My thoughts on life and what it flings at us.
This morning’s deep thought from the bathroom. Ahem:
Recession Lesson #1.
You can trade the majority of your time on this here planet for money, work your whole life at something only to find every penny suddenly gone. See ya, sucker!
LOVE WHAT YOU DO. And you will have lost nothing.
Stay tuned to see what the shower has to say about all this…..
One of my first jobs out of college was Production Coordinator for the Ethnic Folk Arts Festival put on by a little non profit group in NY called the Ethnic Folk Arts Center.
I heard about the job opening from a friend and decided I had to have it even though I’d never produced a thing in my life. It sounded like fun – they worked out of a funky loft in Tribecca, knew a lot about music and wrangled musicians and dancers from all over the world into a Polish beer garden in Queens once a year for a big fat party.
So I put together a resume that listed such achievements as: Produced plays in college (demanded my friends show up to watch my boyfriend act); Started several organizations in high school (had a bake sale once and started a sledding team that had no competition and only one meeting where we spent most of our time figuring out how to score some beer); worked at my college radio station (hung around while my friend DJed). Then I got all dressed up in sensible clothes borrowed from my mother that didn’t fit and marched off to my interview. An hour later me and my big mouth had a new job.
That night I lay awake in wide-eyed horror. My god, what have I done? I am a monster! These sweet, pure-hearted, sandal-wearing people who bring their dogs to work just handed me a coffee can full of money that they spent an entire year collecting for this festival and I’m the lying fathead who’s going to blow it.
I felt sick. I thought about turning myself in but instead wound up working harder for them than I ever had in my life. And I pulled if off in flying colors if I do say so myself. I got all my out of work friends to hand out flyers and take tickets, herded the unruly polka dancers into their places on time, got the latka vendors set up and oversaw the bagpipe parade that went off without a hitch.
I’m not saying you should lie, but I kind of am.
Because when we say we’re unqualified for something, we’re usally saying we’re too scared to try it.
Here’s the thing:
1.) We know waaaaay more than we give ourselves credit for
2.) We are drawn to things we’re naturally good at
3.) There’s no better teacher than necessity
In hindsight, I realized that I was more qualified than I thought. I’m an older sister which means I’m naturally bossy, I like working hard and I can talk to anyone, even a 76 year old Russian man who speaks no English and is in a bad mood because he can’t find his tights.
I went on to do many more things that I was “unqualified” for, but I also wasted plenty of time pretending I wasn’t ready or didn’t know enough or wasn’t sure about some other things I really wanted to do. And I will tell you, jumping in is way more fun than sitting around “getting ready”.
One time I spent an entire month preparing my office to write a book. I got just the right chair, put the desk in the perfect place by the window, organized all the materials I needed and then re-organized them, three times, cleaned the place until it almost wore away…and then proceeded to write the entire book at my kitchen table.
What are you putting off doing until you’re ready?
What could you start doing right now that would make you skip down the street with glee?
What are you pretending you can’t do?
Whether it’s a book you’re not ready to write or a trip you want to take after you lose 10 pounds or a business you want to start as soon as you save enough money….start. Now. You could get run over by the ice cream man tomorrow.
I demand you watch this all the way through lest you miss The Little Purple Man channeling the entire universe through his guitar. Holy frijoles people.
One question: what choade decided it was uncool to smile on stage? Poor little adorable George Harrison’s son is choking down a face-consuming grin the entire time until Prince forces him to lose it. I would be acting like a giddy little idiot if I was up there. Cool is a bore. Anyway, this video will make you wanna leap tall buildings in a sinlge bound.
I’m heading over to SE Asia (!) in December and don’t want to go just bumbling around as a tourist. I want to go bumbling around as a tourist on a quest. I want to come up with some way to engage with people wherever I am and blog about it – here are some of my ideas:
1.) Approach various people along the way and take their pictures wearing a tiara/a clown nose/a dainty hat/sunglasses shaped as the state of Texas/anything else that’s easy to carry around that’s stupid looking.
2.) See how many strangers I can get to take me to their homes for dinner
3.) See how many strangers I can get to let me buy them lunch
4.) See how many strangers I can get to let me cut their hair
Stuff like that. I’ll be in Thailand, Cambodia, Viet Nam and Laos. Got any brilliant ideas?
Alrighty, so I’m probably a little too out of it to attempt facing The Page this afternoon, but in my attempt to be a better blogger, I’monna give it a go. Ahem:
I’d like to meet whoever invented Halloween and give them an uncomfortably long hug. ALL holidays should involve dancing until 6am with Ernie, Bert and a bunch of dudes dressed like stewardesses.
I love it because it strips away the denials that we as a culture cling to for our dear, out-of-it lives: Our denial that we’re gonna die, our denial that bodies are oozy, our denial that no one is better than anyone else, our denial that we all want to connect to our fellow man, our denial that it’s fun to wear a tail and ears. Stuff like that.
I mean, is there anything better than driving down the highway and seeing Satan, a nurse and Sponge Bob fly by in the car next to you?
Costumes are the great equalizer, the open door that makes anyone fair game for a conversation. But here’s the thing – we’re all in costume all the time anyway. We’re all dressed up in who we think we are, so why not keep up the good work? Why not chat up everyone you meet as if they’re dressed in the giant gorilla suit that is their own self perception?
My cat is 18 years old. He reminds me of a well-loved stuffed animal that’s been dragged around by its tail for an entire childhood. His hair’s all crappy, a couple of his teeth have gone missing, he’s gray, boney, confused, crabby and his breath….it’s the breath of a thousand dumpsters rotting in the sun, able to stop conversations in mid sentence with a single yawn. “Oh, dude! What’s he been chewing on, feet?”
But I love him. Even though in his old age he’s gotten increasingly more demanding. This morning as I worked at my desk, he sat looking up at me, shifting his glare back and forth from my eyes to my empty lap. Indignant. Yowling. Not having it.
So I bend down to pick him up and what does he do? He drills his claws into the carpet so I literally have to rip him away to put him in my lap.
What the hell? There’s a place he wants to get to, but the second the opportunity presents itself he hunkers down and refuses to move, clinging to his spot as if as the change will surely cause him to perish.
Remind you of anyone you know?
So last night I did that brilliant thing where you lie in bed, wide-eyed and horrified, freaking out about your life. Why the hell is everything so much worse at night? It’s like this giant magnifying glass comes out and every lousy decision and gray hair and completely inappropriate comment you jokingly made to your friend’s husband about his pants is suddenly huge and insurmountable and most definitely going to ruin your life upon sunrise.
And then the sun comes up and you’re like, what? Oh that. Whatever. We got any corn flakes left?
The excellent thing about this morning was not only did we have cornflakes left, but apparently I had so exhausted myself last night that my brain was turned off completely and a beautiful, staggering idea was able to seep through my insanity and land on my head like a ton of golden bricks:
Why not just believe you can instead of doubt you can?
It sounds so simple, but it blew my tiny mind.
It’s just as easy to believe you can do something as it is to believe you can’t. So why not put all the time and energy you spend on doubting and worrying and justifying why you can’t into blindly blasting yourself forward into just doing it?
I mean, why the hell not? Doesn’t it just seem moronic to do anyting else?
Not long ago I was in a terrible bowling accident. Think what you will, but heed my words: Do not cross the line.
The bowling community is very serious about penalizing those who roll the ball one toe over the line – they pour oil or grease or wax or something unthinkably slippery all over the alley and should someone accidentally step over the line, and should that someone be 6′1″, uncoordinated and wearing rented shoes, they will find their feet flying out from under them and their ass crashing down harder than any ass has ever crashed down before onto a surface that even an airborne bowling ball can’t crack.
Yesterday whilst lolling about in bed with this guy I met at Macy’s, I explained that ever since my accident, I’m now woken up in the middle of the night with excruciating pain in my feet. According to my acupuncturist, this is from the nerves in my back getting slammed when I fell, and that in order to sleep through the night, I’d need a new, firmer, mattress.
“I have pains only when I sleep too!” he exclaimed, raising himself up for an unreciprocated high five.
I’m telling you this:
1) Because if you find yourself waking up with weird pains at night, you could just be a new mattress away from relief
2.) I’m RILL excited about the fact that I’m getting a fancy new mattress
3.) Mattress shopping requires you to lie around in bed in public, and, if you have the salesman I did, with some weird, lonely guy who wants to high five lying down next to you.
I couldn’t help but notice that all the other salesmen simply stood by and rattled off matress facts while their clients rolled around on the beds, but not mine. He’d hunker down next to me on his back, hands crossed over his chest, and chat away, staring at the ceiling like we were at summer camp. I mean, he was nice enough and incredibly knowledgeable about coils and latex and memory foam, but I was scared to roll over for fear he’d start spooning me.
Was I too friendly? Should I not have asked him where he was from? Did he think I meant something else when I patted the bed next to me to test the pillow top?
I’ve never been one to make quick decisions, and certainly not when it comes to something as critical as a mattress, so I ended up spending a good hour lying next to this freak. And here’s the really alarming part: Even though I thought he was fully weird, inappropriate, unattractive and a terrible salesman, I felt hurt when, just after I told him I had to go, he leapt out of bed, with nary as much as an “I’ll be right back” or a peck on the cheek, to go take a phone call.
There I was, awkwardly putting my shoes back on, grabbing my purse, meekly poking my head around the corner to wave good-bye to him, unnoticed, while he chatted into the phone.
I came back a few hours later and my salesman was gone. I spent another ten minutes lying around while a nice young man in a suit stood at the end of the bed and informed me of their ten year warranty program. I gave him my credit card, he told me they’d deliver it next Saturday and I left without a care in the world.
I decided to post this picture of my recent trip to San Francisco for a couple of reasons:
1.) Just because I’m naked in a hot tub with a hot guy, a big smile and you can’t see where my hand is doesn’t mean a damn thing other than I had too much to drink and you should start minding your own business. Either that or it means that I’m sober, he’s gay and I’m trying to get more people to read my blog.
2.) San Fran is oh so gay and today, throngs of homos, bi’s, trannies and the hags who love them marched on Washington to get themselves some frikken equal rights already. Seriously, are we still fighting for this? In 2009 this is still an issue? Really? Land of the free? Home of the homophobic? Really? Still? Come on America. You can do better than that!
Thanks to the hard work of people with gigantic brains, we now know that time is an illusion. Or at least we (if we are anything like me) know that time is an illusion, but we don’t really get it. I’ve read books, attended lectures, watched DVDs, meditated, talked to hippies, gotten stoned and I still have no idea what they’re frikken talking about. The theory that I feel I can really toss around at a party, however, is that not having time is an illusion. For example:
I don’t have time to find a real parking spot. Oh, look at that, I just spent three hours I don’t have getting my car out of the tow garage, another two getting lost on the way home and forty-five minutes complaining about it to my husband.
I don’t have time to eat lunch. Oh, look at that, I’ve passed out face down on the sidewalk outside my office. Now I have to eat a ham sandwich and get my tooth fixed.
When we’re forced, suddenly the time is there. So why not force ourselves to do the things that make us come alive?
The belief that taking time off will cause your entire life to collapse is dangerous, because if you don’t take time off, you will collapse. Your body will eventually put its foot down and make you sick. Bodies do it all the time. Stress is a leading cause of cancer, heart attacks, liver failure, stupid accidents, grouchiness and suddenly not being able to breathe.
Aside from the sickness factor, making time to do the things that inspire you should also be a priority because, um, what’s the point of living life without them? Where’s the fun in waking up at 85 and realizing you “couldn’t find the time” to live the life you wanted? What were you doing that was more important instead? This is not a luxury reserved for people who are richer, smarter or less bogged down than you are. It’s a luxury reserved for people who take the time to figure it out. Luckily, all you need to do is shift your perspective from “I can’t” to “I can.” Because here’s the thing:
Your entire experience on this planet is determined by how you choose to perceive your reality.
It’s that simple. Most of us choose to feel victimized, overwhelmed, defeated, dealt a bad hand (it’s comfy, we don’t deserve better, we’re scared, etc.) which works fine until someone like, say, Ray Charles comes along and blows the whole “no can do” curve for everyone.
If you say you love to travel but don’t have the time, for example, your problem isn’t that you don’t have the time, your problem is that you’re not doing it. So what to do? Put the same energy and thought you put into your work, your family, your charity and brushing your teeth into your love of travel.
Force yourself to take some time each day to get your accounts in order, train people to fill in while you’re gone, inform the charity that they’ll have to do without you for a few weeks and start flipping through travel magazines.
Talk about your trip incessantly to get you excited, get ideas from other people and make it seem real.
And most importantly, pick a date. Decide by a certain date that you’re going to a certain place and mold everything in your world around it. Then set concrete goals and start checking them off one by one.
Make it a natural part of who you are and how you live. And then, when you return from your trip all relaxed and inspired, oh, look at that, your business will be fine, your family will still love you and you will be ten times mightier.
