I'm in hell right now

I seriously have problems. I’m in hell right now. It’s such a simple, stupid hell, the kind of hell where nothing really bad is happening, I’m in no real danger, yet my anger—my reaction—towards every little thing, makes me want to throw and break something big, something that will make a crash, something that will make a loud sound. Fuck! Anything. I just want this emotion out of me.

I write. I paint. I laugh with friends. Sometimes, I cry (by myself, or with friends.) I try to find the lesson in everything. Before I find the lesson, I talk shit about how hard the getting-to-the-lesson is. I complain. That’s how I deal with life. That’s what I do. I’ll do something better when I get better at life.

If I don’t get to see my friends often enough, then I have my writing, or my painting, or my crying. If I don’t feel like crying, then I have my painting, or my writing, or my laughing with friends.

This brings me to this evening’s hell. I just wanted to paint. I’d done my laundry for the first time in a month. I’d cleaned my entire house. I’d convinced myself I was over last Friday night (last Friday, I had another emotional blow out and found myself C-shaped on my couch. Surprise, surprise, my special talent has found me another toxic work environment that has a way of stressing me out so much I seem to need to cry to express my grief. I could go into all of that now, the work bull shit, but I’ll eventually find a way to complain about that later, so let me stay on task) and all I wanted to do was to fucking paint.

But I can’t paint. What’s the problem? Seems simple enough. Get out your oil paints, put the plastic drop cloth over the carpet in your new apartment, open the new fan you bought to blow out the turpentine fumes, put a light on it all, get out the jar to hold your brushes, get the turp jar with the spiral coil thingy to wash each brush as you go and mix color, get your gloves, so all the turps and oils don’t seep into your skin, figure out where to put the wet painting when it’s done, so you, the klutz, won’t knock into it, knocking it over, or won’t brush up against it and get it on your clothes once you clean up.

Oh, and change into your painting clothes (because you are a fucking single-minded-in-the-zone-maniac when you paint and everything around you will get destroyed if you can’t get to your color, your paint, your clean brush, the new brush, the tube with the white, the black, or the other color fast enough, to mix it up enough, or to get it on the canvas fast enough… GET it, NOW! Get into your weird zone where you become an ambidextrous freak and hold paint brushes in your mouth, chase color with your mind, feel need from the brush strokes, and catch up to the happy accident, and fix it, and then move into a new explosion of color as the canvas tells you now what it needs and marries color with accident).

WAIT! Fuck off everything! You still don’t have your studio set up in your new apartment yet, even though your new apartment isn’t that new. You’ve been in another toxic work swirl and have been neglecting your own creative needs. You haven’t figured out, logistically, how it’s supposed to work in this new place.

Remember what happened the last time you felt the urge to paint, a couple months ago? You couldn’t find a drop cloth. The sun was going down and the only natural light was in the kitchen so you found yourself hovering over the kitchen sink and cleaning out a marinara jar from the trash can for your turpentine because the lid to your spiral coil jar thingy, which is where you usually put your turps, which is your usual best friend to cleaning your brushes during the process, was sealed shut and you were fucked, because you would have had to drive a half of an hour to the art store to get a new one.

Is it all coming back to you now? How you got paint all over the kitchen counter. How you started to get high on the turpentine fumes because you didn’t have the proper ventilation and didn’t open enough windows, and your new place doesn’t have the air flow of the last place and you didn’t already have it all set up to protect you against maniac you.

Do you remember crying to Ava because your crazy couldn’t understand how everything wasn’t all ready set up like at your old place, your old home of almost 14 years, the home those fucking butt head neighbors pushed you out of. (Separation anxiety much?) Remember how Ava told you that you’d figure it out?

Yet, you still haven’t. It’s still a mystery how it will logistically work in this new place and you feel like an ass for having such a small problem.

Oh, how about the clean up? Was it fucking miserable trying to figure out where to put all your shit away, back, or where better it should go, since it doesn’t have a spot yet, none of it, not like the studio you’d set up in the old place where it was all open, all there, all ready to leave a painting wet, the chemicals undisturbed. Shelves, time, lights, work, effort, thinking, planning, years, convenience, had all gone into your old small studio space off your old small kitchen in the old place and this space had handed you your crazy inspiration on a convenience train. You could paint within less than two minutes of inspiration.

Now, 20 minutes later, inspiration is wearing thin and you are in a fucking logistical hell.

Before, that last time, when you were painting in the kitchen, was it smart to bring turpentine into the kitchen and place it right next to the dishes you eat off of, the counter you cut food on, and pretty close to the stove? (Just curious.)

Move on.

How’d tonight work out? Was it fun trying to hunt down the plastic gloves you never found? How about that fan you bought three weeks ago for ventilation (you were finally thinking ahead and trying to get things set up). It was good, yeah, with this fan that you left in the package and had to cut out of the cardboard box to set up in a makeshift spot in the middle of the living room? That was pretty cool, eh, how it rendered itself useless when you turned it up to the highest speed, the speed it would take to blow the turp fumes out, and it fell backwards on your carpet because it’s own velocity was to much to keep itself balanced on your living room carpet? What a hoot. Oh, how you didn’t laugh.

What about trying to get the right lighting? That was way more fun. After you were already pissed off about trying to find your oil pastels, because getting out all your oil paints seemed like a bigger hell then the inspiration of the need for immediate creation, that was fan-fucking-tastic that you didn’t remember your oil paint reserves were low and you only have the obnoxious colors left, the ones that would only be perfect for painting a 1980s puked-up disco. Go purple and peach.

It was also pretty cool how that new light you purchased, the one you bought to replace that old one you loved so much (the one that got broken in your move to Colorado), which was the kind of light that is just for these sort of occasions (late night painting in the dark), started flickering, making you feel like you were about to have a seizure. It would have seemed silly that the new light bulb in that new light would shatter, as you tried to tighten it, and keep it from flickering, but, still, it did.

It broke into enough pieces to get into your wine, get onto your couch, get all over your carpet, and speckle on the black drop cloth, where you can’t make out the difference between the broken bulb pieces and the flecks of white paint amongst the other paint flecks that have collected over the years, so you can’t deny the pleasure in that, shattered light bulb every where.

All this before you even got to paint (pastel) even one stroke of paint? Way to go! No, really. Good job. You really got right to your painting, didn’t you. You had you some fun. And you didn’t even cry, or call a friend? You only wanted to purposely break more things and wish you had a casino wall to throw a high ball glass against? (No wonder you’re writing.)

It would seem even sillier that the bulb to your other other light, the clamp one, the one that made it through three moves and that’s worked in some of your worst need-some-damn-light pinches, worked fine just yesterday but was all now, tonight, suddenly burned out when that light was supposed to be your last please-I-fucking-need-some-light-on-my-sitch back up. (Good times.)

Painting, it seems simple enough, doesn’t it? Inspiration hits, and away you go. But, if you are me, if you are one part organized and one part crazed, and if you need some sort of order for your spontaneity, for your inspiration, if you are intensely visual and you require everything you need to create to be in view, to be available, to be ready, to be there in the instant you think—you need—so that your crazed but inspired process is not interrupted by the little things, like breaking lights, potential paint, turpentine, and/or chemical spills on the carpet, or by falling fans, misplaced tools (brushes, paints, gloves, etc.), changing clothes, then the process isn’t that simple.

When I paint, sometimes I don’t know where I go. It’s just me. I could care less about shit I knock over, what I’ve eaten, need to eat, if I’ve eaten, what time it is, and so on… The canvas, the paint, and the process they take over, if order is there before inspiration hits.

If I don’t have order before inspiration hits, then I can’t tell the canvas what I am thinking and I can’t hear what the canvas is telling me back. I don’t get to have the conversation inspiration allows me. Instead, all I can hear is the chaos of what I’m wrestling with in order to attempt to get to my inspiration. The breaking lights, the misplaced drop cloths, the stupid shit not there, the other shit not here, the more shit not working or not in the right place, those logistics, being fucked up… to me, that’s hell. Total HELL. It feels like I am going crazy because I can not get at what makes me sane.

Problem is, I just need to figure out how to set up a studio space in this new place. I like this place. I do. It’s not like the fucking condo bat cave with the weird lingering energy. Not at all.

This place feels comfortable to me. I even made a carpet snow angel the day I found this place with Samantha’s help. After my toxic day at work is done, this place says, “Come in. You’re home. Breathe. You’ll be fine.” But, since I don’t have a studio space yet, since I can’t figure out which will be better, carving out a chunk out of the living room, where the carpet is, where I’ll so fuck the carpet up, or taking out the whole not-really-a-dining room space, where I now do my writing, I will probably remain in hell. (No. I’ll get it. I just don’t got it yet. Nesting takes time.)

Again, a small problem in the scheme. But, in my stupid crazy, it’s a problem. In the scheme of things, I’m an idiot. I have people in my life who are sick, who are fighting with their health to just reach a balance where getting through a day is hell.

Finding the right climate is paramount.

By the way, my parents are moving to a warmer climate to ensure my dad’s continued health and to ensure my mother’s ability to make it, just in case, and another friend is having some incredibly difficult health issues and these are two other cans I can’t open because it’s easier to be shallow and hate my can’t-paint-hell then to remind myself of what an asshole I am for my trivial hell.

Yeah, pulling the normal card on this one. It’s easier to be pissed at my life than to feel how scared I am and worried for the people I love (mentioned and not). So, I have to consol myself. I might be a little crazy. But, I can only forgive myself for letting these things get to me since hell is relative.

Texting is dangerous

Remember Ross, the Greek God, Matthew McConaughey and Jeff Bridge’s baby, the sexy-ass brilliant pot-savant friend? The guy I’d known for years before every inch of my sexual being, which hadn’t been laid in forever, had succumbed and found its way into bed with? Still struggling to recall him? Go back to my Friday, February 12, 2010 post, “I’m Not Getting Laid Because I am Boring,” then check back.

Why bring up Ross? More than a couple of reasons. The first reason is that I must admit that I am realizing I might be an angry little bitch. As I went back to figure out which post Ross was in, so I could see what I wrote, I was a little taken back with the way I’d introduced Ross, a man who has one of the most beautiful hearts I’ve ever known. A man who I said I had nothing left to learn from, but, now, years later, I continue to think of with great affection and cherish how much we both learned from our time together.

In that long ago post, I talked so much about how lost Ross must have been in order to want to cheat on his girlfriend to be with me, but if I’m honest, I never admitted that I was lost enough then to need Ross to want to be with me. Fuck. Even if I wasn’t lost and probably way more damaged then Ross at the time, there’s just something about Ross. So much of what we shared together had so much more to do with where we were both trying to grow as individuals and very little to do with where either of us had fallen short up to that point. Plus, Ross made me laugh the kind of spontaneous laughter which makes soda pop come out of your nose. Very few men have done that.

Ross made me feel beautiful. Not because he chose to be with me while he was with someone else, but because every time I was with Ross I could see the best parts of me through his eyes. Over a year ago, I’d called Ross. It was tough to make the call, because, based on the sexual chemistry we’d always shared and the deepened friendship which had grown from our time together, I knew I’d be playing with fire and asking Ross to play with fire, too, but a dear friend of mine had a child in trouble and I knew Ross had some specific medical contacts which could help my friend’s child’s issue. (Again, I’m being vague on my friend’s child’s issue to keep specific people’s personal details out.)

When Ross called me back, he gave me the information I needed for my friend. Then, we quickly and easily fell into our laughter and caught up on each other’s lives. By the end of the call, Ross and I were in agreement. We’d acknowledged our mutual interest in hoping the best for each other in life and vowed from time to time we’d check in with each other to reinforce the friendship we’d built.

Anyway, the last reason I bring up Ross is to also admit how shitty my memory is. For starters, I can’t remember if I’ve blogged about Ross since the February 12, 2010 post. And, aside from the request from him for a contact for my friend’s child, I also can’t remember the last time I contacted Ross. But, apparently, it was not so long ago. On my way to getting a hold of one of my other friend’s whose name also starts with an “R” I must have been going through my numbers in my cell phone, I probably saw his name, I probably wondered how he was, I probably wondered if he was single now (not in a relationship with the last other girlfriend he was with since last we talked), and, with equal parts hope-you’re-doing-well and what’s-your-status, I must have sent him a text, left him a voice mail, or something, hoping me and my old friend and lover could lean on each other again like we did once before, but I don’t remember.

 But, he did. Because now, however many weeks or months later, he’s responded. Today, I got this text from him: "How are you? Hope all is well. Sorry bout the non reply, but I’m living with my girlfriend and you are a very dangerous person for me to be around, with lots of fond memories. I am sure you are as gorgeous and brilliant as ever. Love Ross."

I wanted to text Ross back, and say, “Ross, I’m an idiot. I honestly can’t remember contacting you. I’ve been so stressed and stupid lately, that I really I don’t know if I texted you or left you a message, or what, and I don’t remember when, so it’s a surprise to hear from you. So, thanks for getting back to me, but since I didn’t remember I contacted you, I wasn’t worried about the non reply. By the way, I could not agree more that we’re both dangerous for each other. Whether you know it or not, you are far more dangerous to me than I am to you. When I was with you, you made me forget me. You made me forget the hard in life because of how we laughed. I’ve always feared that seeing you again would have the same affect on me. You see, I’ve not been happy in life where work is concerned, so in the last two-ish years, I’ve gone from being so stressed by work that I couldn’t eat and lost 20 pounds to being only slightly less stressed and gaining back that 20 pounds plus 12 more.

Yes, Ross, my dear, sexy friend, it is true. While I’d love more than anything to go figure out again if we’re going to do it before or after we go out to some concert, or great dinner, and then settle on doing it before and after, I’m not fit for naked yoga in anyone’s living room right now. Worse truth be told, those smiling eyes you used to know now have the stress of the last two years bagging and blue-circling under them which tell the story of how the last two years have aged me more than the last decade and those years have been even less kind to my body. And, while I have had my dear family and just as dear friends to lean on, I’ve not found it in me to ask a lover or the likes to be another shoulder to lean on. Which means I’m not dating. I keep wanting to. I keep meaning to. But I keep not dating.

So, hearing from you, from what seems like out of the blue, even if it is obviously out of my own miserable memory failing me, I’m at more risk than you. But, that’s an awful lot to reply in a text.

Thus, I settled on sending the following reply: “Glad to hear you are in committed relationship. So, no worries on non reply. Don’t worry. I’m not dangerous any more. Still brilliant as ever (LOL) but stress, life, and time are fucking with the gorgeous part. Ha ha. Best to you, always! Take care. Stay true to your commitments.” Of course, he’ll know that I meant my gorgeous insides are melting as opposed to me being arrogant about my looks, but he’ll appreciate the humor. And, I know that’s a dangerous message to have sent him, but I’m not afraid to admit that getting a text from Ross today, on a day where my heart was beating out of my chest from work stress, was… Well, it was a reminder of how much Ross and I meant to each other for the time we were together.

We’d crossed paths for so many lessons and I’d be an ass not to acknowledge the affect one of my fellow travelers has had on me. I will always be just as fond of Ross as he is of me. Oh, and I'd be an extra asshole not to admit that I am an asshole and I'd love to send another text to Ross, saying, "BTW, hearing from you made my day," just to keep the connection open, because the asshole in me wants to play with fire, but everything in me that supports girl power, and not being the bitch who tempts a man, can't send that text. So, I won't. But, I wouldn't be human if I didn't admit I want to.

At least I can count

Sometimes work can be a four-letter word. (Okay, most of the time it is.) But, thank goodness for seven-letter words: friends. Wayne W. Dyer: 'Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.' Shit. I just tried to change. It didn't work. Work is still a four-letter word. But, at least I have seven-letter words to get me though it. :>)

Is it getting hard?

Is it getting hard yet? That’s a great question, isn’t it? Do you have an answer? Have you rubbed up against the truth long enough to start asking yourself, “Why is this getting harder instead of easier?”

If we’re on the right path, if we’re living a life of purpose, living the life we were meant to live, is that when it starts getting easier? I hope so. I also hope that I’m on my way, that I’ve finally figured out that the reason it seems to be getting harder and harder to fake my way through the corporate life is because I was never meant for it.

Is it all going to start getting easier? P-p-please, Universe! Guide us all. And, if you can, give me a little extra attention. Not because I’m special, but because, apparently, I’m special.

Who’n the fuck else takes as long as I have towards making a life change? Okay, most of us take a bit of time. Change is scary. But is everyone else as fit to be tied as I am? A little help? Tether me now before I’m lost. Seriously, I think I’ve moved away from being a panicky scaredy cat to an angry little ball of hiss.

Is that an improvement?

BTW, turns out I won’t have to share a room with my co-worker (manager?) when I travel for work next week. I’m still being asked to give up four nights of my life in a hotel room after bringing approximately 10 people up to speed on how their jobs have changed when many more of their counter parts have just been canned, but that’s pretty much the point I am making. If I don’t feel excited about what I am being asked to do, if this choice is not of my making, if this feels difficult instead of easy, there’s a chance I’m not on the right path.

Universe? Are you listening? If you are, could you also help me navigate the financial blow as I transition? Oh, and if there are any additional tips you could throw my way on how to get reasonable private healthcare when you have some pre-existing conditions and a less than desirable family health history, that’d be super.

Let's play a new game...

Instead of me giving my opinion, I am going to pose some questions and let you decide how you feel about what I’ve asked. I am not very confident that I can follow through with my side of this game, because I am prone to letting it rip, but let’s see how I do.

Is it appropriate for any representative of a company to ask an employee, who is being asked to travel on behalf of that company, if they would like their own hotel room or if they would like to share a hotel room with a fellow work associate? Have you decided? Yes? No? Okay, how about a little more? Is it appropriate for an employee to share a hotel room with their manager?

Have you tried to break this down further, deciding if the gender of the associate and/or the manager makes a difference? Have you decided why that would make a difference? Let me ask another question. Should a company ask an employee to sleep, shit, or shower in the same room as someone they work with? True, a lot of people shit at work, but do they change into their pajamas, undress, or snore in the same room as someone they work with? Does it still matter what the gender of that someone they work with is?

Have I been asked if I want to share a room with someone I report to while traveling? What do you think? How do I feel about that? What do you think?

Alright, I’m done.

No. I’m not. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? If you idiots can’t afford for me to get my own room, regardless of associate, reporting structure or gender, then maybe you shouldn’t ask me to travel. In what world is sharing a hotel room with someone you work with appropriate? Hasn’t anyone ever heard of the term HR nightmare?

Beyond the potential HR ramifications, am I the only one who knows the term work/life balance? Boundaries, anyone? What’s scary is that the person who asked me probably didn’t have a clue of how inappropriate the question was. This brings me back to my point. Why was the person who asked if I wanted to share a hotel room or wanted my own room put in that position to ask me in the first place?

How in the hell can a company that has somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 employees be so fucking stupid?

One last question. Has the world gone mad?

Leaning into it

A friend once said to me, "We all need to feel needed. You need to allow yourself to need others the way they need you. When you trust another person enough to share, it makes them feel good. They feel needed."

Wow. That’s a lot of need. Question: How many of us can actually say we’re better at trusting someone else than being trusted by them? Anyone? I’m betting not so many of us. It’s fucking scary to count on others.

We know it feels good to the people we lean on that we’ve entrusted them with a piece of our struggle. We know that no matter how small our need, when we break through our own walls we help to tear down the defenses of those we’ve called upon. As such, we are doing that relationship a service. To trust someone, and to reciprocate that trust, it's one of the most beautiful parts of our human experience. Still, we don’t lean into others willingly or easily, do we?

If you are anything like me, sometimes it's not about the basic need, or about sharing too much. It’s not even about whether or not you trust the person you have shared with and/or leaned on. Sometimes, it's about questioning how we feel about what we've shared. Sometimes, we haven't totally worked it out in our own heads yet. So, sometimes, if/when we put something out there, or sometimes, if/when we lean on someone else, before we've thought it through, we feel like we've exposed our self.

Put simply: We feel like we've opened up our innards for surgery without anesthesia. The tricky part is, we often don't know we weren't ready to leap, to lean, or to share, until after we've cut ourselves open and then think, "Fuck. I'm kinda bleeding here."

But, that's the thing. Life is life. It is a leap. That's the beauty.

And, we can do it alone, never sharing or leaning, never leaping forward or letting others in. We can do our best to make sure we never bruise or bleed. Or, we can do it together, sharing, leaning, loving, learning, and sometimes falling, but always getting back up because we have each other to lend a hand.

If this post seems like in any way I am appreciating the friends, the family, in my life again, and relishing in the fact that I have the kind of love in my life, the kind of people, who help me remember I don't have to do it alone, then I'm okay with being transparent.

If I didn't have people to lean on, I'd look for a way to stick a drill in my ear.

No, really, this isn't me.

What ever made me think I could continue to work in a corporate environment? How the hell have I survived this long, for the last 17 years, without throwing myself under a bus?

Man, I wanted to be so sweet in my last blog, and I wanted to be such a good girl in this one, but I can’t. Because when I say this to the VP, “One of the ways that I remain effective and available to the people I support is to make sure that they know that I am not management. That said, it’s imperative that I not communicate decisions and information which management should directly communicate to their staff, such as providing the details of why some employees have been fired and why many others have left the company,” and the VP translates that into telling someone else, “She’s right. She needs to remain close to the support so she can spy on them and tell us what they do wrong,” I can’t help but to blog about it.

My gangster wants to play. I want to tell the VP, “Listen, bitch, you’re making me want to bounce even more. But you’re doing me a favor, yo! Reminding me, I wasn’t made for this fool’s game. But check it. My fists are up. I ain’t gonna show you my back and tuck my mug in the corner like I’ve done before with other power trippers. You’re play’n me? You can’t play a player.”

I’d also like to know how I could think (even for a second) that I could get comfortable enough to forget that it’s not my destiny to work for someone else. It’s wickedly obvious that the universe is done tapping me on the shoulder. The last two years have been the smack in the face I needed. I’m not supposed to be comfortable.

I’m supposed to be afraid, every day, that if I don’t take action, if I don’t keep moving forward and doing whatever it takes to work it out with my art, with my writing, with making money from my creativity, I’m going to die. Either corporate life will be the death of me or I will kill myself. I will find my own fucking bus and figure out a way to drive over myself whilst I’m throwing myself at my bus.

I have a new prayer. Please God, Universe, Gus, Frank, Sally, Wendy, whoever, help me find the energy to make my dreams come true. Please guide me to be an inspiration, to be the story that worked, rather than the person who complained too much and did too little. NO, REALLY, please help me fight the propensity to be a part of my own problem. I want to be my solution.

Please let me be fabulous and not the stinky (complaining) kid no one wants to sit next to.

Where you running off to?

I figured something else out today, about myself, but before I tell you what, let me tell you how I arrived at this new but old conclusion on knowing myself. Don’t worry, the sad sack has been gone for a while, so any sarcasm you detect isn’t from my whoa-is-me, it’s from my I-can-call-a-spade-a-spade, even if I’m calling myself out.

The VP at my work came to see me today, to ask me, “Are you happy here? Do you have passion for what you do?” and to share with me, “I realize I haven’t gotten to know you. I don’t even know what you’re working on. I’d like to work more closely with you (insert my new immediate manager’s fake name here—let’s go with Mika) since Mika has a lot on her plate. Oh, and we also may look into moving you to a new location.”

Translation: “Are we happy with you? Who the fuck are you?” and tell me, “Have you really proven yourself yet? What have you done for us so far? Why does Mika seem to appreciate you so much and yet the rest of us don’t know what she appreciates? And, by the way, I am a bit of a micro manager so when I say new location, I mean I might move you from the office which makes sense (since it is six physical feet from the room where you perform one of your major functions for our company) to a place which doesn’t make sense, which is to the opposite corner of the floor into a cube right outside of my office. I will do this for no other reason than the fact that I want you to know I have power over you. I also think it would be a great idea if you met my boss, if you maybe gave her a shorter version of one of our recent projects.”

Before I tell you how I responded, I have a quick question. How is it that I now work for someone like Mika, one of the best people I’ve ever worked for, EVER, and Mika not only knows what goes into doing my job (because she’s done it, and therefore understands the experience and skill it takes to do it well, she also knows I’ve produced a fucking truck load of sorely-needed material where there was a major gap, so she leaves me the fuck alone and let’s me do it. Yet, I now also work in an environment which makes thirty percent of the people who work with me cry during the day and the other forty percent either go home at night and drink or they act out sexually.

Okay, so I made up those percentages and the results thereof. But, I am trying to drive the point home that one of my best friends works in the same type of environment as I now work within, for a different company, and she does the kind of work my job function supports, and I have watched anxiety and depression take a little more from this friend every day. (Yes. I am actually talking about a friend and not me, even though it sounds a lot like my recent experiences.)

Ain’t all work a muther fucker? But, what if your work required you to endure external customers yelling at you all day, calling you names, and insulting you personally because they are unhappy with the company you work for? That’s the environment the people I support work within. (God, I’m such a long-winded bitch when I am trying to maintain my anonymity and protect the identity of those I love and of those I talk shit about).

How did I answer the VP? I said, “You have no idea how much I’ve enjoyed working here. And this office, being able to work uninterrupted, I can’t believe how conducive it has been to my productivity. If it seems like a lot of the team doesn’t know me, it’s probably because I haven’t really been invited to any of the meetings. But, I am so glad you mentioned it, because I was just thinking last week, as I came up for air with from all the work I’ve been so focused on, that I should be included more. Yes, per your request, first thing tomorrow I will give you a list of all the projects I’ve been working on.”

What was I really thinking? Okay, so you are a micro manager, but I respect that you haven’t been up my ass so far. Now, it kinds feels like I am going to have to ask you to move in order for me to take a shit.

It would have been fun to get all gangster on the VP’s ass, though, and said, “Look, I’m a’ight here, but it ain’t no picnic, yo! Your peeps are hurting. They’re going home wounded at night. I gotta play the line, baby, and keep it real with the ground forces. I know I’m profile, you want me out there, but I got my fingers on the pulse and I’ve been doing what needs to get done. I’m working this playground, girl, and trying to make this grass grow for both of us. You want the low down? I’ll hook you up. My throw down list will blow your mind. I’ve kicked more ass up in here than you even know. I feel you now. Even though you want to run the game on the yard, and want to intimidate me with meet’n the high roller, I might still feel the love. I might just chill now that you came to see me. But check back. If you start play’n me, I’ll bounce, bitch. I know how to roll.”

Now, I’ll make my point. This is what I’ve realized about myself. When it comes to making points, it takes me a hot, sweaty, wait for it… drawn-out minute to make them. Sorry. That obviously wasn’t my point, but I couldn’t help myself.

I’m a runner. That’s the truth. The question I find myself asking today, and it’s the same question you should ask yourself (work or play), is, “Are you running from or to?”

You know, in the book I haven’t finished yet (perhaps procrastination and the psychology behind it should be my next topic), the main character is a runner. I probably made her that way because I understand running. But I think the difference between her and me is that I created her to run from love yet I run from work. And, since she runs from love, she runs from men.

I don’t run from men, or from love. Not really. I’ve not had much of a reason to run from men. When I was younger, I didn’t know how to use my gut, so I was too stupid to run from my mistakes. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned not to be stupid and to trust my gut. And, since my gut has only gotten better, and the red flags have always gotten brighter, if love is in front of me (which is rare and I’ll take it when I can get it), no matter how scary it can be, it feels stupid to run (especially if it feels like I can learn as I love).


How is running from work different than running from love? Maybe it’s not. Maybe it is. When is the battle worth fighting and when is it better to take flight? IN love, I’ve always known the answer, or thought I did. My gut has been the guide.

In work, I haven’t always known. Or, at least, I don’t think I do, that’s why the last few years have gone down the way they have.

I guess when it comes to the people I have to spend eight hours a day with, when it comes to authority, to people who have control over how I pay for my life, when it comes to compromising my ultimate path, or when my independence and security are tampered with, if it doesn’t fit, if it doesn’t feel good, if it hurts, if it’s scary, check the door and check the temperature, because the door was already open and I was ready to bolt before the room got too hot.

I’m sure where work is concerned, my gut has also guided me. But, again, I have more trouble reading the map. Maybe I’ve never been comfortable putting my financial affairs into anyone else's hands because that’s not where my affairs ultimately belong.

Again, now that I am working for a great manager, Mika, and not a totally villainous VP, let’s just see if procrastination, panic, general apathy, and/or comfort sets in as I find my way back to healing in the work place. Time may still be revealing the VP’s character, but my concern is that the power-hungry, estrogen/fear-driven persona I met during the initial interview process may be exactly who she is.

It's so sad that my last job gave me PTSD. (If only that was a joke.)

God help me. I want that sense of accomplishment at work back again, but don’t let me get so comfortable that I forget it’s not my destiny to work for someone else. Maybe this blog has always been about me finding my love in my work. If so, seriously, God, help me! I want to run to my destiny not from my fear.

What’s really going on?

I will tell you what’s going on. I don’t want to find the other beige sock that goes with the light brown loafers. I don’t want to iron another pleat or cold wash another appropriate cotton and polyester blend blouse. I don’t want to pack my lunch the night before. I don’t want go to bed at 9:30 pm or wake up at 5:30 am. I don’t want to comb my hair or put on mascara.

Instead, I want to stay up as long as the creative juices are flowing and I want to sleep in and get up when I am damn well good and ready. I want to wear flip flops. I want a pair of yoga pants to be my daily uniform. I only want to put on make up when I have plans.

In other words, I’m getting it. The last few years have been about the universe telling me that I need to work for myself. Have we covered this? Am I just daft and I take nine blows to the head until I am called to action?

Trouble is, my creative juices have been dried up lately. I haven’t felt much like writing or painting. So, I’ve decided I need to steal from my prior self. That’s why I’m getting off my ass and trying to license some of my previous paintings to see if I can make money off my images.

It’s going to take an initial financial investment, and so far it’s taken it’s time toll (in keeping up the momentum, I’ve gotten a head cold), but fortunately, I’ve gotten what I’ve asked for so I can’t slow down now. All these years I’ve know what a horrible administrative/business person I am and I've hoped I could find someone to do it for me or tell me how to do it when it comes to making money off my art. "Where or where is the art manager or consultant for me to trust and light a fire under me?" I've asked.

Turns out, no one is going to do it for anyone, so the universe sent me someone to tell me how to do it. I've met that consultant and she's started me on my way.

More later… I’ve got to get some nose spray now so that I can breath. (God, I’m a head case in more ways than one.)

Am I baked?

What the fuck? I have so many other things I could post, update on, etcetera, but, apparently, this is me checking in and asking, "Is the pot smoking from the downstairs neighbor giving me a contact high?"

I'm not kidding. I always smell my downstairs neighbor's cigarette smoke and pot smoke rise up through the pipes and hit me in my bathroom. (I still can't figure out how the fumes get isolated and rise up to my bathroom, but they do.) But, until now, tonight, I had only smelled the cigarette smoke and/or pot smoke coming up through the bathroom.

The smoke is now more aggressive. It is rising up through the plumbing, the pipes, the carpet, the walls, and the what-ever-the fuck, and doing so so aggressively that I not only am getting a smoke/sinus headache, I'm pretty sure I'm going to get enough of a contact hit that I am going to go to bed high.

Good night.

Pick your battles and your friends wisely

There you are, in the Trader Joe’s check-out line, standing behind some strange woman with mostly black but also slightly burnt-reddish hair, and you’ve got a million things going on in your mind. You think to yourself, I’m tired. I don’t want to go to the grocery store. But I want my green-leaf lettuce for salads, and I also need to get— Fuck! I don’t want to go to the grocery store. But, if I don’t go, then I’ll have to go tomorrow. I’ll also have a crappy lunch, because I’ll have to walk to get fast food and my toe hurts.

Your mind is so preoccupied with what you’ve done, and what you have to do, that you don’t see the person in front of you, you just see someone standing in front of you. You’re just waiting for your turn to pay.

In my case, my mind was busy thinking about the copies I’d just made, 30 minutes ago, for my up-and-coming court appearance where I was scheduled to discuss the appeal I’d filed to the State of California. It would be decided whether or not it was a financial hardship for me to pay back the $4,500 in unemployment benefits the state awarded me. As I was thinking about lettuce, I was realizing that I’d spent a year of my life stressed out of my mind working for a woman who I felt was the source of my misery. I know now, she was just a catalyst and I have a lot of work to do. But that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve spent another year fighting to prove I was justified in receiving the benefits the state awarded me because of this boss and the environment she set forth.

That’s two years of my life re-living something I desperately want to be in my rear-view mirror. That’s two years of my life giving up my power. I’ve wanted to be done with this energy for so long now, I even planned an apology blog, saying how sorry I was that I didn’t realize sooner that it was never my right to use my pain, my hurt, or my anger in a blog to complain against my previous boss, or the boss before, both human beings.

My whole life, all I’ve ever wanted was for people not to hurt each other. This need started earlier than I can remember, but there are events in my life which have stacked up, and I can recall me saying, in one way or another, “Hey, you can’t do that to someone else! You can’t take from them while you are trying to give to yourself. That’s not fair!”

Everything always has to be fair with me. I think it’s deplorable for someone else to step on the back of someone weaker as they attempt to grow stronger. Yet, in my efforts to gain back my own strength, I’ve been unfair to the people who are probably my soul mates.

If you are thinking WTF?, let me explain.

Bad bosses, difficult friends, challenging mates, intensely-negative chance encounters, they are all people who may have agreed to enter into a contract with us, to return and assist us with the lessons we asked to learn. Hard or easy lesson, they are our soul mates. Another theory? You’re either learning and paying dues, because life is a sentence, or you’re on the path to your happiness, because life is an experience to seek fulfillment from. Either way, I’ve not been fair. And, since I’ve allowed myself to be free in this blog, and not always check myself (when it comes to spelling or being a big of enough person to let go of my own hurt and anger), I’m sending out an apology.

To any boss I’ve worked for who I felt wronged me:

If somehow my blog gets circulated and my attempt to grow while I seek happiness affects you adversely, I’m sorry. I’m just as much of a fraud as the rest of us. Only, in this moment, I am able to recognize that you deserve better than my unfairness.

(Check back with me tomorrow, and I might call you an asshole again. HEY! I’m human, too!)

Back to the check-out line.

My mind was whirling, desperate to catch itself up with something other than my stresses at hand, so I started to dissect the woman in front of me. She’s got thinner arms than me and no cellulite, I thought. Good for her. She’s obviously older than me and I’m never going to have arms like that at her age. She doesn’t have much of an ass. Eh, well, it probably looks better than mine will when I get older. Shit, she has bags under her eyes. The bags under my eyes are only going to get worse and probably put hers to shame.

Then, realizing I was not seeing the stranger in front of me for the whole woman she was, but was, instead, just dissecting her individual parts to escape my own mind, I didn’t stop myself. Hey, I needed the diversion. So, I did the chick check all of us gals do. You know, when we compare ourselves to another woman to gauge where we are.

I thought: if I am being honest with myself, she looks better than I am going to look when I get older if I keep going at this stress rate. I even thought about what Vican has said to me. “Negative energy and stress, it can age you more than anything else.”

Got that right, sister. I hardly recognize myself when I look in the mirror. I seem so much older than I’ve ever thought I’d look. I can’t remember seeing such a weighted gravity behind my eyes. Nor do I recall seeing the visual evidence (the dark circles and bags) of the weight I’ve been carrying.

I’m not the only one carrying a lot, though. Lyta and I were talking the other night, and we agreed that the world has gone a little mad. It’s time for this bad economy to wake people up, so we can all realize what’s really important. But that is not what’s happening yet. Everyone is still chasing fires. Many of us are chasing our tails, growing more and more fearful. The fear is palpable in the work place and it’s affecting our personal lives.

Sadly, I’m still experiencing a difficult work condition, asking myself if I am in the right environment yet, as, just in the last two weeks, four people were canned and two others resigned. Another cried to me at lunch as she told me she couldn’t take the stress our work environment was offering her.

“I can’t do it. The negativity is too much here,” she said. I felt like I was watching myself meltdown before I’d walked away from my last employer. About 40 minutes later, after only two days back on the job, she walked out after lunch and went back on Leave of Absence; joining approximately 6 other employees also out on LOA. (Considering the department I work for only has about 55 employees, that’s about 10% out on leave and 10% canned or fired. Did I do the math right? Just saying.) Another person at work confided in me that she couldn’t eat lunch in the break room. “They’re all just talking about how much they hate their job. I can do that at home,” she said.

I had another friend, who works for a different company, who has admitted that she hates weakness, confide in me that she just had her first panic attack at work and can now understand how horrible it feels. She also confided that there’s too much weighing her down.

After telling Lyta all of this, she says she’s decided that anxiety, depression, stress, and anxiety attacks are NOT a sign of weakness. They’re simply signs of having tried to remain strong for way to long.” (Of course, she’s brilliant, and right.)

It was time for me to take the pay spot. The woman in front of me was about to leave the store and it was my turn to pay for my goods. As the clerk asked her, “Do you need a bag?” and she responded, “No. I live close,” I felt guilty for making my way up to the cash register. Had I encroached on her territory too soon? It sure felt like I had.

I wanted to make good on the energy I felt I’d soured by being anxious to knock out one more errand, so I scrambled to focus on something I could make a light comment about. The woman was buying flowers. There was a small graphic stamped onto the clear cellophane which the flowers were wrapped within. The graphic looked like the old-style blue and yellow California license plates. There it was, the simple something I could turn into a light exchange to engage a stranger and give my silent sorry for getting in her space.

“Oh, that’s cute. Made-in-California,” I said, as I pointed to the graphic. But, I can’t remember her response. It was something like, “Argh,” or, “Harrumph,” or, “Eggh,” but I can’t say for sure. My eyes followed her walking away from me and that’s when I thought: Well, I guess I didn’t smooth that one over, did I?

Then, my brain kind of bounced between my ears. Wait! What the fuck!? I know that walk, that hunkered-down, shoulder-slumped purposeful swagger. That’s the Mr. Burns gate. That was not a Simpsons encounter I just had. That strange woman who was standing in line in front of me was my old boss.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT!

Screech! Quick. Turn to the cashier. Find your ground. Figure it out.

“Oh, shit! That was weird,” I said to the young brunette girl scanning and bagging my goods. “I’ve been in a court case for almost a year and the woman who just left your checkout line is the person who made my life miserable for a year before that. I can’t believe I didn’t recognize her until she walked away.”

The cashier clutched her chest. “Oh my gawd. Are you serious?”

I was still reeling. I looked to see if my old boss was totally gone from the store, then, in almost a whisper, I said, “Yeah. I’m serious as a fucking heart attack. I mean, her hair is now almost black and it used to be more red, and it’s now four inches longer, but still, I can’t believe I didn’t recognize her. I wonder if she recognized me.”

The clerk said, “Yeah. I thought I felt a weird energy there. I don’t know.”

Now, as I write this, it still mystifies me that I didn’t recognize my old boss. The only explanation I have is that I am done. So fucking done. I want to put this shit behind me. I was done a long time ago, but I didn’t recognize it. I am sure that if this life is for lessons, I haven’t yet learned how to deal with authority, with people who exert their power (their pain) over others, but I have learned which battles are important to keep fighting. This one isn’t. No matter how broke I am, $4,500 is not worth my sanity.

Yup. I’m out. I hope one day that my old boss can forgive my anger, can forgive herself, and can find the same peace I am just grazing the surface at and wish I could get to so much sooner. But, whether she’s already found peace, and I’m still the asshole scrambling, or we’re both just as lost, I’m done with this exchange. It’s not useful anymore. It hasn’t been for a while.

Still, that day I kept asking myself how it was possible that I didn’t pick up on her energy sooner and recognize her when I am so sensitive to energy. I kept telling myself: Maybe it’s because that energy is supposed to be behind you. But, I wasn’t sure if that was it yet.

It was not until I appeared before the appeals judge for the case I had been preparing for that day that I truly realized that I wanted— No, needed, this experience in my life to be finished.

Ultimately, I still don’t know what my lessons are. I still don’t have a firm grasp on my happiness. But, after meeting with the judge, I realized, at the very least, that money has been a major reoccurring fear in my life. So much so that it’s consumed many of my decisions pertaining to security and I’ve had enough of that fear. Or, at least I want to have had enough.

But, before I visited In-and-Burger (for the tenth time in the last four months) after my meeting with the judge, and before I realized that I was not going to see anyone from my previous employer’s office during that meeting with the judge, and before I questioned the receptionist at the California office of appeals (or whatever it was called), and asked, “Is anyone from my previous employer going to be here?” as my ever-threatening tears remained at bay, I hadn’t yet recognized the need for the end.

I do remember the drive to the Appeals office, though. As I tried to figure out where I could park, so I wouldn’t incur the debt of another parking ticket (I’d gotten one that morning just outside my apartment), I was feeling bad for Lindsay Lohan. I asked myself: Who cares what Lindsay has done or hasn’t done? Who, amongst us, would want their drama played out and exploited in front of millions?

Later that night, as my belly (my mostly-three-years-of-being a vegan stomach) did it’s best to work up even more enzymes to deal with the meat and cheese emotional coma I attempted to induce, I thought about the judge I’d met with. (Before I get to the meeting with the judge, I need to ask: why does it always have to by so extreme with me? When I am stressed, I either can’t eat or I want to eat the couch with my French fries, my quesadilla, and my salted and enriched snack. Can we get a happy medium here?)

Anyway, I kept thinking about how hard the judge’s job was. I thought about when I was in my late 20s and I was on a jury where we had to decide if this guy was guilty or not of building a pipe bomb. (Wait. I hope I am allowed to write about this and not break the law.) Our job as a jury was to make a decision based on the facts. Emotions weren’t supposed to play a part of the equation.

I think I was the youngest one on the jury, as I only recall mostly business men (old guys) and barely remember if there were any women. It might as well have been 12 Angry Men and me. Okay, so the dudes weren’t that angry, but they were pretty damn adamant in their path forward.

They all wanted to enter a plea of guilty for this guy because two of his fingers, his thumb and his pointer, were missing. He didn’t even have stumps. He just had skin over the knuckles.

Yet, I kept saying, “But his two missing fingers are not the evidence that was presented to us. We are not allowed to make assumptions based on our emotion or based on what we can see. We are only supposed to decide based on the evidence presented to us.”

Against my trepidation, and in spite of fearing the wrath of these powerful older dudes, over and over I kept repeating my understanding of our task at hand. Finally, based on the evidence that was presented, which we all finally agreed didn’t prove guilt, our jury was hung.

Maybe it was that experience which allowed me to be okay with whatever the judge decided. Maybe I saw the fairness of the law in this judge. Maybe I couldn’t hate the judge because he looked like Tim Kang, the actor who plays Kimball Cho in The Mentalist. (Tim Kang is one of my secret crushes.) Maybe, I was just DONE.

Whatever the judge decided, I’d decided that putting this experience behind me really was more important. Now, more than ever, I understand what it means to pick your battles. If the fight to hold on is costing you more than you will lose if you let go, it’s not a battle worth fighting.

How come this took me so long to figure out?

It’s a good thing that I’d made the decision that I wasn’t going to fight for $4,500, an amount so small in comparison to moving forward, because when I got the letter yesterday that I had lost the battle, my instinct was to keep fighting. Jen and I were on the phone together, as I was driving home from a tough day within a tough work week, when I parked my car, checked my mail, saw the envelope from the EED, and then went upstairs to open the envelope and accept the verdict.

“Hold on,” I told Jen. “I’m opening the envelope now. I guess we’ll both find out together.” I read the high points out loud to Jen. “The decision is final unless appealed within 20 days from the date of mailing… .” I sucked in a breath and continued. “Any person who is overpaid unemployment insurance benefits is liable for repayment… .” More breath sucking. Tears starting. Then I finished reading what I knew was coming. “In the present case, the claimant was paid $4,500 in benefits to which she was not entitled.”

“I guess that’s it,” I said to Jen. “It never mattered, my appeal. The law had already decided my fate before I started fighting.” Then, I felt the panic ensue. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. I didn’t want to live it anymore. I couldn’t afford it anymore, financially or emotionally. It didn’t matter that I’ve been $139.00 in the hole every month and that my new job doesn’t pay me enough to pay for my life and that I’m not only going more and more into debt, I am still not happy at work. I couldn’t breath. I had to get off the phone.

What I didn’t tell Jen, is that I was overwhelmed that I still had another phone call ahead of me that I didn’t want to make. I was pissed that I knew it was going to take more out of me. It was going to take me many days of dialing and waiting time, and possibly more than once call, where I would have to figure out how, during work hours, I’d work out a monthly re-payment plan with an EED representative (and finally, finally, put a part of my life I was eager to have behind me, behind me) all the while figuring out how to keep up with the demands of my present job because the only time I could get this resolved was during work hours.

Once that phone call (or calls) was made, I knew I could breathe again. But I still had that ahead of me, and that meant I still had some battle to do when there wasn’t any more fight left in me. So, trying to avoid the panic, I was desperate to get off of the phone with Jen. “I have to go. I need to process this.”

I hung up. Then, I cried. But, only for about five minutes. Then, I decided to write. But, only enough to get an outline down so I could process what I could. Now, I’m finishing this. But, I know there are gaps and brain mishaps. I don’t care.

I can’t say if I’ve processed it all. It may take more time. But, I don’t want to write about it anymore. It’s been said that to conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom (they said that on the television show The Finder). Here is to hoping that I am starting my wisdom. Here’s is to my hope that I won’t let my fears be stronger than my faith.

Here is to thanking my friends for getting me through this. I know sometimes we all feel ordinary when it appears that we are standing alone. But, when we stand together we are extraordinary. We are fabulous. Better than fabulous. We are friends.

Thank you, my friends. I’d be lost without you.

I swore; I wasn’t going to do this.

Here’s the skinny. Years ago, the almost-daily emails exchanged between one of my closest friends and I was the inspiration for wanting to write the book I’ve neglected to finish. This close friend of mine was so impressively vehement in her search for her One, she was going on at least 3 and sometimes 5, 6 on-line dates per week. There would be a 15 minute coffee date here and an extended dinner date there. Not long before she had accumulated almost 60 dates, I couldn’t remember the names of the guys she was and was not interested in. Only the situations stood out.

“Is this the scary guy, where you walked in and out of the coffee shop when you saw him, or is this the other guy you know isn’t any good for you, but who you’re still totally attracted to and going on a second date with?” I’d ask. “No, no. This is the other guy who I wasn’t going to go out with at all, but now I’m going to give a chance to,” she’d say.

Back and forth our emails sailed, and born was the idea for a book that was originally going to be called Fe-mails, a title another very close and clever friend of mine came up with for a book that was supposed to be about two great friends who were serial on-line daters. But, over time, the book told me it wanted to be something more than just a compilation of emails about on-line dating adventures.

Once I relinquished control to the bigger story that seemed to want to prevail, and, as I amalgamated a main character who was born from the stories of my friends, from my own life’s tales, and from the experiences of the beautiful women I’ve met in my life over the last 30+ years (some of which came from two-minute grocery-store-checkout line encounters), it became my hope that the story I was telling would respectfully represent the bliss and grief of the estrogen experience as seen through the main character’s journey and desire for growth.

But, before the new story emerged, and before I could start backing my way into all of the emails I’d collected from my vigorously on-line dating friend, which I was still going to use in part, I needed some personal experiences of my own. Isn’t a writer is supposed to write what they know? Aren’t writers supposed to start from the truth before they can create fiction?

As an aside, that would explain why it’s sometimes emotionally difficult to write—to recount—my own non-fiction life. When I don’t get to twist the truth, to come up with a different outcome, it makes me feel a little twisted. I’d rather start with what I know and then end up with what I’m rearranging. That way, I’m simply telling a story as apposed to feeling harnessed by the truth.

I felt guilty that my primary goal for going on-line was to apprehend the reality of on-line dating. I’d be using unsuspecting men for the purpose of gaining insight. But, it was easy to console my guilty conscious. I knew whatever information I’d gathered that would end up on paper wouldn’t be their truth, or my truth, it would be what I took from the truth to tell a different story.

The truth is, I became so dedicated in my desire to develop a story that would speak to many women, that it became difficult for me to recognize the tales I’d used from my own life or from the life of others. Once the tales were absorbed into main character’s color, they came out with a different sets of circumstances and resulting emotions.

What I did continue to battle with was the idea that, during my field research, I might actually meet someone. I didn’t feel any differently then than I do Now. I didn’t think I would meet the One on line and didn’t particularly want to meet him that way. However, I was much more open to being wrong then than I am Now. Then, I was willing to explore every possibility.

Now, I’m questioning whether or not my intuition has gotten keener, and that’s why it feels even less like on-line dating will work for me, or if the inability to go against my gut isn’t what is really in play here.

F’eghh! Do you see what I’m battling? After a long-ass hiatus, I’m finally, finally, open to love again. Or, am I?

If I was truly open, then it shouldn’t matter how love comes to me, right? So why do I vehemently prefer love to find me regular style? I want a man to see me as I am, not as he imagines me to be from my on-line picture. I want to see a man as he is, and then trust the energy I’m getting from him. I want to get the flutter, feel my weird gut rudder thing, and then have that potential guide me to the next ping.

Put simply, my gut is useless to me when it comes to on-line dating. I can’t get a read on a guy from my computer, which means I’ll have to talk to him on the phone and that still isn’t going to give me the read I want. So then, I will have to meet him in person to see where my inner rudder guides me.

Do you know how much time that takes? That’s going to take at least 15 minutes on the phone. Approximately 45 minutes of getting ready for a date you are not even sure you want to go on. Then, depending on what kind of a date you set, you have to give up another 20-60 minutes, or more, before you can gracefully bow out and try the process all over with another guy.

That’s anywhere from an 1 ½ - 2 hours of time I’ve given up to figure out what takes me less than a minute if I’ve already met the guy. Does someone have a bad attitude?

Me! I do. Which is why I swore I wasn’t going to turn my blog into any version of a bitch spot for what ticks me off about on-line dating. But, I’m a habitual liar so I’ve got some bitching to do.

A handsome-as-hell French man sent me an email, which read: Let's meet. Call me (number inserted here.) Then, during the course of a mostly forced conversation, which was going like most conversations go that stem from an on-line connection, he asked, “When are you going to be in my neighborhood so we can meet?”

That’s when my but cheeks clenched up for the fifth time and I wanted to put a drill into my ear. Go, brain matter. Spill out, now. We’ve lost our battle. On-line dating will never make sense to us.

Really? Frenchie? You saw my zip code. You contacted me. Now I’m supposed to make the hour drive to get to you, the man, after one email and a 15 minute conversation? Ah, Frenchie. You’re blowing it. During our little chit chat (our what’s-your-story exchange), I’d already told you that I was old-fashioned. “I’ve always felt the man is supposed to at least make the effort for the first date,” I’d said. Yet, you came back with, “Okay, fine. We’ll meet in the middle.”

Be still, my heart. A good-looking Frenchman, who is probably used to getting women to jump through hoops, doesn’t appear to want me to be an exception. Why, oh why, is it that the internet makes men lazy. I’ve never in my life had a man that I’ve met regular style ask me to drive his way for a date.

What’s more disturbing is that the only time my ass cheeks have ever seized is during the various phone conversations I’ve had with prospective on-line dates. I’m an intensely comfortable social creature. This is not about talking to someone I’ve only just met. I’ll meet you’re grandmother in the cheese aisle and she’ll tell me about her bone-on-bone arthritis and the surgery she’s going to have next week. You’re brother, who just got out of jail and wants to live a drug free live now, he’s confiding in me, too. The cute guy at the bar, the one I’ve been talking to for a half of an hour and still don’t have any idea if he’s interested in me, he doesn’t make my ass pucker, either.

Sorry, Frenchie. Whatever percentage of me that was previously open to the just-in-case scenario while I was accumulating first-hand knowledge about on-online dating for my book is now an insanely minuscule percentage in comparison. My ability to budge sucks now, so you are going to have to come at my arsenal, my intuition, my cocooned resistance, and my age-found confidence, with something better than, “I was just kidding. Fine. I’ll drive your way if that’s what you really want.”

What am I missing here? Is this my age? Am I so set in my ways that I have worked my self into an unyielding corner? How is it possible that the girl who used to be a hopeless romantic would rather watch an episode of How I Met Your Mother than follow up on a possible ass-net lead?

Kill me now.

I no longer know if this is me being comfortable in my skin, me being arrogant in spite of whatever insecurities I have, or me being trepidatious because I’m going against my gut.

One last question: Is my confusion the privilege or the curse of getting older?

Ready. Set. GO!

Well, here we are. This blog post has been a long time coming with all of the changes going on in my life.

But, before I go on, with what is going to be one hell of a long blog entry, I’ve got a question. Why do I keep calling my blog entries posts? If, from the beginning, I always intended this blog to be more of an on-line book, then shouldn’t my on-line book entries (long blog posts) be called blong entries, like my friend Rod calls them? How about blong-ass entries? Better?

Another question: How the hell am I going to wrap this thing up? Don’t misunderstand me. I have no intention of abandoning my blog once the so-called on-line book portion has concluded. You can count on me to continue to post at a snail’s pace. I just imagine my blong entries will be shorter, more post like. (Who am I kidding? I’m definitely a blonger, not a blogger.) But this brings me to my point. Life—more specifically my non-fiction life—isn’t like a fiction book (on-line or otherwise). Ultimately, I don’t get to decide what happens. None of us do. That’s life.

Sure, our decisions and choices may alter the trajectory of our life. That’s cause and effect 101. But, we cannot manipulate happenstance. That’s entry-level learning to surrender. Or, in my case, that’s rinse and repeat until you get that resistance retard out. So, if I’m fresh out of creative control when it comes to concocting a tidy conclusion for the part of my life that has evolved during the course of what I’m considering the on-line-book portion of my blog, then, once again, how the hell am I going to wrap this thing up? I can no more align the circumstances that unfold in my life than you can decide on or against the doozies that come up in yours. Therefore, I’m at a loss when it comes to culminating a series of posts that would suffice as a conclusion to this on-line book.

Nevertheless, try as I might to control the uncontrollable, and continue to fail as I obviously will, if I can’t get my life to go exactly as I’m trying to create, I am hopeful that at the very least I will get some of my perspective back and that I will finally learn to surrender to the journey more and resist against the process less. Still, I can’t help but wonder if there will be a natural outcome, some sort of closure, befitting of how this blog started almost two years ago, with me inspired, unabashedly hopeful (for every possible outcome), and even wondering if love would find me.

About eight months have passed since the great meltdown of 2011. That’s what I’m calling my reaction to my dad’s quadruple bypass and to the stress of working for two back-to-back power-hungry, energy-sucking bosses for almost three years. If you’ve got another description for me, other than meltdown, one which more adequately describes my decision to quit my job the day after my father was taken off of his breathing tube, and then, consequently, decide to move to Colorado because I was afraid my own life/job stress would result in me having a heart attack, then let’s have it. Because, even though I’d had some of my friends tell me that I was brave for daring to re-arrange my entire life by moving to another state, in hindsight “brave” is not exactly the word I’d choose right now.

Can I get another vote for insane? You’d have to be a little bit batty or feeling a lot pushed into a corner by your life to leap so far and to not consider the consequential after math. What did my frisky life leap get me? Initially, more shit to meltdown over. But, most of the melting is over and I can now write it all down because I finally feel like I might be getting my sense of humor back.

I realize that I have so much less to grumble about in life than most. In the scheme of it all, I’m blessed. After all, I didn’t just quit my job. I walked off the job just before lunch and didn’t really tell them I wasn’t coming back. But, fortunately, because I do have the kind of friends who will open up their home to a girl gone crazy I was able to move in with one of my best friends, Jen. Then, when I realized I might have made a mistake, that I am not a Colorado girl after all, one of my other best friends, Samantha, and her husband, Gary, and their two kids, Bethany and Julian, and their two dogs, Cookie and Freo, and their cat, Twitch, and their turtle, Ed, opened up their home to me.

How lucky am I? I not only had one of my best friends offer me an exit plan when the only plan my crazy had was to stop crying all the time because I wasn’t happy with how my life was going. When my tears had started to dry, and when I was ready to get back to the business of being the real me again, Samantha and Gary provided me with a return plan and offered me their converted-garage guest room as a stepping stone to getting my finances and my shit back together.

Yeah, walking off the job can fuck you up financially. Crazy doesn’t pay. Well, it does and it doesn’t. It depends on if you’re asking the state of California or one of the state’s judges. (We’ll get to that.)

Did I mention that the guest room I stayed in at Samantha and Gary’s home, from early July to the first day in October, didn’t have a bathroom, just a small portable potty, like the kind you’d take camping? Shit. Now it sounds like I’m complaining again. I’m not. I am merely sharing that no matter how much one appreciates the blessings in their life, one should never take for granted just how much of a luxury a flushing toilet is. This I so get and will never forget every time I flush.

Because when you have to pee at 3:00 am, and you have a choice to make: (1) walk from the converted-garage guestroom to the main house, in a half-asleep state, across approximately 40 feet of backyard grass and pavement and attempt to avoid the gifts on the green which Samantha and Gary’s dogs, Cookie and Freo, have left behind right outside of your door, or (2) contribute to filling up your own pee and tissue into the available portable potty—which you’ll inevitably be emptying every other day, it’s easy to learn to be grateful for the little things in one’s every-day life like indoor plumbing.

What a beautiful thing it is to be able to stumble into your own bathroom where a porcelain thrown and a magic chrome-covered handle await you and will flush all of your business away. Ah, perspective.

Until I had my melt down, I never thought about how lucky I’ve been to have lived a single life where I’ve been able to afford rent on a place of my own, a place where it’s always been possible to leave the bathroom door wide-open while taking a crap in the early am. There have never been any little girls silently lurking around bathroom-door corners who suddenly appear and ask, “Aunt, Lev? Are you pooping?” Not having to empty out my own pee into another toilet every other day for about three months, that’s also not something I ever would have considered I’d appreciate not having to do.

Again, if it sounds like I am slamming the offering of Samantha and Gary’s guestroom, it’s quite the contrary. In fact, it was living with Samantha and Gary, and their beautifully raised and well-mannered children, and, before that, living with Jen and her precious little girls, which has made me realize, Now more than ever, that with everything that has been going on with my life, if it wasn’t for my friends, for the beautiful family I have, I might have already broken in half.

Nah. Fuck breaking in half. I might have broken into a million pieces that wouldn’t have gone back together.

However, because of my friends, and because of the shoulders, ears, and places to stay they’ve lent me, I’ve only occasionally broken off into smaller bite-sized awkward pieces. Too bad many of the disagreeable fragments that have chipped off have been inadvertently reserved for an unsuspecting public.

You know you’re crazy is showing when the expression on the post-office attendant’s face says, “Um, hun? Could I get you a Xanax? You’re starting to drip in front of me.”

Damn it! My brain fought against Ms. Post Office’s pointed and concerned attention. I’d thought I’d been swift enough to pull my sunglasses down over the puddles starting to pool in the corners of my eyes before this stranger could see the emotional hit I wanted to hide. Too late, m mess was up and out. Lookie, lookie we have a loony loose.

Poor Ms. Post, she had no way of knowing I’d reached a point of emotional exhaustion that day and that when she, a slight presence of a woman with dark, curly hair, and warm brown eyes, asked me, “Are you okay?” I wasn’t. (Nothing says life has stacked up on you like oozing out a mildly hysterical chunk in front of a complete stranger.)

Even though I was ecstatic to be back in California, the repercussion of my emotional melting was also up and out. Having just gotten back from visiting my father before he was to start his chemo, and being consumed with worry for his health, and likewise concerned about my mother’s wellbeing, the stress in my life was wearing me down. I’d also been worried about trying to find a new job and a new place to live before I outstayed my welcome at Samantha and Gary’s home.

It didn’t matter that they’d kept telling me, “We love having you. Our home is your home. Take as long as you need.” No matter how comfortable they’d made me feel, there was no way I could begin to explain to them how displaced, how homeless, I’ve felt for most of my life.

While Sam and Gary opened up their home to me, their home wasn’t my home. Jen’s home wasn’t my home. The bat-cave condo wasn’t my home. I never even felt at home while living in any of the houses I grew up in. Oddly, as a child, I always felt those houses were my parents’ home; not mine. I’d thought, I’ll get my home when I move out, when I get married, which may explain why I’ve had a sense of homelessness for a very long time.

I doubt that I’m ever getting married, which means that if I keep going at my current salary grade, it’s very likely that I won’t be able to afford a home that’s truly mine and I will probably have to keep renting an apartment which for me means I am at the mercy of others. Ava always tells me that you have to make wherever you are living your home. She’s right. Except, while I know how to do homey, and definitely know how to make my surroundings comfortable, I have never known how to do being at home.

Did I tell you this story already? When I was 19 years old and living in South Lake Tahoe, my roommate and I went out clubbing at the casinos one night. Later, we ended up at an after-hours party in a luxury hotel suite. As the party hopped inside, I was outside, standing on the roof-top balcony, smoking my cigarette, wanting to be social but also needing my space from the crowd (story of my life). Some guy joined me on the balcony and started playing twenty questions. “Are you having fun? What’s your name? What do you do? Where are you from; where’s home?”

“I don’t know where home is,” I said, and then turned away from him so that he couldn’t see my face. His question had hit me hard. I’d started to tear up. It was a defining moment. As young as I was, my inability to answer where home was triggered something in my deep knowing. In that moment I understood that the definition of home meant something different to me. Finding home would be more of a battle for me in life than it would be for most.

Balcony guy thought I was a military brat or something, that I’d moved around a lot and that’s why I didn’t know where home was, so he asked, “Well, where are you from, then? Where’s your home town?”

“Where I’m from is not my home,” I told him, then tamped out my cigarette and rejoined the party to get away from his probing questions.

When I went to sleep later than night, I asked myself, what does home mean to you? Why where you so unsettled by his question? The best I could answer myself is that home is a sense of safety. To most, that means being surrounded by four walls and having a roof over one’s head. To me, it means being protected and feeling comfortable.

Unfortunately, when you are as independent as I am, and have always been somewhat independent, even as a little girl, you don’t always know how to let others protect you or give you the comfort you need. You’re always trying to make sure you can do everything on your own, just in case you are the only one you can rely on. We’re all a little that way, regardless of whether it’s the result of some childhood trauma or we’ve simply learned to buy into the independence American society is built upon.

I don’t know when this independence of mine started. Once my mother told me a story about how I’d gotten sick in the middle of the night and had thrown up all over my bedding, but instead of waking anyone up for help, I put all of my sheets into the washing machine and then went back to sleep on my naked mattress. Since I have no recollection of this happening, I am assuming my independence started pretty young.

What’s not hard to assume is how much my need for independence has affected every aspect of my life. If I feel threatened by someone or by a situation, it threatens my independence. It’s a reminder that someone else has control, and, as you can see, by the way I react to bad bosses and to stress, I don’t do well when the controlling power is an abusive power.

My independence is the reason that my old home, the one that I lived in for almost 14 years, is the only home I have ever known. I moved into that place when I got my first lay off, back in 1997. I was able to make the rent on that place while living off of student loans and getting a college degree. That place, because it afforded me independence in the worst of times, eventually turned into a home. That place got me through three more layoffs. I had lived there longer than I have lived anywhere.

Then, I felt pushed out of my home by the butthead neighbors. (Detecting a little continued PTSD?) It’s now taken me the last year and a half of being so uprooted to realize that the only reason I felt so at home there was because I’d been there long enough to allow myself to focus on balancing the home in my heart, which is where home is supposed to start.

Man, it’s crazy, though, when you realize how fragile we are as humans. The lessons we need to learn are so simple, but we’re so attached to the tangible that it’s nearly impossible for us to absorb the real truth if it’s not something we can reach out and touch.

My surroundings at my old place had been such a constant for so long. I think that’s what afforded me a tangible anchor, a physical sense of safety, of home, which in turn allowed me to realign my focus inward, towards the intangible and towards working on finding that spiritual sense of home within.

Going without the protection of one of the only anchors I’ve ever known, I’ve been floundering ever since. Obviously. After all, since my first 9-5 job resulted in a layoff, without even knowing there would be three more layoffs to come, it’s not like I ever viewed any job as being safe or secure.

I get that all of this uprooting and change (both the change of my making and those changes dealt via life’s hand) are part of life’s tests. Tests designed to bring me to a higher level of inner home/consciousness, where my heart’s song redefines what home means. But, so far, I feel like I’ve gotten an ‘F’ on every pop quiz. I also feel like telling the teacher, “You can shove your mid-term up your—”

What I guess I’m trying to say is that I don’t care how evolved a person means to become. There is something to be said for recognizing, and admitting, that along the way that you are human. With being human comes the understanding that we all crave control of the perceived tangible. We are all caught in the illusion of our human dream. We want to soar and be free of our fears, yet we’re tethered by our needs for stability, in both our surroundings and in who surrounds us.

We need home. We need a safety that feels like it’s ours. We need a job we can count on. We need people in our lives who love us and who we can trust.

Hopefully, if we have these things, we began to realize and accept that the life we’ve planned is rarely the life we’re living and we can be more open to finding the courage it takes to surrender to the process of the unplanned journey. At the very least, it would be nice if we could find a way to be a little less hard on ourselves when we feel like we’ve failed another one of life’s pop quizzes. After all, our teacher, life, has never, and will never, grade us as harshly as we grade ourselves.

Sometimes, though, even when we have everyone and everything we need, we still find ourselves amazed at how much we’re adversely affected by the words and actions of others. That just goes to show you how powerful we all are, how much influence we have on each other, and how careful we need to be when it comes minding our own imbalances and insecurities. Our words and actions matter.

If we’re not paying attention, someone else may find that we’ve become quit adept at projecting the pain we’ve experienced onto them and have been unconsciously feeding off of their imbalance so that we can steel their power in order to replace the power we lost so long ago. Not that I’m talking about any bosses I’ve worked for or anything. And I’m definitely not admitting that you’d have to be in a state of imbalance in the first place in order for someone else to knock you further off your kilter because no one can take your power. You have to give it up, even if you’ve relinquished it unconsciously. Why and when we’ve begun to give up our power is a question we all need to ask ourselves.

While we’re looking for that answer, it might be useful to understand that life doesn’t have to look how one thinks it is supposed to look. The journey is the imperfect perfection.

Still trying to suck that one up? Me, too. I’m fucking struggling. I’m still tired.

I no longer want the choices I make or the circumstances life hands me to contribute to an imbalance that creates a sense of homelessness in my heart. I want to learn to embrace the intangible better. (I’m going to put that desire right up there with wanting to get better at meditating.) I no longer want the plans I’ve had in my heart for my life to be so different in comparison to the life that I’ve been living that the disparity between the two makes me feel disconnected enough from myself that I’m prone to leaking in front of strangers.

Okay, so it’s been months since my crazy has opened up a can of cry in front of someone I don’t know. Lie alert. I accidentally leaked, just a wee bit, the other day when I went to buy a green food supplement. There I was, just asking the Living Temple store owner if he could tell me which supplement was best, when he asked me if I needed— No, told me that I needed a hug. He said he could read my energy. In horror, I asked, “It’s not bad, is it, my energy?”

“NO. No,” he said, assuring me and smiling his totally balanced-being grin. “You’re energy is good. It’s just stressed. Very stressed. I can tell. You need more hugs in life. 10 hugs a day. That’s what I prescribe.”

That’s when, feeling found out, my damn eyeballs seeped. My independence wanted to run. Screw you, asshole. I don’t need this shit. Then my interdependence slowed me down. Well, okay there, Mr. Living Temple dude. Thanks for peering into my unprepared soul, but can I just get my green-food supplement and go now before you tell me what color my bra is? You see, I’d like to stay and curl up in your balance, but your amazing force of random, positive energy caring unto me is making me feel a little exposed. I don’t know how to handle it.

Plus, I’ve been single for about two years now and mostly single for a lot longer before that. Therefore, the majority of my human contact consists of the people I just started working with and I’m not about to start asking them for hugs. People will talk. So thanks for the Rx, dude, but if you could just find me a new lover than might make it easier.

How much did I hate the fact that Mr. Living Temple could see that the fragility of my humanity has been more raw than most for a quite a while? Not much. My independence would have preferred a hot poker to the gut.

It seems to me that we are all just one trick of fate away, in a series of circumstantial events, from losing it in front of Ms. Post or from tearing up in front of Mr. Living Temple. Then again, I got the feeling that Mr. Living Temple is tapped into the pulse of most people and could probably get a rock to emote. His caring energy was that strong.

But, Ms. Post? She wasn’t privy to the series of stacked events which had brought me to her post-office counter that day in order to mail off a plea which would decide the fate of my financial welfare. She didn’t know I was in a tiff with one of California’s unemployment judges who had sided with my previous employer after California had given me the go-ahead on unemployment benefits.

Now I want to know something, California. Was the preliminary phone interview you held for me, which resulted in me being awarded unemployment benefits, not ultimately enough to satisfy your appeals judge? I thought you and I were clear, that you understood and agreed that I had good reason to quit my job. Based on the benefits you awarded me, you seemed to concur that my work environment was hostile and that I was being assigned work that was outside of my position scope and my job duties per my union job description.

Side Note: We’ve covered this. Even if the state of California didn’t get it, in what universe am I the girl who is hired to understand the logistics of accounting principles as related to the underlying code behind an accounting software designed to reconfigure multiple accounting data scenarios? (Right?)

In the interest of current and continued anonymity, I know I have never exactly defined what I do for a living. Until I am actually getting paid to write about my crazy, it wouldn’t be personally or professionally prudent to disclose any details which may reveal my identity, but come on. If you had your pick between me being a software developer/accounting decoding data smarty pants kind of a gal or a creative communicator type chick, who do you honestly think I am? Is there a point in continuing?

What’s up, California? Were you mad at me for leaving for a spell? Should I have not waited until my previous employer appealed my unemployment benefits to tell you about the forced birthday luncheon where the VP called all of us subordinates piglets because we didn’t agree to share a birthday meal with the VP? Was I wrong to initially leave out that offence? What about when the VP, during the same birthday luncheon, bullied a table full of people into drinking alcoholic beverages during working hours so that the VP wouldn’t have to drink alone? Should I have also told you about that before? Did I screw up?

(What’s sad is that never before in my life have I ever been offered a drink and didn’t feel comfortable enough to accept.)

I have another question, California, and maybe I’m just whining, but was it right for me to be verbally berated, where an entire office could hear the VP yelling at me (at a top of the lungs/belittling speed), for what was clearly another higher-up’s mistake? California, I know your EED representative and I didn’t discuss that incident expressly during my benefits award phone interview, nor did we go into the acute and stressful details of each offence which created a hostile work environment, but I thought we had a general understanding, that I was only one, among many, who had grievances against the management/division I’d worked for—the only difference being that I was one of the few who hadn’t formally filed any grievances with the union.

So why did you let me down, California? I just want to let this all go and leave it behind me. Why do you think it took me so long to write this blong? I don’t want to live in my past. Yet, because you justifiably awarded me unemployment benefits, but then scheduled my benefits appeal hearing three days after I started my new job, and I didn’t want to jeopardize my standing with my new employer, so I chose to appear by written declaration rather than appear in person, one of your appointed judges decided that it was my previous employer’s word against my written declaration and you took those benefits away?

Well, you showed me Cali, didn’t you? I get it. I’ll tell everyone. If your unemployment insurance is ever appealed by your previous employer, and you receive a court date, even if the day you are supposed to appear in court is right after you’ve started a new job, work it out.

Create an emergency. Get creative. Just be there.

Because if you’re a fricken idiot, like I apparently am, and appear by written declaration, any representative from your previous employer who shows up can contradict anything you’ve written in your declaration (even if they’re full of utter shit). Then, the six stressful hours you spent, after spending three days of doing research into your own previously painful experience, putting that written declaration together, will have been wasted.

And, you’ll find yourself standing in front of Ms. Post. You’ll be wondering how you’re going to come up with the $4,500.00 worth of benefits that you’d lived off of for 4 months, which is the amount California expects you to pay back right the fuck away. Also, since you are really more worried about whether or not your dad’s chemo is going to work, and whether or not he’s going to die and leave your mother behind, and you are also mildly consumed with wondering if you’ll find a new job and a new place to live before the holidays hit (which is when job and/or apartment hunting becomes almost impossible), you’ll likely leek a bit as you hand Ms. Post your appeal to the judge’s decision which you’re asking Ms. Post to send off via certified mail.

Oh, one more thing, California. Between filing an appeal to the initial appeal, then appealing the appeal that was denied, and then filing for the financial hardship so as not to have to pay the benefit money back in one lump sum, and then appealing that appeal, which was denied, or was it the appeal for the—? Well, you get it, Cali. You’ve confused the crap out of me and I’ve been finding it pretty frustrating that when I get something from you I not only have no more than 20 days, and often only 10 days, to get back to you, should I have any questions for you I am forced to listen to 40 seconds of a pre-recorded message before an automated voice informs me that all of the lines are busy and I need to hang up and try my call again later.

Also, way to go on how you’ve trained many of your staff. I’m scrambling to get a hold of you during my lunch, and sneaking calls on my breaks, an/or before and after work, and it only takes me approximately 30 dialing attempts and at least 40 minutes to get through to an impressively impenetrable operator who displays very little concern for the fact that I am freaking out about money and deadlines and now, because I am at work, or on my lunch, I only have two minutes to talk. Thank you, California.

F’ GEEZE! It’s no wonder there is a history of heart disease in my family. My people are an anxiety people who honestly don’t know how to handle stress.

Unfortunately, no one is more aware of this fact than Samantha’s husband Gary. Wonderful, sweet, logical Gary, who wants to fix, and can fix, most everything. Except me. When I got back to Samantha and Gary’s home that day from the post office, I was F’n FRAZZLED!

As I walked through the door, I was not expecting to see anyone already home from work. But Gary had taken the early train. He was standing in the kitchen making a snack. With a broad grin across his face, cheerfully he said, “Hi. How was your day?”

First the leaking started, as I answered, “I just got back from the post office.” Then the short, choked breaths moved in as I pushed out, “I don’t have the money to pay them back in 10 days.” Stilted speech followed as I began to gasp for air. I couldn’t catch my breath as I told Gary, “I was thinking about my dad when I crossed traffic lanes without signaling.” Without pausing, I went on to say, “I cut someone off. I almost got in a car accident.” Then, I tried to exhale out a big sigh so that I could continue on more coherently. Instead, I only managed to suck in deeper and deeper breaths between each word. I couldn’t find a way to exhale. My airway felt constricted. I became more and more light headed.

Having Gary witness my convulsive efforts to breath mortified me. Gary didn’t ask me, “Are you okay?” He knew I wasn’t. “Just take a breath. Breath,” he said, hoping whatever was happening to me would stop. Even in the midst of what is now I’m considering the third full-blown panic attack that I’ve had in the last year and a half, I could read the expression that Gary was unaware had registered across his face.

Inherent in a man’s nature is the desire fix the situation. The look of horror on Gary’s face proved that beyond giving me instructions on how to do something that should have come naturally, breathing, he was at a loss. Wanting at least one of us to find relief in an uncomfortable moment where my sanity was tipping more than sideways, I did what I’m good at. I lied.

As the heat of my emotion and embarrassment flushed my face red, I said, “I’m fine. No, really. I’m fine.” Then, I scurried out of the kitchen and made my way across the green to find sanctuary in the converted-garage guest room. And I hoped, like hell, that I wouldn’t need to take a shit for the rest of the night. I had no desire to scuttle back across the green only to find the rest of the household in full swing awaiting the second coming of the embarrassment I felt for hyperventilating over the little and the BIG of my life.

As I lay there in the guest room on a borrowed bed surrounded by only a select few of my belongings, some of my bathroom toiletries stored in a couple of plastic tubs, and some of my clothes hung on Samantha’s treadmill and the rest of them folded not-so-neatly inside of two suitcases, I stared at the feather and pinecone bird that my dad had made and had given me during our last visit.

This funky-ass bird, with it’s googly eyes, looked ridiculous hanging next to a picture of Samantha and me wearing lobster hats at a lobster festival which had taken place over five years ago. Beginning to laugh through my chocked sobs I thought: Lookie, lookie we have a loony loose. Gary thinking that I’m a freak is the last of my worries.

My self-deprecating humor wasn’t enough to stop my tears from continuing to erupt, but it was enough to get me back on track with starting to breathe more normally. As I started to wonder whether or not minor and/or major panic attacks were now a part of my new emotional landscape, I reminded myself that everything is temporary, no matter what it is, and there is always something to be grateful for.

Again and again I told myself: I’ve got amazing friends and a great family. I’ll find a job. I’ll find a new place to live. My dad will be okay. Who cares if countless strangers, everyone from the EED staff, to various Kinko’s workers, many post-office attendants, and a host of bank employees have all had their peek at my private affairs? So what if they all know that I am in an unemployment case with the state of California and also have the low down on my financial not worth? My vital data (social security number, etc.) is safe with them, right? What’s a little information between friends?

A couple of days after I dropped my basket in front of Gary, I was back at Kinko’s again, my new home office, but this time it was not for EED business. My efforts to meet my quota of applying to three job postings a day had paid off. I was trying to secure a new position printing out an offer letter. But, unfortunately, due to some known glitch, my Kinko’s friend told me there was a problem in connecting to Yahoo email accounts, so I wouldn’t be able to retrieve the offer letter which the HR representative gave me 72 hours to respond to. No problem. All my new friends at Kinko’s already knew all of my business, so why shouldn’t they, along with Gary, also know what my new annual salary would be?

Grumbling aside, it was nice that Gary was willing to use my Yahoo password to access my email account in order for him to use his resources at his work to print out my offer letter and then fax it to me at my Kinko’s office. It was a character building experience hanging out with all of my new Kinko’s office friends while I was on and off the phone with Gary waiting to see when one of my friends would confirm receipt of Gary’s fax so I could then sign my offer letter, give it back to another friend, fax it off to the HR rep, and also do another round of phone confirmation with the HR rep while I waited to see if “they got it.”

Don’t you get it? Any time it’s necessary to involve at least three other parties and you must give up the privacy of your affairs in order to accomplish a task that would normally take twenties minutes, but, by way of Murphy’s law, gets extended to two and a half hours and threatens the precarious nature of your need for independence, you are now a better person for it.

(Convinced? Me neither.)

It’s also character building when you undergo three interviews totaling over five hours over the course of almost a month in order to get a job that will help you barely make the rent on your new apartment and also struggle to meet your other monthly expenses.

Don’t worry. I’ll do it for you. I’ll say it if you’re thinking it: SHUT THE FUCK UP! You have got a job when so many people don’t have one right now. Quit complaining.

Yes. I am fortunate. I have worked for more than 10 years in my industry which means I have enough experience to be impressive sometimes and other times be just as much of a hack as the rest of us getting by and therefore have been lucky enough to get more than one job to complain about. But, that’s the point.

Finding work during this economy is difficult. This I know. Does that mean that if we are among the lucky-to-be-working we should just be happy because we’ve got an income? Should we give up on our personal and professional passions? Are we supposed to yield to a bad boss/company who might be using the current economic climate as an excuse to take advantage of people? Is it wrong for us to want more?

My answer is NO.

Maybe it’s just the influence of the Eckhart Toll I’ve read, or maybe, even while I’ve been coming to terms with the fact that I’m less capable of handling stress than most, I still get the bigger picture. This may be my little blog, my own little experience, and my account of last year’s meltdown, but I am one among many sharing this universal challenge.

The Universe has a message. Are we listening yet? Are we getting that we’re being asked to rearrange our priorities on a mass level? Are we not being reminded that we’re in this together? Is this economy not our generation’s spiritual wakeup call?

What’s important to you? What are you afraid of? What’s holding you back? What do you really want?

Don’t hide. I’ve shown you my crazy. Show me yours. Ask yourself, What’s my cracked? Where do I break and then come out passion screaming?

Let’s try it again. What do you want but aren’t going after? What scares you enough that you won’t even admit it to your friends, to your family? What is it that you should you be confiding in them about just as much as they need to confide in you about something? What are the voices in your head that are screaming at you to leap towards your forward movement? Don’t lie to yourself. We’ve all got those voices.

We’re all fighting at least one demon—consciously or not. If we weren’t, shit wouldn’t bother us. We wouldn’t worry about money. Work wouldn’t be a problem for any of us; it would be our pleasure, our passion, and our play. We’d schedule more time for play.

Imbalanced people wouldn’t get the better of us. We’d be a better us for them so we could be their example by our living. We’d be living our moments, our words, and our actions with more integrity. That would be our way of life.

Food wouldn’t be an issue. We wouldn’t feel guilty about the comfort we’re eating in order to forget the discomfort we’re drowning out. Eating would be our social pleasure and our singular sustenance instead of an individual battle.

Alcohol would only be an occasion. Nicotine wouldn’t be an addiction. Recreational or prescription drugs wouldn’t be a problem.

We’d be in more constant touch with our spirituality/personal religion. We wouldn’t have a bone to pick with our past or a fret to pick with our future. Nothing about our family would test our strength. We wouldn’t question the mate we’ve chosen, or the mate we’ve not yet met.

We wouldn’t question our mortality, or anything that reminds of how frail we are. We’d all dream better and sleep like babies, instead of trying to pull the blankets over the day we’ve had and forget the bad dreams that are keeping us awake at night.

There wouldn’t be something that we’re hiding from most of the people we know. Mostly, if we weren’t fighting at least one demon, exposing ourselves would feel more like a relief than a fear-based hurdle.

Now, let me ask you this. Did you cringe, if only a bit, at one of the questions I just asked in the previous paragraphs? Was there something there, even if just a little, that fits your crazy?

Of course you found something to flinch at. I’m not a fricken genius. Far from it. I’m just getting more in touch with my human than I’ve been in a long time. That’s why I’m feeling a little freer with my crazy. The least I can do is help you get in touch with yours. You’re welcome.

(I know. What a Bitch.)

If you recall, when I started this blog, my biggest fear was that I’d be found out. That’s still my fear, but not in the way you might think.

I know I still have to play by the rules. I can’t take my crazy out to dinner with me, nor can I put my batty in a pair of jeans on casual Fridays at work. (My crazy never did look good in leggings.) But the great thing is; I now get that we’re all hiding from our humanity.

There is no one amongst us who doesn’t fear how difficult it is to face the day-to-day insanity that we all deal with. We all wonder whether or not our kook-to-the-loo looks more lopsided than someone else’s jacked-to-the-whack.

What else have I learned from the last twenty or so months? My need for independence, in the long run, is probably not serving me well. I’ve also learned that sometimes you have to put a bra on to take the garbage out. Sorry. I wasn’t trying to be profound. It’s just that in my new neighborhood the trashcans are in the alleyway and there are a couple of different neighbors of the dude persuasion who hang out in their garages along the alley. Maybe I’ve got it wrong, but usually no girl wants to give up a free view of her tits without reasonable cajoling.

Second garbage rule? Buy a shredder, babe. If, at least every two hours, you can hear people riffling through the alley dumpsters for recyclables, etc., than it might be a good idea if you learn to dispose of your sensitive trash more properly. God forbid a recycler gets a hold of your thyroid medication.

I’ve also learned that there are better alternatives to showing one’s gratitude than almost killing your friends’ cat, Twitch. Yes, nothing says, “Hey friends, Samantha, Gary, thanks for letting me stay with you while I figure out how to put my life back together. Incidentally, do you mind if I step on your cat’s tail and just keep that tail under my foot without budging because I am too tone deaf to hear your cat me-grrr-ow-ling at me to get the OUCH off?

You don’t think Sam and Gary minded, do you? Twitch is not only just as vertigo ridden as I am, he’s half blind. Plus, he’s what, almost 92 in cat years? Sam and Gary were totally aware of the fact that Twitch, with his slow-moving and warbling cat thing, and me, with my didn’t-fucking-see-Twitch-under-foot-half-the-friggen time thing, couldn’t seem to get out of each other’s way.

Me tripping over Twitch daily still fails in comparison to building a bomb in Sam and Gary’s kitchen. Look, I was just trying to do my part. When you’re the girl without a job living rent-free, doing your friends’ dishes and laundry, without them asking you to, is the least you can do.

Little did I know that when I tried to use my regular stain-removing mix, a ½ of a cup of rubbing alcohol and a ½ of a cup of white vinegar, in order to get the pink out of their previously off-white bed sheet, which got stained from a mystery item in the wash (I never did find the damn red culprit), it was a potentially lethal combination if I were to add bleach to that mix, which I did. Sonuva! The pink in the sheet wasn’t budgeting after two washes. That’s where the bleach came in.

Less did I know that adding bleach would cause a toxic gas to be emitted from the washing machine which would them permeate the entire house. When the always knowledgeable Gary informed me that the combination of fumes I’d constructed could be deadly when inhaled, and that I was only one lit match away from building a combustible gas, it really was news to me, but it did explain why my throat burned, why I felt lightheaded, and why I wasn’t the only one who’s eyes were tearing up from the fumes.

Honestly, it wasn’t my intention for us all to have to open up every door and window and put fans in every room so that we could circulate out the deadly fumes. I wasn’t trying to kill anyone. I was only trying to do a little laundry.

I think the almost making a bomb incident made me even hungrier to get back into a place of my own. I figured, if I’m going to blow something up, shouldn’t it be mine to obliterate? My need to get to my independence back is probably why it didn’t seem to matter that the property management company for my prospective new place was located in one of the worst downtown areas of my city. The place itself, that I wanted to rent, was located in a safe area close to my old neighborhood not so far from the beach.

After Samantha and I had walked through the front door of my prospective new place, I could see that sunlight filled every corner of the living room, the kitchen, and the bedroom. I could also see that the place was big enough for all of my belongings, which is rare for places near the beach which have decent rent.

I wanted the place. The property management told me that I had two hours before they would be closing and if I wanted to be considered first on the list, I would need to have all of my paperwork turned in that day. So, Sam and I drove a half of an hour back to her house for me to get a copy of the only pay stub from work that I’d received which the property management told me was required as proof of employment. Hearing that Sam and I intended to go to lunch at my favorite Lebanese crack chicken place after all the apartment application paperwork was signed, Bethany was eager to join us on our return trip to the rental office.

As we all stood at the rental-office counter, waiting for the slow moving older lady with the thick glasses and the bad attitude to give me the rest of the forms I was required to complete, Sam was preoccupied with the policeman who was also waiting at the counter. Mr. Law had informed the younger Rosie Perez look-alike working behind the counter that he needed one of the tenant’s apartment keys so he could do a dead check.

Okay, the policeman didn’t exactly say, “I gotta do a dead check.” But I’ve watched enough television to know that if a policeman says, “Neighbors are reporting they haven’t seen or heard from Mr. So-and-so for weeks. There’s no noise coming from his apartment but they insist he’s home,” and, if Mr. So-and-so lives in a neighborhood where hookers, drugs, and crime are the usual, then they’re probably doing a dead check. I’m just saying.

Trying to lighten the mood, the policeman turned to me and said, “It was you. Wasn’t it?” I asked the policemen, “How’d you know? I thought I looked so innocent.”

Once the policeman smiled, and flirtatiously replied, “No. I thought you looked pretty guilty,” the hooker outside, who was on her cellular phone and was cussing someone out at the top of her lungs as she paced frantically back and forth in front of the rental office’s front door, no longer held 13 year old Bethany’s attention. Bethany now wanted to know, “Why does that policeman want to get into someone’s apartment?” Sam and I exchanged a look. We’d decided it was best not to indulge Bethany’s intrigue on that one.

Minutes later, when we got back into my car to head to lunch, I worried about whether or not I’d get the place. I also worried about how much I wasn’t looking forward to going downtown once a month to pay my rent. Samantha, the eternal optimist, said, “You’ll get the place. You’ll be fine.”

Maybe I’d be better than fine. The reality is, when I am not at work, if I don’t have plans with friends, I spend most of my time alone, and so I could probably use some new friends to hang out with. I bet me and some of my Kinko’s friends and some of the downtown hookers would have a blast going to see a Disney movie together. We could get the cop to be our designated driver and not tell him we’re going to smuggle in our own libations? Cha-ching!

Samantha was right, two days later I received the call. I’d gotten the place. But, before they’d give me the keys, there was more paperwork which required my signature. Paperwork which included a bed-bug waiver. That didn’t creep me out at all.

I’m used to signing mold notification forms and asbestos warnings. Those are par for the Long Beach apartment renting course, but bed bugs? Do you mean to tell me that you’ve had enough outbreaks in your apartment buildings that you now have a form your tenants are required to sign which states that they will comply with your bed bug removal procedures? Excuse me? Am I supposed to feel better once you tell me the story of how your Bed Bug Addendum became a standardized form in your property management’s Residential Rental Agreement? What’s that you say? A disgruntled renter dragged a bed-bug-infested mattress back into the apartment they’d moved out of as a retaliatory measure?

Thanks for telling me that. I feel better already. I’ll sleep as snug as a bug in a rug in my new place.

Fuck it! Trudge forward, girl. You need your independence back.

The lesson I had no idea I would be learning is that just when you think you’ve had enough, when you are starting to question if you can handle any more, more might still be coming.

I took possession of the keys to my new apartment, my new home and my new hoped for sense of safety, on a Wednesday. The following Thursday after work I took some of my clothes over to my new place. The next Friday night after work, I took some more clothes over. That’s when, on that Friday evening, the night before I was going to move all of my stuff out of storage and into my new comfort zone, I saw that someone had broken into my apartment.

I’m sorry. Now I’m just being dramatic. If there is no sign of forced entry then it is not called breaking and entering, is it? What does it matter if the night before I’m supposed to move into my new place I found my front door wide open?

Maybe it was me. Maybe I left the door open when I’d dropped some of my stuff off. No. It wasn’t me.

I specifically remember making sure I’d locked the door. I’d even futzed with the deadbolt. After I locked it, I pushed on the door and pushed again, to make certain that the door was secure before I locked the bottom doorknob lock. I even remember being satisfied that the deadbolt was locked, and thinking, I’m going to have to get used to this deadbolt. It turns a different way than the doorknob lock does.

So, after having locked both of the locks and after having checked and rechecked that both of them were secure, and after having pushed on the front door once more, I was satisfied that I could walk away.

But I was bothered that I’d been so paranoid. What’s wrong with me? I wondered. You’ll be back tomorrow. What’s going to happen in one day?

In one day I’d come back to a front door which was wide open, yet the bottom doorknob was locked and the deadbolt was undone. No worries. I’m sure it was just the wind that blew my door open. The weird feeling my intuition had the night before when I was dropping off my cloths was probably nothing.

The uneasiness I felt while I was signing the rest of the Residential Rental Agreement forms couldn’t have been my intuition, could it have? But wouldn’t anyone feel on edge if they noticed all the motley minimum wage workers passing each other in the hallways? Wouldn’t they also wonder how many of those workers had access to all the rental record files and keys? Just because the greasy haired guy with the missing tooth reminded me of the time Jen’s apartment was broken into by someone from her apartment’s rental office, that didn’t mean it was going to happen to me. It was a stupid thought. You just have safety issues, I told myself.

Wanting a false sense of safety back after the mysteriously wide-open door incident, on the day of my move in, amidst everyone from Sam, Gary, their kids, my movers, and Fae helping move my boxes and furniture into my new upstairs residence, I asked Gary to change my locks so that I could sleep more peacefully that night.

Boy did it ever piss me off when three days later the property management hung a notice on my door that they would need to enter the premises in order to install a carbon monoxide detector. SHITzaF’n! FINE! I’ll just have Cella’s boyfriend change the door nob back out but I’ll keep the new deadbolt in place. Then, since I can’t take off from work, I’ll leave the deadbolt unlocked so those fuckers can get inside. But, I’ll booby trap the place. I’ll hang a jacket over the closed TV and stereo cabinet doors just so. I’ll drape a blanket over the computer cabinet this way. Then I’ll place small pieces of paper over each cabinet and doorway, like I saw that guy do in that one movie, and we’ll just see if they get into my shit. I’ll look for the ever-so-small fallen piece of paper.

Thankfully, there was no evidence that anyone had been into any of my stuff on the day of the detector installation so I estimated that I would have a false sense of security back in six, seven weeks max.

Then, when I was just trying to get back some of the peace and quiet I’d lost over the last six months since my crazy had fucked me over, and when all I wanted to do was to leave the television off, to let go of all the distractions I’m not used to having (which living in a household entails), and to just putter around in silence while I settled into my new place, I jammed my little toe into the corner of a box. F’theSONUVAgrhhh! THAT HURT! Are you kidding me?!

Not to worry. After my insurance carrier figured out that they were actually supposed to X-ray the little toe on my right foot, not my left, they assured me that they’d call me if the toe was in fact broken. They didn’t call. So how come 6 weeks later, even after all the black and swelling had gone away, my toe still hurt?

“Oh, that’s because you have what appears to be some sort of a bone fragment or a growth coming off of the inside of the bone and a sharp possible spur coming off of the other side,” the podiatrist said.

Ah, I see. “So that hooked, tree branch looking thing might be a growth?” I asked. “Yes. We should take a biopsy of that,” the podiatrist said.

Great, thanks. I know what my next steps are. “If I ever want to be able to wear shoes comfortably again, I need surgery to investigate the possible growth/fragment thingy and you’ll have to shave off the sharp protrusion before you re-set my toe to point in the right direction again. Have I got that right?”

Whatever. It’s just a toe. Truth is, aside from fearing the expense of surgery, I’m kinda chicken. I’m afraid something will go wrong and my toe will be worse. I read somewhere that injuries to your appendages mean your creative energy is being blocked. Point taken.

That’s why I should be asking myself when I am going to manage to finish the final chapter of my other book; the one that’s not on-line. It’d be nice to get to the place where I have sent my book out to multiple publishers in the hopes of hearing back something great, that is as opposed to just being stuck in the place where I’m hoping that I’ve done my book justice and, as such, can’t seem to finish the last chapter. (Yes, Lyta, you’ve been right to keep pushing me. I’ve been emotionally depleted and brain dead. But that’s no excuse not to keep at least trying to work towards my passion.)

It’s crazy to me when I think about how free I’ve allowed myself to be in my blong posts. There have been countless entries where I’ve not remembered if I’d wrote about this before, or referenced that already and even more entries (usually late night entries) where my spelling and grammar have shit the bed. Still, while I’ve let my written expressions free into the Ethernet for my blong, I continue to put a tremendous amount of pressure on myself to make the other book that I’ve been working on perfect.

What else should I be asking myself? When am I going to put myself back out there again? We got the word in late December, on the 23rd, the day of my dad’s last chemo treatment, that dad is officially in remission. This means I can breathe now.

I have also had a place of my own since the first of October. And, I am working again. I may not be making enough to continue working at this job for long, but financial problems aside, there is so much less stress in my current work environment. My boss is actually pretty awesome. So, why do I still feel closed down when it comes to opening myself up to love again?

Not having slept with anyone since Watt, it’s no secret that baby girl needs some action. Plus, before Watt, the box of just-in-case condoms which I’d kept by my bedside had expired. It’s sort of sad that I am now working my way towards having another box of condoms expire on me.

Watt and I have touched basis, you know? While I was still living in Colorado, I’d messaged Watt on Facebook. About eight months after we’d parted ways, I’d been periodically checking for Watt’s surrender to the social networking beast. I figured if I could catch him on Facebook, then, regardless of whether or not he responded to me, I could be fairly certain he’d receive the message I’d wanted to give to him for some time.

In typical Watt fashion, having more class than most men, he told me he was happy to hear from me and immediately let me off the hook when I expressed my regret for how I ended things with just a phone call and didn’t give him the courtesy of a face-to-face conversation. In fact, Watt didn’t even acknowledge my apology. He just blazed straight towards the catching up part. What a guy.

After we exchanged a few emails, bringing each other up to speed on the high-level details of our lives (he’d moved to Texas a bit before I’d moved to Colorado), Watt did a quiet drop off, which was fine and is what I expected and respected. Watt’s Facebook status indicated that he had a girlfriend. Therefore, it wouldn’t have been right of him to continue a correspondence with me.

I was glad when he responded to my initial contact, though. That meant we were friends. Sure, we were only friends on Facebook, friends who I wasn’t sure would ever catch up again, but we were friends. That’s all that mattered to me.

Then, in early November, out of the blue I got an email from him, “Hey. I was thinking about you the other day. Let’s get something to eat sometime. Easy breezy.” I wrote back, “Yeah. Good company and good eats, easy. Let me know.”

After that, I didn’t hear back from Watt. If I ever do, I don’t think it will be for a while. I’m okay with that. When he and I were together, while I was open to so much more than we shared, I felt that our time together was going to be brief, and it was, which was disappointing. I get the feeling now that if we’re meant for more, as friends or otherwise, it’s not going to be for a long time. If I’m wrong, about any of it, I welcome the correction. Regardless, I’m just happy that when I think about Watt now, I no longer have regret for how things were left. I can wish him well in whatever he does and wherever he goes.

I would, however, like to be more open than I have been lately when it comes to love. I’ve accepted that I’m pretty normal. For a lot of people, when the things you’re dealing with in your life are already requiring most of you attention, the idea of making yourself emotionally available to someone else is less than appealing. But I’ve learned that because of my independence, I’ve never been very good at making myself available for love. When I have been open, I didn’t have a choice. My inner knowing pushed me.

Haven’t I mentioned that distinct feeling I’ve only gotten about six times in my life? Did I already tell you about the first time I felt it, when I was 16 years old, a sophomore in high school? I was at the arcade hanging out with friends when this boy, playing video games in the corner of the arcade, laughed. I couldn’t see his face, and I wasn’t exactly sure who I’d find when I walked past Frogger and came around the Asteroids game, but I ended up having a crush on that boy for the rest of high school. 15 years later, when I ran into him in Newport Beach on the boardwalk, he still made me weak in the knees.

What about Now? I haven’t seen or heard of him in years, but I can admit that I think about him at least once every couple of months and have no doubt that he’s still someone I could fall in love with. Who cares if, years ago, his sister said he’s scary looking now and is totally tatted. I’d still roll around with that ink and take my chances.

I also know that, aside from the last man who truly had my heart (a man who I still hope has found a way to put back together his broken pieces), every man I’ve ever had this feeling for is someone I could fall back in love with or who I could willingly fall in love with for the first time. This includes the guy who seemed to enjoy my attention and kept me on a friend string for a couple of years while he dealt with his father’s sickness and then eventual death. I never faulted him then, and I fault him even less now.

Watt is one of the six guys I felt that distinct feeling for and this six is split into two groups: those I had a feeling I was going to meet before I met them, and those I met and then instantly had the feeling I could fall. Watt, Mr. Kept Me on a String, and Mr. Gold standard all fall in the group which I had a feeling I was going to meet before I did.

What's my point? Why am I bringing all of this up, this gut feeling stuff? It’s because I’ve realized that I’ve reached a point in my life where I’ve gotten too independent. I’m so used to not needing anyone in my life, thinking that I don’t need someone, even becoming almost afraid to count on someone else, that I am not sure I am still capable of opening my life up. That’s probably not healthy.

Lyta tells me, “Take baby steps. Date first. Then worry about learning to get over the fact that you don’t want to have to share your bed in place of getting a good night’s sleep.”

So, I’ve been thinking about going back on the internet again. But, every time I think about doing this it makes me sick to my stomach. It feels wrong for me. So I’ve been asking myself why the internet was good enough for me when I needed material for the main character in my other book, yet it doesn’t feel right for me?

I keep coming back to the same answer. In my knowing, I have never felt like I’d meet the person I was going to end up with on the internet. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think there is anything wrong with internet dating. I am all for it. I’m just having an incredible time fighting that feeling that in my gut that the internet is not how I'm going to meet the One.

I’m willing to be wrong on this, too, and I’ll likely sign back up to internet dating again just to give myself something to bitch about, because we all know I’m good at that. It’d also be nice to have plans on the weekend when my friends are busy. But if that’s my attitude, then what success can I hope to have?

Well, that’s pretty much it. You’re up to speed on the emotions and events of the last months.

Now, I’m just trying to focus forward, because if I’ve learned anything at all, in order to be free from the confines of the past, you have to stop thinking about how you’ve been affected by what’s happened to you. Freedom doesn’t come until you let go.

I’ve written it all down now, so I don’t want to think about much of anything for a while. I’m going to start living my charmed life now.

Ready. Set. GO!