choices

The Crane Wife

“The Crane Wife” is a story from Japanese folklore. In the story, there is a crane who tricks a man into thinking she is a woman so she can marry him. She loves him but knows that he will not love her if she is a crane so she spends every night plucking out all of her feathers with her beak. She hopes that he will not see what she really is: a bird who must be cared for, a bird capable of flight, a creature, with creature needs. Every morning, the crane-wife is exhausted, but she is a woman again. To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work. She never sleeps. She plucks out all her feathers, one by one.
This is a story we can all relate too, right? Who hasn’t tried to be something they’re not in order to get someone’s love or approval?
It was sent to me by one of the miraculous women I’ve had the profound privilege to mentor the past few months. When I took on that task, I was certain it would be a sacred energy exchange—that the wisdom would flow both ways—and boy, was I right! I invite you to take the time to read this women’s beautifully written story of self-discovery—and then do what I did—email it to everyone you love.
Carry on,
xox


 

The Crane Wife

By

Ten days earlier I had cried and I had yelled and I had packed up my dog and driven away from the upstate New York house with two willow trees I had bought with my fiancé.

Ten days later and I didn’t want to do anything I was supposed to do.

*

I went to Texas to study the whooping crane because I was researching a novel. In my novel there were biologists doing field research about birds and I had no idea what field research actually looked like and so the scientists in my novel draft did things like shuffle around great stacks of papers and frown. The good people of the Earthwatch organization assured me I was welcome on the trip and would get to participate in “real science” during my time on the gulf. But as I waited to be picked up by my team in Corpus Christi, I was nervous—I imagined everyone else would be a scientist or a birder and have daunting binoculars.

The biologist running the trip rolled up in a large white van with a boat hitch and the words BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES stenciled across the side. Jeff was forty-ish, and wore sunglasses and a backward baseball cap. He had a winter beard and a neon-green cast on his left arm. He’d broken his arm playing hockey with his sons a week before. The first thing Jeff said was, “We’ll head back to camp, but I hope you don’t mind we run by the liquor store first.” I felt more optimistic about my suitability for science.

*

Not long before I’d called off my engagement it was Christmas.

The woman who was supposed to be my mother-in-law was a wildly talented quilter and made stockings with Beatrix Potter characters on them for every family member. The previous Christmas she had asked me what character I wanted to be (my fiancé was Benjamin Bunny). I agonized over the decision. It felt important, like whichever character I chose would represent my role in this new family. I chose Squirrel Nutkin, a squirrel with a blazing red tail—an epic, adventuresome figure who ultimately loses his tail as the price for his daring and pride.

I arrived in Ohio that Christmas and looked to the banister to see where my squirrel had found his place. Instead, I found a mouse. A mouse in a pink dress and apron. A mouse holding a broom and dustpan, serious about sweeping. A mouse named Hunca Munca. The woman who was supposed to become my mother-in-law said, “I was going to do the squirrel but then I thought, that just isn’t CJ. This is CJ.”

What she was offering was so nice. She was so nice. I thanked her and felt ungrateful for having wanted a stocking, but not this stocking. Who was I to be choosy? To say that this nice thing she was offering wasn’t a thing I wanted?

When I looked at that mouse with her broom, I wondered which one of us was wrong about who I was.

*

The whooping crane is one of the oldest living bird species on earth. Our expedition was housed at an old fish camp on the Gulf Coast next to the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, where three hundred of the only six hundred whooping cranes left in the world spend their winters. Our trip was a data-collecting expedition to study behavior and gather data about the resources available to the cranes at Aransas.

The ladies bunkhouse was small and smelled woody and the rows of single beds were made up with quilts. Lindsay, the only other scientist, was a grad student in her early twenties from Wisconsin who loved birds so much that when she told you about them she made the shapes of their necks and beaks with her hands—a pantomime of bird life. Jan, another participant, was a retired geophysicist who had worked for oil companies and now taught high school chemistry. Jan was extremely fit and extremely tan and extremely competent. Jan was not a lifelong birder. She was a woman who had spent two years nursing her mother and her best friend through cancer. They had both recently died and she had lost herself in caring for them, she said. She wanted a week to be herself. Not a teacher or a mother or a wife. This trip was the thing she was giving herself after their passing.

At five o’clock there was a knock on the bunk door and a very old man walked in, followed by Jeff.

“Is it time for cocktail hour?” Warren asked.

Warren was an eighty-four-year-old bachelor from Minnesota. He could not do most of the physical activities required by the trip, but had been on ninety-five Earthwatch expeditions, including this one once before. Warren liked birds okay. What Warren really loved was cocktail hour.

When he came for cocktail hour that first night, his thin, silver hair was damp from the shower and he smelled of shampoo. He was wearing a fresh collared shirt and carrying a bottle of impossibly good scotch.

Jeff took in Warren and Jan and me. “This is a weird group,” Jeff said.

“I like it,” Lindsay said.

*

In the year leading up to calling off my wedding, I often cried or yelled or reasoned or pleaded with my fiancé to tell me that he loved me. To be nice to me. To notice things about how I was living.

One particular time, I had put on a favorite red dress for a wedding. I exploded from the bathroom to show him. He stared at his phone. I wanted him to tell me I looked nice, so I shimmied and squeezed his shoulders and said, “You look nice! Tell me I look nice!” He said, “I told you that you looked nice when you wore that dress last summer. It’s reasonable to assume I still think you look nice in it now.”

Another time he gave me a birthday card with a sticky note inside that said BIRTHDAY. After giving it to me, he explained that because he hadn’t written in it, the card was still in good condition. He took off the sticky and put the unblemished card into our filing cabinet.

I need you to know: I hated that I needed more than this from him. There is nothing more humiliating to me than my own desires. Nothing that makes me hate myself more than being burdensome and less than self-sufficient. I did not want to feel like the kind of nagging woman who might exist in a sit-com.

These were small things, and I told myself it was stupid to feel disappointed by them. I had arrived in my thirties believing that to need things from others made you weak. I think this is true for lots of people but I think it is especially true for women. When men desire things they are “passionate.” When they feel they have not received something they need they are “deprived,” or even “emasculated,” and given permission for all sorts of behavior. But when a woman needs she is needy. She is meant to contain within her own self everything necessary to be happy.

That I wanted someone to articulate that they loved me, that they saw me, was a personal failing and I tried to overcome it.

When I found out that he’d slept with our mutual friend a few weeks after we’d first started seeing each other, he told me we hadn’t officially been dating yet so I shouldn’t mind. I decided he was right. When I found out that he’d kissed another girl on New Year’s Eve months after that, he said that we hadn’t officially discussed monogamy yet, and so I shouldn’t mind. I decided he was right.

I asked to discuss monogamy and, in an effort to be the sort of cool girl who does not have so many inconvenient needs, I said that I didn’t need it. He said he thought we should be monogamous.

*

Here is what I learned once I began studying whooping cranes: only a small part of studying them has anything to do with the birds. Instead, we counted berries. Counted crabs. Measured water salinity. Stood in the mud. Measured the speed of the wind.

It turns out, if you want to save a species, you don’t spend your time staring at the bird you want to save. You look at the things it relies on to live instead. You ask if there is enough to eat and drink. You ask if there is a safe place to sleep. Is there enough here to survive?

Wading through the muck of the Aransas Reserve I understood that every chance for food matters. Every pool of drinkable water matters. Every wolfberry dangling from a twig, in Texas, in January, matters. The difference between sustaining life and not having enough was that small.

If there were a kind of rehab for people ashamed to have needs, maybe this was it. You will go to the gulf. You will count every wolfberry. You will measure the depth of each puddle.

*

More than once I’d said to my fiancé, How am I supposed to know you love me if you’re never affectionate or say nice things or say that you love me.

He reminded me that he’d said “I love you” once or twice before. Why couldn’t I just know that he did in perpetuity?

I told him this was like us going on a hiking trip and him telling me he had water in his backpack but not ever giving it to me and then wondering why I was still thirsty.

He told me water wasn’t like love, and he was right.

There are worse things than not receiving love. There are sadder stories than this. There are species going extinct, and a planet warming. I told myself: who are you to complain, you with these frivolous extracurricular needs?

*

On the gulf, I lost myself in the work. I watched the cranes through binoculars and recorded their behavior patterns and I loved their long necks and splashes of red. The cranes looked elegant and ferocious as they contorted their bodies to preen themselves. From the outside, they did not look like a species fighting to survive.

In the mornings we made each other sandwiches and in the evenings we laughed and lent each other fresh socks. We gave each other space in the bathroom. Forgave each other for telling the same stories over and over again. We helped Warren when he had trouble walking. What I am saying is that we took care of each other. What I am saying is we took pleasure in doing so. It’s hard to confess, but the week after I called off my wedding, the week I spent dirty and tired on the gulf, I was happy.

On our way out of the reserve, we often saw wild pigs, black and pink bristly mothers and their young, scurrying through the scrub and rolling in the dust among the cacti. In the van each night, we made bets on how many wild pigs we might see on our drive home.

One night, halfway through the trip, I bet reasonably. We usually saw four, I hoped for five, but I bet three because I figured it was the most that could be expected.

Warren bet wildly, optimistically, too high.

“Twenty pigs,” Warren said. He rested his interlaced fingers on his soft chest.

We laughed and slapped the vinyl van seats at this boldness.

But the thing is, we saw twenty pigs on the drive home that night. And in the thick of our celebrations, I realized how sad it was that I’d bet so low. That I wouldn’t even let myself imagine receiving as much as I’d hoped for.

*

What I learned to do, in my relationship with my fiancé, was to survive on less. At what should have been the breaking point but wasn’t, I learned that he had cheated on me. The woman he’d been sleeping with was a friend of his I’d initially wanted to be friends with, too, but who did not seem to like me, and who he’d gaslit me into being jealous of, and then gaslit me into feeling crazy for being jealous of.

The full course of the gaslighting took a year, so by the time I truly found out what had happened, the infidelity was already a year in the past.

It was new news to me but old news to my fiancé.

Logically, he said, it doesn’t matter anymore.

It had happened a year ago. Why was I getting worked up over ancient history?

I did the mental gymnastics required.

I convinced myself that I was a logical woman who could consider this information about having been cheated on, about his not wearing a condom, and I could separate it from the current reality of our life together.

Why did I need to know that we’d been monogamous? Why did I need to have and discuss inconvenient feelings about this ancient history?

I would not be a woman who needed these things, I decided.

I would need less. And less.

I got very good at this.

*

“The Crane Wife” is a story from Japanese folklore. I found a copy in the reserve’s gift shop among the baseball caps and bumper stickers that said GIVE A WHOOP. In the story, there is a crane who tricks a man into thinking she is a woman so she can marry him. She loves him, but knows that he will not love her if she is a crane so she spends every night plucking out all of her feathers with her beak. She hopes that he will not see what she really is: a bird who must be cared for, a bird capable of flight, a creature, with creature needs. Every morning, the crane-wife is exhausted, but she is a woman again. To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work. She never sleeps. She plucks out all her feathers, one by one.

*

One night on the gulf, we bought a sack of oysters off a passing fishing boat. We’d spent so long on the water that day I felt like I was still bobbing up and down in the current as I sat in my camp chair. We ate the oysters and drank. Jan took the shucking knife away from me because it kept slipping into my palm. Feral cats trolled the shucked shells and pleaded with us for scraps.

Jeff was playing with the sighting scope we used to watch the birds, and I asked, “What are you looking for in the middle of the night?” He gestured me over and when I looked through the sight the moon swam up close.

I think I was afraid that if I called off my wedding I was going to ruin myself. That doing it would disfigure the story of my life in some irredeemable way. I had experienced worse things than this, but none threatened my American understanding of a life as much as a called-off wedding did. What I understood on the other side of my decision, on the gulf, was that there was no such thing as ruining yourself. There are ways to be wounded and ways to survive those wounds, but no one can survive denying their own needs. To be a crane-wife is unsustainable.

I had never seen the moon so up-close before. What struck me most was how battered she looked. How textured and pocked by impacts. There was a whole story written on her face—her face, which from a distance looked perfect.

*

It’s easy to say that I left my fiancé because he cheated on me. It’s harder to explain the truth. The truth is that I didn’t leave him when I found out. Not even for one night.

I found out about the cheating before we got engaged and I still said yes when he proposed in the park on a day we were meant to be celebrating a job I’d just gotten that morning. Said yes even though I’d told him I was politically opposed to the diamonds he’d convinced me were necessary. Said yes even though he turned our proposal into a joke by making a Bachelor reference and giving me a rose. I am ashamed of all of this.

He hadn’t said one specific thing about me or us during the proposal, and on the long trail walk out of the park I felt robbed of the kind of special declaration I’d hoped a proposal would entail, and, in spite of hating myself for wanting this, hating myself more for fishing for it, I asked him, “Why do you love me? Why do you think we should get married? Really?”

He said he wanted to be with me because I wasn’t annoying or needy. Because I liked beer. Because I was low-maintenance.

I didn’t say anything. A little further down the road he added that he thought I’d make a good mother.

This wasn’t what I hoped he would say. But it was what was being offered. And who was I to want more?

I didn’t leave when he said that the woman he had cheated on me with had told him over the phone that she thought it was unfair that I didn’t want them to be friends anymore, and could they still?

I didn’t leave when he wanted to invite her to our wedding. Or when, after I said she could not come to our wedding, he got frustrated and asked what he was supposed to do when his mother and his friends asked why she wasn’t there.

Reader, I almost married him.

*

Even now I hear the words as shameful: Thirsty. Needy. The worst things a woman can be. Some days I still tell myself to take what is offered, because if it isn’t enough, it is I who wants too much. I am ashamed to be writing about this instead of writing about the whooping cranes, or literal famines, or any of the truer needs of the world.

But what I want to tell you is that I left my fiancé when it was almost too late. And I tell people the story of being cheated on because that story is simple. People know how it goes. But it’s harder to tell the story of how I convinced myself I didn’t need what was necessary to survive. How I convinced myself it was my lack of needs that made me worthy of love.

*

After cocktail hour one night, in the cabin’s kitchen, I told Lindsay about how I’d blown up my life the week before. I told her because I’d just received a voice mail saying I could get a partial refund for my high-necked wedding gown. The refund would be partial because they had already made the base of the dress but had not done any of the beadwork yet. They said the pieces of the dress could still be unstitched and used for something else. I had caught them just in time.

I told Lindsay because she was beautiful and kind and patient and loved good things like birds and I wondered what she would say back to me. What would every good person I knew say to me when I told them that the wedding to which they’d RSVP’d was off and that the life I’d been building for three years was going to be unstitched and repurposed?

Lindsay said it was brave not to do a thing just because everyone expected you to do it.

Jeff was sitting outside in front of the cabin with Warren as Lindsay and I talked, tilting the sighting scope so it pointed toward the moon. The screen door was open and I knew he’d heard me, but he never said anything about my confession.

What he did do was let me drive the boat.

The next day it was just him and me and Lindsay on the water. We were cruising fast and loud. “You drive,” Jeff shouted over the motor. Lindsay grinned and nodded. I had never driven a boat before. “What do I do?” I shouted. Jeff shrugged. I took the wheel. We cruised past small islands, families of pink roseate spoonbills, garbage tankers swarmed by seagulls, fields of grass and wolfberries, and I realized it was not that remarkable for a person to understand what another person needed.

CJ Hauser teaches creative writing at Colgate University. Her novel, Family of Origin, is published by Doubleday.

 

I Want What I Want – And I Want You

For my beloved on the occasion of the seventeenth anniversary of our first (blind) date.
I went on a date and six months later-I had a husband. My life was forever changed that day in more ways than I could have ever imagined, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat
💕


I Want What I Want—And I Want You

We’re not so different, you and I.
When it rains I want a starry sky,
at the shore I dream of mountains high,
with winding roads for us to ride.

We’re not so different me and you.
Grey storm clouds or skies of blue,
both cause our wanderlust to stir,
a quiet life or a fast-paced blur.
we can’t decide which we prefer,

We’re not a complex he and she.
always coffee, never tea.
Milk connects us both you see,
no sugar, some froth and a cookie, or three.

We’re a lot the same, we are, it’s true.
It’s why I fell in love with you.
Still, you contradict most things I say,
and when I’m cross you look the other way.

Babe, after seventeen years I can’t imagine my life without having you here beside me.

Don’t Get Shot

I was in Tennessee and Alabama last week hangin’ with my girls. My tribe.
Two of them are from Canada, the land of Mounties and mooses—and Justin Trudeau—which they rub in my face every chance they get.

She was telling me over duck-fat tater-tots (you heard me) that when she phoned her mom to tell her she was coming to the States, her mother didn’t tell her to have fun, or ask her for a t-shirt from Nashville (which is up there with Vegas and Disneyland in its “We don’t have anything like this in Canada” gobsmackery.)

Nope. Her mom voiced her concern. It went something like this:

“Mom, I’ll be in the United States next week.”

“Aww jeez honey, don’t get shot.”

Wtf? That’s embarrassing.

It breaks my heart. And it makes me mad. 
Because it happened on my watch. Our country became this dysfunctional, hot mess on MY watch?

The fact that the rest of the civilized world is afraid to come here for fear of some loon opening fire and killing them with his Constitutionally protected assault rifle while they innocently sit eating a tater tot is sad—and disgusting.

What has become of us? What does it say about America when sane folks warn their daughters to duck and cover?

A few weeks ago Trump signed into law some legislation making it easier for the mentally ill to get guns. You know, because who doesn’t want that?

I’ve always had such a hard time with this “right” to own a firearm. Listen, my husband has guns. He relishes his right to own them. He is skilled with them, respects them, and locks them up when they’re not in use and most importantly, last time I checked—he wasn’t crazy. But sadly, that is not the case with some people.

And I have to say, their rights are starting to infringe on mine!

I have to go through metal detectors at museums, concerts and sporting events. Some schools even have then now.

I have to open my bag at most public social events and let people poke around in there.

And the past few times I’ve flown I’ve been subjected to a body scan at the airport even though I’m TSA pre-check approved.

When do I get MY rights back? When do I get to laugh at my friend’s mom for being neurotic nervous Nelly—instead of prudent?

When will they stop interpreting the Constitution for their purposes?

When does this madness end? I don’t have the answers.

Thanks for the rant. 

Oh…Canada.

Feel stuff. Stay involved. Vote.

Carry on,
xox

The Heart Wants What It Wants—Then You Check Under the Hood

Hey guys,
I wrote this a while ago and threw it into a file. I wasn’t sure when the time would be right to hit “publish”. But in the space of the past few months, several woman have told me about a very similar situation coming up in their lives, and a couple of high profile female writers have left their male partners for women—so I knew it was time to share. Besides the fact that I know you guys love to hear about things that get me all squirmy.
Let me know what you’re thinking.
xox


“I had a love affair with a man”, he said nonchalantly, his back to me while he flipped pancakes.

I nearly did a spit-take with my mouth full of coffee. Not the funny kind that happens at the end of a joke. More the shocked, eye-bulging, quick exhale, I-need-more-air kind that happens when your live-in boyfriend casually drops a bomb like that at the breakfast table during a leisure Sunday morning two years into your relationship.

We had gone down THAT road.

The road less traveled. It is labeled that because you should NOT go that way. EVER.
We somehow, and I can’t remember exactly how, had gotten sidetracked and ended up on the subject of past lovers. There should be a big sign: TURN AROUND. GO FURTHER AT YOUR OWN PERIL! For those of us stupid enough to think that talking about that kind of stuff doesn’t matter. Oh, it matters!

Or does it?

This guy always colored outside the lines. He was big and bold in everything he did, most especially in the way he loved.
His love was enormous. It was unencumbered, dramatic and all-encompassing. It’s magic lie in its unedited innocence. He was still under thirty and had never had his heart crushed by a steam-roller or dragged behind a car. I was thirty-five-ish and besides being steamrollered and dragged, my heart had also been dropped from a fifty story building and tied to an anvil and thrown into the sea. Just to name of few.

I had the barely healed scabs and scars from my wounds. He did not. His heart was smooth and supple.
A love that pure enabled him to paint with a very broad brush. My pathetic brush was the width of a single human hair.

So, besides being madly in love with him, I was forever intrigued.

“Oh, really?”, I replied as soon as I could find my voice, attempting to sound cool and casual, like he’d just told me he loved plaid. I’m sure I sounded like I’d swallowed a piano.

“These are hot”, he said as he delivered a stack of blueberry pancakes to the table. “And I already buttered ‘um”.
He kissed the back of my neck as he went by, grabbed the syrup and a plate and sat down across from me.

My eyes were fixed on him but not focused. God, he was beautiful—and blurred. Me? I was reeling a little. Okay, a lot. I was reeling A LOT!

Did he have an aids test? I know we’d discussed it once but I couldn’t remember. My heart was pounding. Yes, Yes he had. Whew! We both had and they were negative. Bullet dodged.

So, now what? What about the obvious question: Was he gay?

I remember the napkins and what I was wearing. Isn’t that weird?

The napkins were white cotton with big, blue flowers and I was barefoot, wearing a blush colored linen top that I’d paid way too much for because the color “blush” was all the rage—and I was a redhead back then so “blush” was a good color for me—over a pair of ripped up jean shorts.

“Tell me more”, was what I think I said. Or something to that effect. I may have said “You have my attention”, but I doubt I had the cognitive agility at that moment to come up with any three syllable words. As he started to talk, my vision came back into focus and I sat mesmerized, staring at his lips as they moved over his teeth to form words.

“It’s wasn’t a big deal really,” he said, sensing my inner freak-out. “He was a guy who lived in my building. He had a huge jazz collection on vinyl and we used to listen to music and smoke pot.” He was shoveling forkfuls of pancake in between words, the blueberry tinted syrup glistening on his lips as he spoke. I handed him a napkin.

“How long ago was this?”, I asked, and the minute I did I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer. Recently? When he was a teenager? What did I want him to say?

“Oh, I don’t know…” he was looking into the distance, trying to conjure the past. Shit. Did I want him to re-live this memory?
“About five years ago. Yeah, wow, five years”, he was shaking his head marveling at the passage of time. I remembered that feeling.

Years are like dog years when you’re under thirty.

“You said love affair. You were in love?” I asked. This was the curious part. The part that struck me. I suppose I understood a dalliance in college or a same-sex fling. I could wrap my brain around the sexual exploration aspect of it all. But love? That was…diiferent.

“I was. We were. In love that is”, he was leaning back in his chair, arms crossed, staring at me, grinning. I could feel my face melt. There it went, down the front of my blush blouse, pooling in my lap. I suppose looking across at a melted face snapped him out of his complacency. Compassion kicked in because he leaned forward and took both my hands in his.

“Listen, it just happened. We were friends, and then we fell in love. We had sex…” He looked me straight in the eye. “It’s the oldest story in the book.” In that moment his brush painted a swath across my life as wide as the Grand Canyon.

“Was he…is he gay?”, I asked, holding my silly, single-haired brush. I guess I was thinking maybe the other guy had seduced him although I knew it had probably been the other way around. That wide-open heart of his was irresistible.

“I’m not sure if he identifies as homosexual. I don’t know. He moved away and we lost touch. I don’t—if that’s what you’re worried about.” he was laughing, turning my hands over, gently kissing my open palms while keeping his chocolate-colored eyes locked on mine. His ease and comfort around sexuality only served to exacerbate my narrow-minded clumsiness. Damn my face! It always gave me away. Poker player was not going to be a profession I could bank on.

That was the first time I’d heard the term “identifies” regarding sexuality. This was the nineties so the term wasn’t all over social media like it is now. As a matter-of-fact, this was before social media, if you can imagine that.

“You love who you love”, he said in a more serious tone, letting go of my hands. Then my boyfriend with the gigantic, all-encompassing heart got up and started to clear the table. “The heart wants what it wants”, he said, “Then, eventually, you check under the hood”.

The visual of that made us both laugh.

This “situation” turned out to have no repercussions on our relationship which died of natural causes about a year later.

What did reprecuss was the influence of this young man. He turned out to be my Yoda. He taught me to paint with a brush as broad as a four-lane highway. About almost everything in life. And in the process, it healed so many of my open wounds. He, on the other hand, did go on to have his heart broken by numerous other women—those bitches.

So, what I know for sure is that doesn’t matter how you “identify”. If you fall for someone of the same sex after being straight—are you gay? Bi?

Who cares! To quote Lin Manuel Miranda: Love is love, is love, is love, is love.

Carry on,
xox

Printer Ink, Epipipens, Razor Blades and Bearded Men ~ Reprise

If I can say one thing with conviction, it is that those ink cartridges for your printer ALWAYS run out when you need them the most.

Case in point: The other morning while I was at the gym (trying to find my abs), my husband was in his office busily preparing invoices on his computer for the five or six different jobs he’s working on right now.

We like invoices. Invoices are check magnets. Checks allow us to eat. And we love to eat, so there you go.

Anyhow, when I returned he was circling the printer, cursing a blue streak. It seems his printer had run out of black ink and subsequently had refused to print the invoices. “I thought I had another black cartridge in here”, he grumbled through gritted teeth while rummaging through a cabinet like a bear searching for a baloney sandwich. Slamming the door shut, he slumped in his chair. “Great. Now I can’t print these today.”

What? No money—No food. I could barely hear him over the growling of my stomach.

You’ve gotta know a thing about my husband. He is very old school. Not only does he email his invoices, he prints up hard copies for his files along with copies for his clients to hold in their hot little hands. He has found that these same hands are much more likely to write checks when they’ve just held one of his carefully prepared, itemized invoices. Nobody gives a shit when you email them a bill so basically, paper wins over technology every time.

This stopped me in my tracks. “What? I mean, what about the color cartridge? You could print them in blue or purple?”

He shot me a look that straightened even my pubic hair.

“Listen”, I said, remaining calm. “You aren’t dressed yet, but I am, I’ll make a quick run to Staples and get you a black cartridge. I’ll be back before you’re out of the shower.”

After presenting a few lame protests, he agreed, so off I went.

As I closed the door I heard him offer to give me some cash. “I’ve got it!” I replied, sprinting to the car. I remembered having about $50 in my wallet, I mean, how much could it be?

Not fifty dollars I can tell you that! Not sixty-dollars either. That fucker was SEVENTY-DOLLARS!
PLUS TAX!

“Whyyyyy?” I whined, waving the cartridge at the boy stocking the printer paper. He just shook his head, avoiding direct eye-contact.

“Why is this so expensive?” I hissed, interrogating the check-out girl. “It’s a tablespoon of ink in three dollars of plastic!”Without even looking at me she offered a rebate. A $2 rebate that takes eight weeks to take the two dollars off my SEVENTY DOLLAR printer ink purchase.

“People pay this? This is extortion!” I yelled as the manager walked up. He seemed hardened to this argument. He had talking points. “You save when you order in bulk”, he said, motioning to alert the three-hundred-pound security guard. I knew that guy would understand my plight. We needed to invoice! We needed to eat!

“Ha!” I guffawed loudly, a little bit of spit landing on my chin.

Embarrassed, I mumbled under my breath while handing the cashier my debit card “Bulk? You’ve gotta be kidding me. A bulk order of this ink is equal to a car payment.” I grabbed my cartridge made of gold—and the receipt with the fucking rebate to fill out and mail in. I wasn’t giving them that extra $2 godammit!

“What a racket.” Were my parting words as I passed the bemused security guard. He nodded in agreement even though I’m relatively sure he had no idea what I was talking about.

This whole thing really pissed me off. Our immediate need for this overpriced product stripped away any and all negotiation power leaving me with no options. My husband needed to print invoices. Today.

I opened all the cars windows on the way home, hoping the cool, fresh air would change my mood. It was a beautiful morning. I had already accrued my ten thousand steps. The invoices would be printed and we would live to eat another day.

“Let it go, Janet,” I said to myself. “This is how they’re able to sell printers so cheap.” 

Then I started to think about the other NECESSITIES in our lives where they have us over a barrel.

Epipens came to mind. Raising their price 400% is just a crime. Plain and simple.

And Razor blades. Have you purchased a pack of razor blades lately? They’re so valuable people steal them. (Like saffron at the supermarket and Sudafed at the drug store.) You have to ask for them up at the register at Target.

Tell me why? They’re three, one-inch blades of steel, encased in fifty cents of plastic!

That got me thinking, maybe the razor blade price gouging started this beard phenomenon we’re experiencing. Maybe men just threw up their hands and said: “Fuck it!” I can eat or I can shave. (Everything comes down to eating with me.)

BTW: I was wondering who to blame. Not every man looks good in a beard you know.

So the moral of this story is: It’s the principal of the thing. Even if I can afford it, I don’t like being taken advantage of for no good reason.

I know I’m not alone here. Tell me what gets your blood boiling.

Carry on,
xox

Butterflies on the Subway and Black Berets

“Once I read a story about a butterfly in the subway and today, I saw one! It got on at 42nd and off at 59th, where, I assume, it was going to Bloomingdales to buy a hat that will turn out to be a mistake, as almost all hats are.”
You’ve Got Mail

Once upon a time, a loooooong time ago, my friend Wes asked me this question: “If you were a hat, what kind of hat would you be?”

“A black beret, of course”, I responded without hesitation.
This was the mid-nineties when everybody was wearing berets. Think Monica Lewinsky.
And it was during my black dress with black tights with black Doc Martins phase so yeah, I felt confident with my decision.

As I remember it, we were walking down a pretty steep hill near Wes’ home in San Diego on our way to dinner at a little place in his neighborhood.

Or… We were walking down that same hill after parking someplace where they didn’t have meters (because we were too cheap cool to pay for parking) and I was eating an Abba Zabba.

I have memories of both those events and the hat conversation happened on one of them I just can’t remember which one.
Anyway, I digress.

Wes stopped dead in his tracks mid-hill which took me a while to notice and because I had so much momentum going. When I finally did look back—he was shouting distance away.

I know that because I heard him shouting “You are so NOT a black beret! Do you even know yourself at all?” At the back of my head.

I waited and when he caught up with me he gave one of those shoulder shoves that your brother gives you when you eat the last chocolate chip cookie or your friend gives you when you say something dim-witted like, you think you’re a black beret.

“What? I love my black beret! It’s simple and clean and it gets the job done—pretty much like me!” I said, presenting my case to his smirky little face.

He started to laugh. And not just a polite little tee hee kind of laugh. Oh, no, my friend was practically doubled over, seized with big guffaws of raucously loud laughter.

I looked around, embarrassed, but the street was empty.

“You are the most complicated person on the planet! He finally managed to choke out. “Simple? Simple? HARDLY!” Bahahahahahaha!

I just stood there with a pouty face silently watching my friend convulse with laughter. But as everybody knows laughter is contagious and within seconds I came down with a nasty case of the giggles.

He continued, Oh, my, gawd! Get’s the job done! A beret is boring! A beret says I didn’t have the time to think about this. You are NOT boring and let’s get real here—you overthink EVERYTHING!”

He locked his arm in mine as we continued down the hill powered by the laughter.

“Okay”, I acquiesced through a fit of giggles. He had a point. “Then, if you know me so well—what kind of hat am I?”

“You are a pink hat. A pink party hat with a flower. Something zippy and sassy that says let’s have fun!”

And although I would never be caught dead in such a hat, I loved the fact that my fashion-forward, highly insightful friend had picked the exact same hat for me that I imagined the butterfly on the subway had chosen for itself at Bloomingdales.

By the way, I have to disagree with Ms. Ephron, (who wrote You’ve Got Mail) hats are never a mistake, even for butterflies.

So…what kind of hat are you?

Carry on,
xox

The Cricket Chorus

I was lying in bed last night listening to the crickets who finally got a chance to chirp since Raccoon Fight Club has relocated and I remembered this:

https://www.facebook.com/soulseekers.worldwide/videos/1810889285894025/

This is something you have to listen to! In 1992 Jim Wilson got the idea to slow down a recording of chirping crickets. He referred to the revealed sound as “Gods cricket chorus”. They sing in perfect harmony to each other. How does that happen?

It’s gorgeous and mind-blowing and better than…a frog chorus.

Quick cricket story (of course). Back in the day, in one of my apartments, during the summer the crickets would find their way inside and chirp all night long. It wasn’t slowed down to an angelic sounding chorus—it was simply annoying. I couldn’t escort them back outside like I did with the spiders and daddy-long-legs because they hid from me. As hard as I tried I just couldn’t find them.

So like the bitch says above—my idleness, laziness and the desire to save myself the trouble of moving necessitated being inventive.

Bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, I got a bright idea. For three nights in a row, I decided to have a chat with them, a cricket “Come to Jesus” so to speak. I walked around and politely asked them to be quiet, explaining my need to sleep at night and giving them permission to chirp their little hearts out during the day while I was at work.

Night one: A full chorus. Nobody felt like not chirping. As a matter of fact, I think they invited friends.

Night two: A little better. They must have started after I went to sleep because when I got up to pee—it was full Woodstock.

Night three: Silence. Nothing. Crickets. (I just cracked myself up.)

The things that nature hides from us are astonishing.

Carry on,
xox

Four Questions That Will Help Bob Take The Wheel

I found this tucked into an old journal the other day.
At the time these questions intrigued me and I remember cutting this out and doing what you do when you are lost and completely directionless—I journaled the shit out of it.

It’s from a magazine dated way back in 2010.

2010 was the year I started asking questions of life. Big ones. I had the universe on speed dial.

On the surface mine sucked.

I had lost my business just the year before, I was 52,  and I had no idea what the hell I was going to do next.
I don’t know about you but when the chips are down I’m not very nice to myself. All of that “buck up” and “stiff upper lip” shit kicks in and I’m not even British!

I really could not risk making any more “mistakes” so I went right back into the profession I had left in 2007.

Stripper.

Kidding.

Anyway, I went back to selling jewelry. I know, it’s not the gulag—but it was not the answer to my inquiries either.
The voice that was speaking, the one I was ignoring, it was telling me to write.

You guys, it may as well have yelled “strip” and waved fistfuls of dollar bills at me because I wasn’t gonna do it.

Then, slowly, methodically, and thankfully just in time, the universe, God, Bob or whoever you want to believe controls these things took the wheel.

Starting in 2012, through a series of coincidences and synchronicities, the most improbable people, writers, started showing up in my life.

These new women caused my life to change dramatically. Especially the one that died that very year.

She arrived on a white horse (or cloud) just when I was begging for a mentor.

Once she showed up crazy, mystical, weird-but-true experiences became a daily occurrence. So much so the I (we) wrote an entire screenplay about it.

And within three years my life changed forever. Bye, bye jewelry, hello writer.

All this to say, I believe that answering these questions is freaking magic, you guys. They unleash some kind of supernatural voodoo, woo-woo, vibe that unclogs the pipes and gets things moving in the right direction. I invite you to study them, answer them and then stand back, grab a cocktail, put your feet up, and let Bob steer the bus.

I promise you will love the results.

Carry on,
xox

Wise Words From A Dead Friend

My dead friend at 9:18 am this morning: “How disappointed are you to find out that we came here to be happy?”

Me (With a mouth full of toothpaste): Whaaa…disappointed? What?

DF: Just be quiet and listen.

“LIFE.”

It’s not a business trip where all you do is work, work, work.

It’s not a prison for idiots and bad people.

It’s not a series of problems that need to be fixed.

It’s not a tourist destination where all you do is take pictures and leave.

It’s not a planet in peril that needs to be saved.

Contrary to some beliefs it’s not a schoolroom with a huge test at the end.

This beautiful blue planet was created for our enjoyment. Every animal, plant, rock and grain of sand is here to add to the fun.

Quit taking it all so damn seriously! Live life. Have fun. Be happy.

Me: That’s it?  Are you going without wishing me a happy weekend?

DF: Jeez. I think that goes without saying.

Carry on,
xox

Read This If You’ve “Never Had The Guts” ~ Throwback

image

“If you build the guts to do something, anything, then you better save enough to face the consequences.”
― Criss Jami

Things that never happened because I didn’t have the guts.
The list is long. Like longer than Taylor Swift’s legs long.

How do I know for sure what could have happened?
I don’t. But my regret does.
I’m sure you know what I mean.

My regret is an artist who paints with broad strokes. Large, majestic scenery, filled with full-color landscapes of stories that never happened.

It also is a master in the art of persuasion.

Those stories look spectacular.
They seem amazing.
They are fucking fairy tales.

In these scenarios, my gutless self is replaced by another person. Someone who is risk averse; the acrobatic chance taker/failure dodger. For instance:

I’m a Broadway actress with a shelf crowded with Tony awards.

I’m a rock star, or the wife of a rock star (take your pick), who continues to tour and performs to sold-out crowds.

I’m a mother. Twin boys and a girl.

I’m an entrepreneur who shattered the glass ceiling and owns six companies that are all publicly traded.

I’m a seasoned lecturer and public speaker.

I’m someone who looks refreshed and rested, at least ten years younger (but whose wallet is twenty-five thousand dollars lighter.)

I’m the winner of Dancing With The Stars, The Voice, the Apprentice, and Jeopardy (the celebrity edition).

I’m a mentor on America’s Top Model after having my face grace more magazine covers than any other living human being.

I am resting on my laurels.

~OR HOW ABOUT~

I’m an aging hippie who lives off the land up in Oregon.

I’m an aging New Ager who lives off tips in Hawaii.

I’m the aging owner of a brothel somewhere tolerant of that sort of thing.

I’m busking on the corners of Santa Cruz.

I’m the ex-wife of seven men.

I’m someone who never married, looks thirty-five and owns dozens of Siamese cats.

I’m living in a Villa in Italy after cashing out, buying a one-way ticket, and hooking up with a guy named Paulo.

I have photo albums filled with pictures of me bungee jumping, sky diving and formula one racing, climbing Mt. Everest, Deep sea diving and waving my certificate that states I am the top of my class in NASA astronaut training school.

I’ve changed my name to Solange.

After surveying this list. The list that was supposed to summon that pit in my stomach. You know, the one that makes you feel bad about yourself and feeds regret?

Instead I had an epiphany.

What if those things didn’t happen not so much because of a guts deficit — but due to a keen sense of the obvious as far as knowing what I was capable of — an inkling of my life’s trajectory — a ginormous helping of common sense?

Ha! Take that regret!

P.S. I HAVE done many things in my life that required a shit-ton of guts, and so have YOU—but THAT my friends, is a list for another day.

Got any regrets?

Carry On,
xox

Hi, I’m Janet

Mentor. Pirate. Dropper of F-bombs.

This is where I write about my version of life. My stories. Told in my own words.

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