My Newest Discovery

I don't HAVE to be all sweetness and light and joy.

I can actually embrace my inner brat and stuff.

Man, I felt like I was suffocating with all the happiness and positivity.

PHEW.

Thanksgiving.

I suck at posting on this blog, I know. And my apologies for the total stream of consciousness post today.

However, I'm in a slightly more relaxed job now, as opposed to the one that had me running so fast and hard every single day that I was about two days from complete and total meltdown before I quit.

THANK YOU THE UNIVERSE FOR FINDING ME ANOTHER JOB!

(Well, and thank you to me too, for getting off my ass and looking.)

I just found my brain going into these bizarre scenes of abject HORROR, imagining the worst-case scenario in all situations, freaking out about everything. I mean, it didn't help that my husband was walking to class in front of the building where all the shooting broke out at Virginia Tech this past April. That tends to put a kind of crimp in the headspace, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, I hadn't realized how much stress I was under at my last position. I hadn't realized that pretty much from 7am to 4pm my heart was pounding. No fricken WONDER I was starting to have health problems, and I couldn't lose weight, and my brain was fried.

It's just not good to walk around in an artificially generated state of "HOLY FUCKIN SHIT" all the time, especially when it's being maintained by somebody outside of yourself.

Man. I ESCAPED!

I realized though, that I'm still freaking out a little bit about the work that I left undone at my old job. But there was honestly no freakin way I could have possibly gotten through everything, as my boss, even up to my last day, was constantly throwing new stuff at me. He needs to get himself under control. Seriously. He's going to burn himself out, and FAST.

To keep myself sane, I've been writing in gratitude journals twice a day. Once in the morning. I got to do it this morning sitting on the subway platform waiting for the train after I dropped off my daughter at daycare. That was cool. And I got to see some of the city around my new workplace. This area, just over Bryant Park, feels more like home than Park Avenue ever did. It's pretty awesome. I can look out my boss' window and see the lions in front of the New York Public Library (the big one). And I have bookstores nearby as well. I'm surrounded by comfort! My favoritest things (books) in the whole entire world are right at my doorstep. Plus, I really love the lions.

But, I digress. The night time journaling is also cool. My friend (fairygodmother/guardian angel/person of great awesomeness) J. sent me a journal one year that is based on the song "I Hope You Dance" by LeeAnn Womack. What's really funny about that is that I am NOT a big country music fan, but I discovered this song when it first came out and fell in love. Now, it is one hell of a mushy, sappy, sentimental song, but somehow it broke through the cold crustiness of my cynical little heart and I fell madly in love with it. I bought the album and listened to it over and over and over. Then it got stolen from my car in Alexandria, VA, but that's neither here nor there. That car was doomed.

Not knowing that I loved that song, somehow J. was drawn towards the journal, bought it for me and sent it. Cool, eh?

I started keeping it as my gratitude journal when I was having some major postpartum depression and it was the only thing that kept me from going completely and utterly apechitbananas. Dark, dark days.

I don't know why I keep letting it slide. I'm determined not to do it again. I really like writing in it.

Whenever I get overwhelmed throughout the day, I pick up my gratitude journal and write one thing that I'm thankful for.

So. Thank you, J. for the awesome journal. I give thanks to you every single night when I pick it up and write in it. I hope that I can return to you some day, even a tenth of the love and generosity that you've given me.

Happy-making things

-a bright orange bra somehow made its way onto the subway tracks at the times square station.

-an acapella singing duo on my train was belting out "down by the river side" and then on their way out the door yelled "don't forget to smile - it won't mess up your hair."

-my boy Dorian Spencer was playing at Times Square yesterday. He's always worth a smile or two... http://www.dorianspencer.com/

This is my city...

Things I saw today that were awesome:

-the empire state building from my subway platform. Usually the air is so smoggy that I can only see a vague outline of it, but this morning the air was so clear, I could see architectural detail.

-A guy wearing cranberry douchbag pants, velvet blazer, white shirt open to the chest and a black and white patterned silk ascot.

-An older guy who looked like he was an ageing rockstar. Long shaggy salt and pepper hair, great craggy face, denim shirt untucked from his jeans, well worn book in hand, glasses. I looked at him. He looked at me. We had a moment. (you know, as in "The pig and the farmer regarded each other...")

-little chinese boy about the same age as George who had many of the same habits. I waved, he nodded "no." I waved again, he hid his face and peered out from behind the edge of his stroller. I hid my face behind my hand, he peered a little bit harder. Then, as his mother was pushing him away, he waved and yelled "BYE"

psychic friends network

So lately, I've been talking to dead people. Well, not too often, and just to my father and my father in law.

I spoke with my father in November or December of 2006. He died on April 1st, 2006. That was just the kinda guy he was. Total joker.

My friends, my crazy internet friends the BEER (Bitchy Evil E-mail Ring) had a star named for my dad on his death. I knew nothing about it, and the package with the framed international star registry certificate and other goodies showed up at the house when my husband, daughter and myself were on vacation last summer. It was a great big cardboard box and as I wasn't expecting anything, I immediately sat down and started tearing into it.

It was the star. And it came with one of the nicest notes ever. I don't know which one of the evil bitches thought this up, but I'm forever grateful to all of them. It just goes to prove that you can't always get what you want...

Later that year, I got out of the car at night, in Christiansburg, and it just so happened that Dad's star was right over our house. I glanced up and said "Hey, Dad." and in response I got "Life's a bitch, kid, and then you die." And some cosmic giggling and nothing. (No bamboo, girls.) It was something that my dad totally would have done.

And, I might add, the star is the only grave marker my dad has, and probably ever will have. Right now, what's left of him is sitting on a table at my mother's house wrapped up in burgundy paper with a gold ribbon. It amuses me to no end that the funeral home wrapped my dad's ashes.

Yeah, talking to my dad was pretty normal. I seriously doubt it'll happen again. I think he's now headed off to wherever the peacefully dead head off to. Or is in line for reincarnation or something.

My husband's dad, however...

I was sitting at my husband's godmother's table in New York City writing in my journal one evening. I'd been doing my morning pages for quite some time for The Artist's Way and was just writing away with a stream of consciousness type of thing for a while, when suddenly Bruce Sr. started to have a pretty intense conversation with me. I've got it all written down. This happened about five weeks ago, and I haven't really been able to write or talk about it much. To his credit, when I told my husband, Bruce Jr. about it, he just took it in stride. Asked "Oh, how is he?" and didn't really freak out or anything.

Bruce Sr. seems a little tortured. He's feeling guilty about how badly he treated his family while he was still alive, and about some specific things he did. He wanted to know if his children had forgiven him.

I told him that I think he did the best he could under the circumstances, which were pretty rough. I also told him that I knew Bruce Jr. had forgiven him completely, but I wasn't sure at all about the other siblings. I don't think that J or S have forgiven him, but E is a different story all together. She was too young to have harbored much resentment or hatred of him, and she was raised by Bruce Jr. so she's a pretty mellow kid.

That was the gist of our conversation. I was pretty tripped out for a while after talking to him, as that sort of thing has never really happened to me before. Well, obviously one sentence and a giggle with my dad, but no actual conversations. Then again, my father wasn't much of a conversationalist when he was alive, so there's no reason for that to change after his death.

Bruce Sr. was a talker though.

So that's it. It feels really normal. I've been having some other all the hair standing up on my body gotta do or say something RIGHT NOW experiences, but they've seemed relatively inconsequential. Although you'd better read that book SOON, Stacey.

I'm very grateful for these experiences. I think that the entire universe is conspiring to rid me of any last prejudice that I might have.

the inner spark

I was reading somewhere, I forget exactly what I was reading, but I was reading it. Really.

Anyway, I was reading somewhere about aging and the author mentioned how beautiful all children and teenagers are, no matter how homely they might be, every last one of them has this amazing glow about them. Maybe it's just the youth. Maybe it's because they haven't had the years of experience that older people have.

I'm only 12 years out of my teens, and my face has changed immeasurably since then. It's truly amazing how much it has morphed. And, I look back at photos of myself from then, and I'm blown away at how beautiful I was.

Well, still am. It's just different now.

That, and reading Martha Beck's book, Expecting Adam. It's about her pregnancy with, and raising of her son with Down Syndrome. She wrote about dealing with appearances, especially that of a child who isn't "normal."

"I've had a hard enough time learning to handle difference without discomfort, to look beneath the surface. I do feel sad, though, for parents who might have had an opportunity to learn a new way of seeing, to look into the magical part of life, and let it pass them by... Maybe it's just Adam himself. In his strange, not-quite-human way, he is constantly reminding me that real magic doesn't come from achieving the perfect appearance, from being Cinderella at the ball with both glass slippers and a killer hairstyle. The real magic is in the pumpkin, in the mice, in the moonlight; not beyond ordinary life, but within it."

So I've spent all morning on the subways and streets of New York, looking for the inner beauty in everyone I've met.

And I can tell you exactly where my prejudices lay. I can see the beauty in the crazy homeless lady who gets in everybody's way on the street, I can see it in the traffic cops and the sidewalk vendors and the subway buskers. I can see it in the retarded and the blind and the little 20 year old girls who are incredibly concerned with their own appearances and their places in New York, while attempting to land a rich husband and some sweet real estate on Central Park.

It's much much harder for me to see that spark in the older insanely wealthy women that I meet on the streets. Well, let's say nearly impossible. I can see it in maybe every one out of a hundred that I meet. And, it depresses me. It makes me feel really uncomfortable. And I'm not sure how to combat it. Part of it is trying to make them smile when I see them on the streets. That only works some of the time, and mostly when I have George with me. I don't know. I'll have to meditate on this one.

However, on the whole, the people of New York City are gorgeous. There is some light and some joy there, from the girl who gives me shit at the bakery in Harlem, to the world's worst steel drum player, busking at the Times Square subway station. Or to the girls helping me out at Sephora, or the little gay boys prancing around at H&M.

It's ridiculous how much love there is here. And you don't even have to look very deep for it. I'm so incredibly wealthy.

in a new york state of mind...

So some pretty awesome things I've seen and experienced during the last week in New York City.

-Three thuggish looking fellows get on the subway, talking "n----- this, and n----- that" and acting all tough. They sit down, and the first one pulls out a battered Jonathan Kellerman paperback and starts reading. The second one pulls out the latest James Patterson in hardcover. The third one pulls out Danielle Steele.

-A group of incredibly boisterous loud teenaged boys comes barrelling down the subway stairs next to me, as I'm carrying Georgia down in her stroller, rather precariously. I hear "whoa whoa whoa whoa." and one of the young men says "Are you ok? You need help? You allright?" and a couple of them help me down the stairs with the kid, and then run off being all boisterous again.

-A young girl with huge earrings and a bad attitude gives up her seat willingly to an elderly gentleman on the subway.

-Doors are held all over the city for the kid and I.

-I notice some pretty gooshy looks shot in my general direction when I start kissing my baby's head on the streets or on the subway.

-Some NYOBs (New York Old Bitches) in fur coats and diamonds and shoes and bags that cost more than I made in all of last year offer to help me with doors and packages and the baby, and whatever else I need. (NYOBs are the type who dress in the manner described above and look down their noses snootily at all of the riff raff that they're forced to encounter on the streets. I was feeling pretty cranky towards most of them, but then I started this great game of trying to get them to smile at me when I'm walking down the street.

-Lovely young businessmen on the subway offering to help me out with the kid, or gently assisting older homeless women into seats on the trains, or catching somebody who falls running down the stairs...

This city is so full of love and kindness. It's pretty amazing. I see it directed towards me, and towards others...

Of course, there are the VERY SERIOUS PEOPLE, and there are quite a few of them, but I'm pretty sure that they have hearts somewheres in there.

I'll find them. Really.