spiritual

At breakfast this morning, my BFF Steph and I were marveling at how kind and thoughtful the folks are here in the south, specifically Nashville and Huntsville since that is where my butt has sat for the past few days. I’m sure the rest of the south is equally kind. For instance, I know for a fact that the folks in my brother’s home state of Arkansas are top-notch, slap your mama, over-the-top nice.

Especially Billy. Billy is in a league all his own—but that is a story for another day. Suffice it to say, Billy has gotten me out of so many jams—technologically speaking, (and let’s be honest, are there any jams that are worse than a computer staring back at you with the black screen of death?) that I bought Billy a pony—on Amazon.

Anyway…Steph was relaying the story of her seat mate on the flight into Huntsville yesterday.

He was your standard issue, middle-aged guy, who’s been commuting from the state where he’d been transferred, back and forth to Alabama where his wife and daughter have stayed put until she finishes her senior year of high school.

In my tribe, we’ve been talking a lot lately about mindfulness—conscious living.

Why we want the things we want.
What are our expectations?
What do we hope to gain?
Will this decision add to my quality of life—or detract from it?

You know, all of those questions that make us formerly impulsive Bohemian types cringy and squirmy.

We have entered the phase of life where the opening line when you talk to God has changed from “Dear Lord, please give me what I want—to, Dear Wise One, please show me what I need.”

The man on Steph’s flight was coming back to be present at his daughter’s senior prom. The decision was easy for him as he explained, “You know those dates on headstones and the top of obituaries? The date of birth, then a dash and the date they died?” Steph nodded.

“In my family, we’ve decided to ”live the dash. To figure out what makes us happy between those two dates—and just go for it!”

I sat back in my chair for a minute taking that all in.

Don’t you fucking love that?

I never thought about mindful living quite that way before, but he’s right! There are a finite amount of years that fit inside the dash. How we fill that space is our choice. We can live unconsciously, (which to most of us means fearfully, cautiously), reacting to circumstances that seem beyond our control.
OR
We can take the reins and live the dash. Filling the space between those dates with love and happiness.

I choose the latter, don’t you?

Carry on,
xox

Have you ever given that much thought? I have.

The fact that we’re trying to maintain our balance on a planet made mostly of liquid, that is spinning at 1000 mph?
Then imagining that big wet blue ball hurtling through the void of space at 67,000 mph.

No wonder I fall down so much. Just thinking about it makes me want to vomit.

I know science says it all has to do with centrifugal force, gravity nd blah, blah, blah…
But I think it’s a freaking miracle.

This rare jewel. This Goldilocks habitat, in the middle of a vacuum. How did I get so lucky?

When I contemplate all the places, all the gin joints in all the towns, in all the worlds, in all of the Universes, where I could have ended up, I must have drawn the long straw, because I could have been born as a gnat on the ass of a Wookie.

It is my belief that we volunteered to come here at this time in Earth’s history.
We waited in line.
We knew things wouldn’t be easy. But we knew they wouldn’t be boring either.
It would be a time of great change, and we knew we could make a difference. It would be a challenge to fit all of our magnificence into a body. It’s uncomfortably tight at times, like squeezing into size zero skinny jeans.

And those emotions! How the hell do they work?
They looked really fun from an outsider’s perspective.

But the beauty. My God, the beauty.
Trees of green and skies of blue. Purple mountains majesty.

I’m in awe whenever I see an elephant or a whale, or a wild wolf.
Watching hummingbirds in my backyard or starlings flying in formation.
The smell of cut grass, and orange blossoms and puppy breath.

Those are just a few of the things that help me maintain my balance here.

I KNOW we all came in with a purpose. God or whoever does not make extra people.
That’s not the way the Universe works.
No one and nothing is superfluous. And all life is connected.

Remember that the next time you’re feeling lonely, unsettled and out of balance.

Then open your eyes and look around. Take a deep breath and realize how freakin’ lucky you are. How lucky we ALL are.
Then get to work, you with your mad skills.

XoxJanet

“I know a man who gave up smoking, drinking, sex, and rich food. He was healthy right up until the day he killed himself.”
~ Johnny Carson

I had a startling realization about myself recently, I am to the diet/health connection what the deniers are to climate change/global warming. I know that all of the studies are true—it’s just so fucking inconvenient!

Case in point.

I love to eat. Food makes me happy. Almost happier than good sex with bad boys.
Most of the time I try to eat healthily but I’m far from fanatical about it. Unless you count donuts. Donuts are my Kryptonite and they are banned from entering my house lest I devour an entire dozen, naked and dripping in raspberry jelly in the space of an hour. And here’s the thing, my body doesn’t react in a negative way at all, at least not in an overtly obvious way. I’m sure the blood sugar spike is off the charts, I just can’t see it so it doesn’t exist. The only thing I CAN see is the shame on my face in the bathroom mirror so that is deterrent enough for me.

Denial. That has been my default setting up until now.

Last week my husband and I did a cleanse. Not one of those highfalutin celebrity cleanses that promise you clear skin, shiny hair and an ass you can bounce a quarter off of. Nope, my husband absconded with some literature (basically, the how to’s—whys — and what for’s) of a client’s wildly expensive, doctor supervised cleanse.

Never ones to take things at face value and because we happen to be as cheap as the day is long, we decided to follow the basic tenet of the program—but morphed it to our liking.

Instead of their spendy protein shakes twice a day (at breakfast and dinner), we drank what we had on hand, our old faithful, Shakology.
We also included coffee.
And pumpkin pie.

Just kidding, No pie.

The rest of the day you are required to juice and I know how lazy I can be, especially when I’m in full victim mode, like during a cleanse, so I went to the grocery store (ours has a juice station in the produce dept.) and bought some juices to go so I’d have no excuse.

The cleanse advocates a healthy lunch of fish or a lean meat and filling up on tons of fresh veggies and fruit. My husband was great about that especially since the dinner of a protein shake loomed large for him.

Me, not so much. Once I get in full deprivation mode I tend to run with it in a religious pilgrim kind of way. I swing to an unhealthy extreme. If I was into pain I’d self-flagellate.

I know, what can I say, I need help.

All week for lunch I switched between albacore tuna out of a can, a baked sweet potato, or raw apples and celery. Instead of juicing them I ate them raw so I had something crunchy to gnaw on in lieu of my own foot.

We were both diligent. Our stick-to-itiveness impressed even me and I have impossibly high standards.
He was dropping weight at a slow and steady rate. I don’t weigh myself (long, violent story. A lot of scales were killed along the way so I won’t tramatize you with the details). Suffice it to say my skinny jeans moved out of the torture device category and back into fashion where they belong.

Then this happened. Nothing. At least not what I expected.

I didn’t get tired. I was filled with energy.
I slept great. I woke up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (I finally know what the means).
I wasn’t angry about anything. My moods stabilized, giving me a perpetual skip-in-my-step giddiness.
I barely pooped and when I did it smelled like violets (okay, maybe a slight exaggeration).

I figure it even changed our character a little. We didn’t cheat. Not even little. And we kept on going through the weekend which is unheard of for us. It’s just a thing we’ve silently agreed to. We use the weekends, which of course start Friday night and last through Sunday, as neutral territory. Nothing sticks. No fight, no diet, and no freaking cleanse. Duh.

Except for some reason, this one lasted until a baby shower we were both required to attend on Saturday late afternoon.
I was reluctant to eat. I felt tentative around the crudites. Skittish. I eyed the cheese with suspicion.

He piled his plate with fresh bread and a perfectly ripe camembert but passed on the red wine.

Did you hear me? He passed on the red wine!

Who were we?

We were the freshly cleansed. That’s who.

After the smell of the dark, freshly baked bread took up residence inside my nose, hanging drapes and laying carpet, I caved too.

Cut to a couple of hours later with me in the car, prone, my pants unbuttoned, moaning.
I felt like shit. Worse that shit.
I felt like the foul smelling shit on the bottom of shit’s shoe.

When we got home I went straight to bed without my shake. So did he. It was 7:30.

Never in my long and illustrious life as a foodie have I noticed the connection between food and how it affected the way I felt more than I did that day. It made me a believer. A convert. And now a zealot.

I’m currently on a writing vacation with my tribe, happily eating my way through Nashville but I have to confess– I can’t wait to get back to my cleanse and the way it made me feel.

Has this ever happened to you? I need to know.

Carry on,
xox

What in the hell was going on? I had unwittingly been given a front-row seat to a disaster that I’d known was going to happen—for a year!

Why in the hell was I in Hawaii again? What was my part in this tragedy?

I never wanted to be someone who predicts disasters. Seriously Universe? Give me another talent.
Glass eater.
Fart lighter.
Anything.
Something else. Something not so fucking scary.

Be careful what you wish for. Now I talk to dead people. But not the scary ones. Funny ones. The bossy but kind ones.
Thank God for small favors.

Anyway…the local anchor came back onscreen to inform us that one of the deep ocean buoys had registered a tsunami fifteen feet high and getting larger, with a velocity of over five hundred miles per hour, headed directly towards the Hawaiian Islands.

It would get to us in five hours.
3 a.m.
Fucking three a.m! Of course, it was coming in the middle of the night!
The witching hour. The time when nothing good ever happens. Oh, and by-the-way, dark water is one of my biggest fears.
I was petrified.

Ginger was feeling sick and went bed. The guys opened another bottle of wine and started playing cards, remaining lighthearted, partying while waiting for the inevitable. It felt like gallows humor, like the deck of the Titanic.

I went back to our room, shivering under the blankets with anxiety, glued to the TV while the disaster siren wailed in the background.

Right around midnight, they announced the second buoy reading. The wave was larger and picking up speed as it headed our way.

Suddenly the intercom came on inside the condo. Nobody even knew there was an intercom connected to the main resort which was run by Marriott. (You can hear it on my 3/11 Instagram)

A voice cleared its throat.

A young man’s voice, extremely nervous, shaky, cracking and squeaking, blared loudly throughout the condo. Haltingly, he instructing everyone in units below the fifth floor to evacuate to the roof. “Bring blankets…pillows…water and, um, your shoes, it’s going to be a long night”. His anxiety was palpable.

Uh, okay Voice of Authority.
Didn’t they have anyone available with a more mature tone? Something deep and fatherly? A voice that could console us and instill calm. I was thinking Morgan Freeman or James Earl Jones.
This kid’s voice and delivery were comical to me. In my imagination, he was the pimply faced nephew of the lady who fed the stray cats behind the parking garage. One minute he was doing his calculus homework, the next, he was behind a microphone, advising hundreds of tourists during an impending disaster. He was the only one that was expendable in an emergency. Everyone important had a task.
Holy crap, he was the best they had!

Thank God something was funny.

One of trembly, squeaky, scared guy’s announcements advised us all to fill our bathtubs in order to have plenty of drinking water in case the sanitation plant was wiped out.

Intermittently he’d come back on with further instructions, Anyone with a vehicle in the lower garages, please move them to higher ground behind the main hotel, he advised, sounding as if he were on the verge of tears.

Not long afterwards I heard voices, car keys, and the front door slam as the guys went to move our cars.

In the dark from our balcony, I watched the groundskeepers running around like headless chickens, rushing to clear the sand and pool surround of hundreds of chairs. Then they emptied the rental hut with its kayaks, snorkels and fins, inner tubes and dozens of surf and boogie boards.

If you watch the Thailand tsunami videos it is those seemingly innocuous beach toys that become deadly projectiles in fast-moving water. You may not immediately drown, but a surf board or a beach chair coming at you at hundreds of miles an hour will kill you for sure.

It was too much. The destruction in Japan was too much for me to handle.
I watched multi-story buildings get washed away like they were kids toys. We were so close to the water. Could our building withstand the rush of the initial wave? How high would the water come?
The third floor, the fourth—or higher? Was the sixth floor high enough? What was going to happen?

I turned off the TV. The dark room fell silent and instantly I felt a drop in my anxiety level. You can get sucked into the endless loop of death and destruction—it’s addictive, like a drug.

I unhooked the CNN IV, grabbed my phone, inserted my ear buds, pulled up a meditation, and started to calm my nervous system down. Slow…deep…breathing. In…and out… after a few minutes, I could feel my shoulders drop and my face relax. My jaw throbbed. I’d been unconsciously clenching it for hours.

My mind started to unwind. The siren went way, fading into the distance, the boy’s terrified voice becoming a muffled form of white noise.
I actually slipped into a half sleep state. Aware of my surroundings, but extremely relaxed.

The meditations came to an end. Silence. I was still okay.
No longer spinning in fear I decided to calmly ask a question.
“What’s going to happen, how bad will this be?” I asked no one in particular.

Here’s where the magic happened.

A very loving, clear and calm voice answered back:
What do you want to happen? How bad do you want it to be?

What? You mean I get a vote?  This answer left me flabbergasted. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but this felt extraordinary.

Somehow, instinctively I knew that I couldn’t say make the tsunami go away—there are some things we are powerless to change.
What I could change was MY experience of it. What did I want to happen to me—to us?

Script it the voice said, and that has changed my life.

Okay…I said in my head, remembering the videos from Thailand, you can come up to the palm trees that line our pool area and define the boundary between the beach and our resort. That’s it. To the palm trees only, NOT into the pool and NOT into our resort.

No further conversation was needed. No idle chit-chat, no more Q & A.

I fell asleep. A deep sleep rich with meaningful dreams that I no longer remember.
Inside one, a muffled voice that felt like it was underwater warned: Stay away from the ocean…Do NOT get near the water…We are on lockdown…stay inside your rooms…

It must be happening crossed my mind, but I was too deep to care.

Only as far as the palm trees…up to the palm trees…echoed in my mind.

When I finally opened my eyes I could see daylight. Raphael was asleep next to me and I could smell coffee.
Obviously, the tsunami had come and gone—and everything seemed…normal.

These are pictures of the waterline the tsunami left behind. It is still waaaaay up the beach at this point, about three hours after it came ashore. It surged forty feet UP the beach, over dry sand, and stopped right at the palm trees that line the pool, and our resort.

Script it. Imagine it. Feel it. Ask for it. Relax.

That proved to me, without a doubt, that we can script our circumstances. There are things we can’t control, but there are so many that we can.

Get calm, and set boundaries. How bad/good do you want it to be? What do you want to happen?

We have control over our immediate circumstances.
Script it.

This changed my life–I hope it changes yours.

Carry on,
xox

I wrote about this a long time ago, but I’m going to post it again.
Partly because there are so many new readers, and also because yesterday (and this morning) mark the five-year six-year anniversary—AND it’s a fuckin’ great story.

If you’ve heard it before, go make yourself a sandwich. And don’t give away the ending.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

In the spring of 2010, I went to Hawaii with my dear friend Wes to get some clarity about which direction I should take my life after the death of my store, Atik. Loss can make a person lose their trust in life—and themselves, and I was not lucky enough to escape that unspoken step of the grieving process. Besides, misery loves company.

Oh, who am I kidding? We went to drink Mai Tai’s, eat like escaped death row convicts, sit on the white sands of Waikiki Beach all day gossiping and people watching—and get massages.

All we did was laugh. Well, he laughed and I cried—then he laughed at my crying. Then I cry-laughed. It was wet and sloppy. Lots of running mascara and snot-bubbles.
You get the picture.

About mid-way through our seven-day trip, I got the sense there was going to be a tsunami.
You know—like you do…
That evening when Wes met me at the bar for happy hour I voiced my concern. “I want to move to a higher room in our hotel. I said, stirring my drink with a hot pink plastic monkey. “I think there’s going to be a tsunami and I’m not going to be safe on the second floor.”

“Did you start without me? How many drinks have you had?” he guffawed as he flagged down a waiter in order to catch a buzz and grab a seat on the crazy clown car I was obviously driving.

“I’m serious. You’re on the third floor, but I’m not even sure that’s high enough. Let’s look into moving”, I argued back with conviction.

“I can’t take you seriously with that pink money in your hand.”

All I could see in my mind’s eye were those horrible videos from the tsunami in Thailand.

His eyes said: Have you lost your mind? But in order to calm my fears, he immediately whipped out his phone and started to look up Hawaiian tsunami.

“The earliest on record was reported in 1813 or 1814 — and the worst occurred in Hilo in 1946, killing 173 people.” he was reading a Wikipedia page.
“So it happens kind-of-never, and I’m okay with those odds.” He raised his drink to toast “To surviving that rarest of all disasters—the Hawaiian tsunami” We clinked glasses as he shook his head laughing at my continued squirminess.

Still laughing he mumbled under his breath, “But if it does happen, which it could, ‘cause you’re pretty spooky that way— it will be one hell of a story…”

The first week of March the following year, 2011, our great friends, the ones who ride the world with us on motorcycles, asked if we wanted to join them at their condo in Maui. I was printing our boarding passes before I hung up the phone; you don’t have to ask me twice to drop everything and go to Hawaii.

On the beautiful drive from the airport to Lahaina, the air was warm and thick, filled with the fragrance of jasmin and rain as we wove our way in and out of the clouds that play peek-a-boo with the sun all day on the Hawaiian Islands. With a view of the lush green mountains formed from the ever-present volcanos to the right, and the deep blue Pacific churning wildly to our left, it really felt like Paradise Lost.

That’s when it hit me like a bolt of lightning.

I turned down the radio of the rental car that was blaring some five-year-old, Top Forty song.
“We’re going to have a tsunami”, I announced.
It didn’t feel like if — it felt like when. A certainty.
“I think we’re more likely to have a volcanic eruption than a tsunami.” my hubby replied nonchalantly, turning the radio volume back up.

Damn! I love my husband. He cohabitates with all the voices in my head without batting an eye. Most men would run for the hills.
He just stays rational. A volcanic eruption in the Hawaiian Islands is…the rational supposition.
God love him.

I had never mentioned my premonition from the trip the previous year—too odd; but I let loose for the remainder of the drive, wondering aloud about what floor their condo was on and worrying if it would it be high enough. Neither of us had any idea and I’ve gotta tell ya, I breathed a sigh of relief when the answer came via text. The sixth floor. Their condo was on the sixth floor, overlooking the pool, facing the ocean.

We spent the next week eating and drinking amazing food and wine, snorkeling, swimming, driving around, and whale watching. As a matter of fact, the ocean outside of our resort was a veritable whale soup.

There is a passage between Maui, Lanai, and Molokai (both which we could see in the distance), that the whales like to use as a detour from the open ocean, and we could see them breaching from our balcony. They were present in high numbers and especially active.

It was extraordinary! Everyone said so. Even the guys on the whale watching boats agreed with our friends—they’d never seen a year like this one.

Two days before our departure, on the eleventh, it all seemed to come to a screeching halt.

The ocean was as passive as a lake that day. I hiked alone down the beach to a little cove that was billed by the locals as “swimming in a tropical fish tank,” There was nothing. Literally not one fish. People kept remarking how odd it seemed. The guys on the whale watching catamarans were perplexed because suddenly, there were no whales.

We made dinner in that night and by 9 pm I was just the right amount of sun-kissed, buzzed, full and sleepy. After my shower, I turned on the TV in our room for the first time the entire trip to catch the results of American Idol. As I got dressed and dried my hair I casually flipped around the channels. American Idol, Baywatch re-runs, CNN. Then I saw it.

The bright red BREAKING NEWS banner at the bottom of the screen: Huge Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami.

I screamed something incoherent as I ran out into the family room, half-dressed, my bare feet sliding on the polished floors, knocking things over, becoming hysterical.
“You guys! Turn on the TV! Oh my God! Turn on the TV!” I yelled, grabbing the remote; but it looked like something that powers the International Space Station, so I threw it toward my husband.

“Oh, I don’t want to watch TV…” I heard someone say, but Raphael could tell something was wrong. He said later it felt like 911 when everyone was calling and the only thing they could manage to say was: Turn on the TV!

“CNN. Find CNN!” I was so freaked out I could barely speak.

When the images came up on that big screen HD TV they were even more terrifying.
It was a helicopter shot, high above the coastline of a small city. There was a wave with a white cap as far as the eye could see. it looked like it spanned almost the entire coastline and it was headed straight for cars, boats, houses…and people.

Now we were all transfixed. Silently glued to the screen with the frantic sounding Japanese commentary running in the background. This was all happening LIVE.

The CNN anchor sounded reassuring, telling us that Japan had one of the most advanced tsunami warning systems on the planet. Sirens had started sounding a few minutes after the large off-shore earthquake, warning the population to make their way to their pre-determined evacuation points up on higher ground.

We watched in horror as churning brown water began rushing onshore with a ferocity that was nauseatingly familiar.
It just kept coming and coming. Undeterred by the breakwater…and the thirty-foot wall they had built to withstand a tsunami.

“God, I hope they had enough time” I whispered.

Suddenly the CNN picture was minimized as the face of a local anchor at the Maui station took up the entire rest of the screen.
“Good evening”, he read off the cue card, “The entire Hawaiian Islands have been placed on tsunami watch due to the large earthquake off the coast of northern Japan. We will keep you posted as scientists get the readings off of the tsunami buoys that dot the span of the Pacific Ocean from the coast of Japan to the west coast of North America. If it looks like a tsunami is coming our way, the watch will turn into a warning.” He swallowed awkwardly, I saw his Adams apple quiver.
“Stay with us for further instructions.”

The screen was filled again with the escalating destruction in Japan.

I started to shake uncontrollably, my eyes filling with tears.

Then I saw him out of the corner of my eye. My husband flinched. It got my attention and when I looked his way our eyes met and he looked as if he’d seen a ghost. Remote in hand, he turned toward me slowly and deliberately. His mouth dropped open, his eyes were full of…questions.

Then with no sound, eyes locked on mine, he mouthed my prophecy from earlier that week: We’re going to have a tsunami.

The hair stood up on the back of my neck. Really, the hair on my entire body. Even my chin hairs stood at attention.

The shrill wail of a Disaster Alert Siren brought us both back to reality.
It was official—a tsunami was imminent.

To Be Continued…

“No apology has meaning if we haven’t listened to the hurt party’s anger and pain.”
~ Harriet Lerner

Have you ever been on the receiving end of a half-assed, half-hearted apology?
I have and it feels terrible. You almost wish the apologizer hadn’t opened their mouth at all.

We all know that someone who gets defensive the minute you disagree with what they’re saying.
Suddenly a discussion turns into an argument. They escalate it. They get BIG and they get LOUD.
Especially in public. They want to be right and they want you to drop the subject.
They try to humiliate you into dropping it.

When you get in the car (invariably you came together—you probably even live together), there’s an awkward silence and then maybe this…

“I’m sorry if you feel bad about …”

THAT is NOT an apology.

I’m no saint. I’ve also completely blown an apology. It’s usually so garbled, so difficult to get the words out since I can’t seem to remove my big foot from my mouth.

Take a look at this video. It’s a quick (a whopping minute and a half) snippet of a conversation between the all around awesome Brene Brown and relationship expert Harriet Lerner about how we’re wired for defensiveness.

https://www.facebook.com/SuperSoulSunday/videos/1234564259924425/

Bullet points in case you can’t find less than two minutes in your schedule. (You’re welcome—and shame on you!)

• You’re too busy listening for what you don’t agree with. ( So, then are you really listening?)
• You’re listening for exaggerations. (At our house it’s the two words NEVER and ALWAYS—we decided long ago that those two words are not allowed because nothing in life NEVER happens and ALWAYS happens.)
• You’re listening for the inaccuracies. (Keeping score, debunking percentages used, you know, general jackassery.)

I felt we could all use this little reminder going into the weekend when a couple of glasses of wine mixed with politics at dinner can be a recipe for disaster.

You guys, let’s all pay it forward, let’s learn how to say an authentic “I’m sorry.” The world will be a better place.

Care to share the best apology you’ve ever received?

Carry on
xox

http://brenebrown.com

http://www.harrietlerner.com

Yuck it up big guy.

This post is from early last year and the good news is: nothing has changed. And the bad news? Nothing has changed. Cest la vie!
Big Love,
xox
***

My husband is a gem. He is a prince of a man. A tender-hearted soul who adores dogs, good food, boobs, and anything with an internal combustion engine.

Okay, now that I’ve made that clear let’s get real.
He can also be an asshole.

But, hey, show me the short list of who can’t.

Plus, I said ‘can be’ —not ‘IS an asshole’.
That’s a VERY big distinction and one that will probably save my marriage.
He has his moments, but then again, don’t we all.

He is also a MAJOR procrastinator.
Big time. A professional. It is such a finely honed skill of his, refined and practiced all these many years, that he is a MASTER Procrastinator.
He could teach it at the college level.
At Harvard.
Sir Raphael of the Bertolus, Professor of Procrastination.

Now you may be worried that he’ll read this and get angry. He will, and he will — he’ll get to it in about a month. That leaves me plenty of time to practice my apology, find my push-up bra, and cook him a nice dinner.

So, am I writing just to bag on my adorable hubster? Yes… and NO.

You see, this is all relevant because his behavior has surprised me lately. He’s taken on a new “ator”.
He has become The Validator.
Validation is just this side of a compliment so I think he’ll get to keep his *“I’m a Frenchman, The French don’t give compliments” card.

Just the same, he’s been showering everyone around him with the gift of validation and it sounds something like this:

HUB: “I told Matt that I was very happy with the fact that he’s treating himself to a nice, new motorcycle, you know he works really hard AND he takes care of his brother…”

ME: “Wow. That was nice of you.”

The following week,
HUB: “When I had lunch with Peter the other day I mentioned how impressed I am with him. He always seems to make the best, most measured and uncompromising business decisions. He’s a pleasure to observe.”

ME: “Wait, What? You said all of that to his face? Did he choke on his steak sandwich?”

Then, today…
ME: “Thank GAWD we didn’t run into anybody at lunch. It’s a miracle. I look how a fart smells. I have this freaking head cold so my entire face is a chapped disaster, my hair looks like fuel for a grease fire, and I smell like yellow toenails.”

HUB: “I really like that you can go out in public and not care if you’re all dolled up. You’re like Janet—Unplugged. That’s really great because when you DO get fixed up, it’s such a startling contrast that everybody realizes how good you clean up.” (OUCH. And Yeah! Okay, it’s not perfect but I got the gist.)
*SEE, HE GETS TO KEEP HIS FRENCH CARD.

ME: “You are…that is just so…Was that a compliment? I think it was. No, wait, it was that validation thing you’ve been doing lately.
It needs some polish but I like it!”

Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to — The Validator!
Which makes so much sense to me because he is such a silent observer of the human condition, only I guess now he’s decided to offer us all some validation on the wanky-wonky way we’re just trying to get by—just living our lives.

I think more people could use validating. Everyone needs to be acknowledged from time to time, right?

Don’t you agree my beautiful, smart and loyal tribe?

Carry on,
xox

“Can I get a little help here? Anybody?”

Oh, Hello Rut.

At least I think that’s you. I haven’t seen you in a while and even though you tend to show up in my life on a semi-regular basis—you rascal—you always fool me.

Never one to pass up a good disguise, in the past, you’ve arrived wrapped up in a blanket of safety and security—sunglasses—and a hat.

Always a damn hat.

“Tell me, who doesn’t love safety and security”, you coo. “No one”, I answer. “Unless… it starts to feel like a high-security prison.”

You scoff loudly and keep on digging a deeper hole.

Webster defines you as, A habit or pattern of behavior that has become dull and unproductive but is hard to change.

I don’t know why I listen to you but I do as you feed me all of your bullshit stories and disproven theories, and I’ve come to notice that when you’re around there may be safe & sound—but there’s no growth or change. Just more of the same ol’, same ol’.

I have to admit, that may feel good for a while but even a table full of chocolate gets boring if that’s all you get to eat for months. Sometimes a girl just wants a steak.

Lately, you’ve taken on the guise of rules and rigidity. Keeping to a strict schedule. No wiggle room, no deviation, no slack, no life—no kidding.

Then, like all Ruts do, you point at all of the surrounding chaos as you sing me a sweet lullaby and lull me into complacency. That all works fine as long as I stay inside of this hole you’ve dug for me.

But you see, here’s the thing: Writers/artists/people need to be IN the world not just OF it.

Sometimes a person needs to put their feet in the sand, feel the warmth of the sun on their face, and set out walking in a pine forest with absolutely no destination in mind. But with you around that isn’t easy. I can feel the tug of your two goons Shame and Guilt around my ankles pulling me back into the chair where they place my fingers firmly onto the keyboard all the while chanting “Write, write, write something good.”

So, I get it. This time you look like creativity wrapped in obligation, except everyone knows those two don’t mix.
They’re like oil and water,
Kanye and Taylor Swift,
Democrats and Republicans.

Be gone Rut! I’ve seen thru your latest ruse. You can go and look for another soul to crush but I’m ratting you out right here and now so…good luck with that.

PS. See ya. I’m going on a walk to nowhere and I can’t tell you how long I’ll be gone.
PPS. I hate your stupid hat.

Carry on,
xox

“In Asia, they have a saying: The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master.” ~ Martha Beck

Everyone seems so down in this new Age of Absurdity.
Long faces. Flus and colds that last weeks. Up in the middle of the night uncertainty.

Russian hacking. Healthcare reform. Suppression of truth.  In other words…Too. Much. Stress.

I think Martha Beck, a magical pixie of a woman, is on to something here—so please take a look.

Inclusiveness.

Dissolution of fear, neediness, and rigidity.

Critical mass.

React from the heart. Make art.

““This is precisely the time when artists go to work, there is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” ~Toni Morrison

xox

Um, Yeah, what he said.

Since Donald Trump landed with a giant, orange thud on my radar two-ish years ago, I have watched him traverse the political landscape with a mix of slack-jawed awe and mild nausea.

Who is this guy and how in the hell did this happen?

Previous to running for the office of President of The United States he was just another self-aggrandizing blowhard who lived in a golden tower, cheated on his wives, called himself a billionaire, starred in a cheesy reality show and had something to say about everyone and everything.

Not necessarily an educated opinion—just something to say.

He assumed he had an audience. I guess he thought people cared…Right? Someone must have said that to him once, “Hey, Don, I’d love to hear what you have to say about Roe V Wade!”

He slithered his way through his preferred method of communication—a Howard Stern interview, waffling back and forth on his opinions of the Clintons, Barack Obama, abortion, and the Iraq war on a regular basis.
It was all in good fun back then.

Just a couple of douches talking nonsense.

New Yorkers couldn’t stand the guy and yet, without ever holding public office or participating in any kind of community organizing besides building skyscrapers with his name emblazoned on them in thirty-foot high gold lettering—he gained some traction.

And in 2015 after some consideration (I can’t write that it was careful because that word can never be used in the same sentence as his name), Trump decided to you know, run for Leader of the Free World.

After the most wtf campaign on record and the most wtf win in the history of winning—he now sits behind the big desk in the Oval Office.

“Nothing like this has remotely happened!” has been echoing around the globe since November and I for one have just GOT to put some kind of positive spin on this…this…this anomaly.

What is an anomaly anyway?

Webster defines it as “something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected.”

An oddity. A peculiarity. 

A quirk. A rarity.

Something inconsistent with the norm.

Yes, yup, uh huh and bingo.

It seems to me we are now living in the Age of Absurdity. I can resist (which believe me, on the things that matter I am) but on one point in particular, I say, if you can’t beat ‘um—join ‘um. Do you wanna know what the tipping point was for me?

One word. Oprah.

She voiced in a recent interview exactly what I’ve been thinking.

When asked if she was interested in running for President she responded saying that Mr. Trump’s election had made her re-evaluate her previous skepticism about running for President.

“I never considered the question even a possibility,” she told David Rubenstein on his Bloomberg Television program when pressed about whether she might consider running in 2020. “I just thought, ‘Oh… oh?'”
Referring to Mr. Trump, Mr. Rubenstein said: “It’s clear you don’t need government experience to be elected president of the United States”.

“That’s what I thought,” she continued. “I thought, ‘Oh, gee, I don’t have the experience, I don’t know enough.’ And now I’m thinking, ‘Oh.'”

That’s crazy, right? …CRAZY GOOD!

Will Oprah run? Probably not. But that’s not the point.

How many of us think we’re “unqualified” for a promotion because of the way things have always been done?
How many of us never even try things we know nothing about like writing books, screenplays or musicals?

What if we could accept this new normal and have the kind of faith in ourselves that Trump apparently has? We don’t have to go all dark and twisty narcissistic. What about supremely, peculiarly and unexpectedly confident?

You know what I mean.

If you’re like me you reconsider opportunities because of your age (too young or too old), your inexperience, the fact that you’re unfamiliar with the “system”, and the knowledge that certain things Just aren’t done that way.

I think we can all agree that time is over.

All bets are off.

The rules have all been broken. They are scattered at our feet. That can either be a bad thing—or a good thing.

I say if the idea occurs to you and you think you’d be good at it—go for it!

Who knows, you may end up President of The United States.

Carry on
xox