone else as a resource. No, no, no. I’ve just got it all wrong and I am not up to par.
Oh, and then there is that fact where the replication and data validation of 25+ financial reports hasn’t been completed by me yet, even though that’s not work a production trainer usually does, but generally speaking what a team comprised of a business analysts, a developer, and an accountant would accomplish, so I shouldn’t forget that I still suck on that account, too.
BTW, it is worth mentioning that the entire division I have been working in has been under similar stress, working with just as tight of deadlines, and all equally detest the management, but they are not me so I cannot begin to account for how they want to handle how they are affected.
I am now truly sorry. I did it again. If just writing the last “how many?” paragraphs made you want to stick a drill in you left ear, like me, I shouldn’t have driven you there.
What’s been my point? It’s not worth it, doing work that doesn’t fulfill you for people who are basically killing you. And, while I previously mentioned two jobs that I gave up over a dirty shirt and a Spring break, I would like you to understand that I have never quit anything in my life. I have chosen.
Sometimes life asks you to choose between slowly dieing or consciously living. I choose to live, to turn a corner, make a change, and take a chance. It’s taken me a year of misery, a lot of crying, and even more stress to realize that I’ve never regretted any leap of faith I have ever taken.
That’s why I know I won’t regret putting my entire life in storage so I can minimize my stress. I am giving up this bat-cave condo and I am going to start living just as fearlessly as I did in my youth. I am not going to give all the details now, because I don’t know what route I will take with work to make sure I have continued health insurance to deal with my existing medical conditions, the damn thyroid thing and the blood pressure, but I am saying enough for you to figure it out.
What’s paramount, is that my dad is okay. He was up and walking within a day and a half of his surgery, and when I was talking to him on the phone the other day, he was slowly ascending the stairs (something the doctors told him not to do unless my mom was home, and she wasn’t). But I know in my heart if I keep going at this pace, keep working for this place, if I keep coming home and giving up my dreams to tears, tuning out, and television, I am not going to be okay.
Am I afraid of the changes I am planning ahead? What do you think? But, again, I am more afraid of living the way I have been. I’ve am growing back the back the balls of the 20 year old in me who took off to Mexico.
My truth is now this: I don’t want to live so tentatively that I’m always living in pencil, afraid to make a mistake, afraid to take any chance that won’t give me the room to erase. I may have more furniture, and may need a little more health insurance, now that I am older, but I’m going back to drawing in pen.
Isn’t that what life is about?
(To my big sister: I love you. Thank you for being so fabulous and for helping me find my strength again! There are leaps in life I would not have been able to make were it not for you!)
Saturday, April 9, 2011
I am dating my new bike...
Yeah, I know I said I wasn't going to be back until I finished my book, but, apparently, it looks like I will show up for short little tid bits.
This is what is new in my life: I bought a bike, a beach cruiser. It's purdy, all white with mint/aqua blue details.
I am now dating my bike. Since I picked it up, site-to-store, a couple of days ago, I haven't really had a chance to ride it. I took it for a short spin, but it wasn't enough. I've been staring at my bike, in my living room, and I even get up and sit on it, smile, and think about the nice rides I am going to have on it, but haven't had that ride yet.
Now I have. My first ride just happened. This is is how...
This morning I fully intended to ride my bike, then work on my book. The opposite happened. I woke up, ran some errands, worked on my book until past 9:00 pm, and then, even though settling in for a couple of hours of trash TV seemed to be my agenda, I thought no.
I decided to install my new bike bell (ring-ring) and my new night-time bike light (shine-shine). Then, um, yeah... had a bell, had a light, had to go for a ride.
So, even though I might be admitting that I broke the law (and if so, I am lying about this part), I filled up yesterday's to-go water cup, from Chipotle, with wine, and I went me for a little night-time bike ride. Yes I did.
How'd it go? Great. Rung-rung my bell at some jacuzzi-ers I could hear in their back yard on the bike path near the place I am living. Rung-rung my bell again at some cigar smoking poker playing men I could hear and smell on the same bike path.
The cuzzi/cigaries didn't respond, but who cares. I got to ring my bell, ride my bike, shine my light, and now, I know, without a doubt, that I need a cup holder. Fuck my wine flopping around in my bike basket and trying to balance as I reach for it to take a sip.
Wait. It wasn't wine. It was punch. I'd never break any laws!
Oh my fabulous new bike. I love you Schwinn! Let's cruz! But, we do need that cup holder. Don't we?
This is what is new in my life: I bought a bike, a beach cruiser. It's purdy, all white with mint/aqua blue details.
I am now dating my bike. Since I picked it up, site-to-store, a couple of days ago, I haven't really had a chance to ride it. I took it for a short spin, but it wasn't enough. I've been staring at my bike, in my living room, and I even get up and sit on it, smile, and think about the nice rides I am going to have on it, but haven't had that ride yet.
Now I have. My first ride just happened. This is is how...
This morning I fully intended to ride my bike, then work on my book. The opposite happened. I woke up, ran some errands, worked on my book until past 9:00 pm, and then, even though settling in for a couple of hours of trash TV seemed to be my agenda, I thought no.
I decided to install my new bike bell (ring-ring) and my new night-time bike light (shine-shine). Then, um, yeah... had a bell, had a light, had to go for a ride.
So, even though I might be admitting that I broke the law (and if so, I am lying about this part), I filled up yesterday's to-go water cup, from Chipotle, with wine, and I went me for a little night-time bike ride. Yes I did.
How'd it go? Great. Rung-rung my bell at some jacuzzi-ers I could hear in their back yard on the bike path near the place I am living. Rung-rung my bell again at some cigar smoking poker playing men I could hear and smell on the same bike path.
The cuzzi/cigaries didn't respond, but who cares. I got to ring my bell, ride my bike, shine my light, and now, I know, without a doubt, that I need a cup holder. Fuck my wine flopping around in my bike basket and trying to balance as I reach for it to take a sip.
Wait. It wasn't wine. It was punch. I'd never break any laws!
Oh my fabulous new bike. I love you Schwinn! Let's cruz! But, we do need that cup holder. Don't we?
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