Desiderata

I saw this posted in its entirety on Anne Rice's Facebook page, and keep returning to it and re-reading it.  It is a prose poem written by Max Ehrmann in 1927.  Every single line of this is just so... right.  I wikipedia'd it, and saw in the notes that Morgan Freeman credits the poem with deeply shaping his life.  That explains a lot about him and his appeal.  I think they are words to live and breathe by, so here it is.

Desiderata (Latin: "desired things")

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. 

As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. 

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. 
Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be.

And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. 

With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

Listen To Your Valley Girl, M'kay?

This is going to be a weird post.  On the one hand, I’m going to tell you to be cautious, and on the other hand, I’m going to tell you not to give in to the fear.

Some of you longtime Valley Girl readers might remember the vicious, nasty, cuss-laden post I wrote to the person who burglarized our house nearly two years ago while Derek and I were at work.  Unless you’ve gone through a similar experience yourself, nobody can adequately convey the feeling of violation and rage that accompanies such an event.  It is nothing short of devastating. 

Though we have since gotten an activated alarm system and a doggie door so Big Brown Dog can satisfactorily patrol the entire premises, and though the police who investigated the crime assured us that “these people” who do these sorts of things almost never return to the scene of the crime for a repeat offense, the feeling of being unsafe never really goes away.  Most people end up selling the house and moving after being robbed for that very reason, but for others, that’s not really an option. 

One of my dearest friends of all time had such an experience last night, I’m sad to report.  Everyone was home and asleep and oblivious to what was happening in their home – even their mean, protective pit bull who would scare the bejebus out of anyone.  Some asshole got in, rifled through their most personal and expensive objects, picking and choosing what to take, and slipped out without being noticed.  All while their two kids slept in the next room. 

People, going through it myself was bad enough, but knowing someone you love is now going through these feelings is awful, and since you are likely someone I love if you are reading this, or even if I have never even met you, you are someone I care about, and I am begging you, BEGGING YOU—

Step up the home security right now.  Today.  I don’t care if your dog is Cujo and you sleep beside an insomniac Special Forces mercenary with Bionic hearing and a bad attitude.  KEEP YOUR DOORS AND WINDOWS LOCKED UP.  Put motion detector lights on your roof or by the front door.  Don’t leave out valuable stuff that can be seen from the street.  If you are home and someone comes to your door selling shit, let them know you are home, but don’t open the door.  Tell them (as I do) that you have a really mean dog that will bite them on the balls.  And as the cops who took our burglary report told us to do, put wooden dowels in your windows like this…

… so that windows cannot be forced open.  Every single window, even ones you think nobody would ever know about.  You can get these at any hardware store for cheap and cut them down to size to fit your windows, or have the dudes in the store do it for you.  And you know those plastic thingies that lock onto the window sash?  Do you have those?  Forget them – they don’t work and can easily be forced off.  That’s how Assholio got into our house.  Basically do everything to make your beloved pad say “Move along, Mother-Effer.”  These are hard times economically, and people will get more brazen about trying to steal your shit.  And while I sympathize with anyone having money probs, stealing what belongs to another and violating their sacred space is never the answer.

Which brings me to my next point I really want to make.  Don’t give in to the fear.  There is a lot of panic and paranoia in the air right now that only gets worse when people start feeling threatened.  They perpetuate a vibe of hostility.  I’m guilty of this – after our house was hit, a neighbor of mine cast suspicion on a guy down the street since he is kinda street-looking and drives a douchey car.  Other than being annoyed with his noisy douchey car, I never thought twice about the guy, but now I was looking at him with suspicion and hostility as well.  This is not good.  In times like these, we need to be reaching out to our neighbors with love and a helping hand more than ever, and thinking of ways we can help one another.  Being afraid of our current circumstances doesn’t help anything.  Our beautiful country has been through way worse and it will get through this.

But in the meantime, there’s nothing wrong with being a little extra cautious.  I’m just sayin’….

Be safe.

Love,

Jennie

 

 

The Wisdom of the Rooms

So apparently I didn’t get the memo, but there was an Ultimate Fighting Championship in the McLean Condo last night, so please forgive if my thoughts are a wee discombobulated this morning. And I’m still kind of reeling over the death of Heath Ledger, star of one of my all-time favorite movies, Brokeback Mountain. I just can’t believe it.

It occurred to me that it has been all baby-baby-baby-pregs-baby-sick-baby-pregs-baby-sick-kosher dills on this blog all the time, and I realized I have not updated you on my career and the massive shiftage thereof.

I had to quit doing massage, people. I had been thinking about quitting and doing something else for awhile since it was really bothering me that there was not a lot of brain activity on the job. Don’t get me wrong – I am not saying people who do it are dummies. They are doing a huge, selfless service to humankind, especially the ones who do it well, and a nice pregnancy massage recently saved my ass when I was really hurting from carrying around the McLean Condo and these giant bazooms.

But once you have been through massage school, the job itself is all intuitive -- feeling where someone hurts, a lot of quiet, then changing the sheets and doing it again. About the time I was having these feelings, I started to get a lot of, shall we say, hygienically-challenged individuals on my table. People who would come in for a massage, covered in sweat, straight from a full workout at the gym next door. People with active outbreaks of infectious skin diseases. People who had never heard of the concept of washing one’s feet after a day of flip-flop wearing. Now, aside from the fact that a pregnant person has an overdeveloped sense of smell, visions of staph infections and contracting God-knows-what from these people while in a state of compromised immunity started to tear at my psyche continually. It’s bad enough feeling like a sitting duck for every random cold and flu cootie out on the playground, but the stress of not knowing what I was exposing myself and my baby to became too much, and I had to quit.

So what’s a pregnant person to do with nearly four months of working ability left before squeezing out the wee bairn? I started looking at part time job listings and came across this man who wrote this book and needed some help with the marketing of this book and the editing of his next one. I started reading the book last night for research purposes, and OMG you guys, I was so blown away.

How is it that no one thought of this idea before? He has taken years of quotes and wisdom learned in 12-step meetings, and put them into a book. But the beauty of it is, you don’t need to be involved in a 12-step program to appreciate the profound nature of what is contained in the pages. Anyone struggling with ANY kind of addiction, or anyone who loves someone who is, needs this book. Anyone who has ever repeatedly banged their head against the wall and fallen into the same patterns in life over and over needs this book. Anyone who refuses to define God in limited, dogma-laden terms and seeks a relationship with God on their own spiritual path, needs this book. Anyone who needs to be reminded of universal truths told from a highly personal perspective needs this book.

Have you ever heard someone speak or read something in a book and felt like what you were hearing/reading was meant just for you? Like that person was speaking directly to you? That’s what every page of this book so far was like for me. I can’t wait to read the rest of it and explore the thought-provoking questions asked with each section. And no matter what happens with getting the job or not, I am grateful I came across the information in this book, and simply had to share it with you.

I’ll keep you posted.

Salvador Dalí

In the interest of getting my butt out of the house and doing as many interesting things as possible before I am confined to the small world of diapers and nursing, I took it upon myself on a recent Sunday to go with Trish and Miata to the Salvador Dalí exhibit at LACMA.


While there are those who may assert that viewage of such freaky-deakiness while preggers may warp my developing child’s little sensibilities, I decided to take a walk on the wild side and go ahead and take in the freakiness in person. I was not disappointed.

Aside from a voluminous collection of paintings, there were also film clips playing of the artist’s various collaborations with filmmakers of his day -- in particular, an animated film that the artist worked on with Walt Disney. I got teared up watching the thing, it was just so very magnificent and so sad that it was never before released to the public. It was like watching a Dalí painting come to life for fifteen minutes. Afterward, we sat outside and talked about what we had seen. I don’t know about you guys, but after I see something like that, I tend to look at the world a little differently, at people a little differently. Those beautiful paintings existed in that man’s mind before they became reality, that regular guy with the crazy handlebar moustache and crazy eyes. And look what he contributed to the world.

Well, I recommend you see the exhibit fast before it is gone. It will only be there until January 6. So get your freaky on.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art
5905 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036
(323) 857-6000
www.lacma.org

Sad Sack, Party of One? Your Table Is Ready.

Okay you guys, here it is. I know I have been a bad neglectful parent to this baby blog lately and I want you to know why.

Your girl has been stricken with the worst depression since Sex And The City went off the air. And yes! I am aware of the movie in the works and yes! You better believe my ass will be throwing a huge party for that occasion, complete with cosmopolitans, high heels, and lots of chicks. In fact, ONLY chicks. But that’s down the line, and that is IF this dream miracle of a movie ever actually does come to fruition. You know how Hollywood is.

What’s been happening with me is far more sinister and unexpected. And I think I have it figured out after much parsing out of emotions, dissecting, analyzing and actualizing by some key friends the likes of which would turn a codebreaker for the CIA green with envy. To put it in brief terms, my world has been turned upside down. And I am just now figuring out how to put back in their place the fragments of my psyche that have shaken loose.

See, for nearly twenty years of my life, all I have known is the comfort and predictability of office life. Sitting behind a desk. Though it has gone radically against my natural biological grain, my daily life has involved, as long as I can remember being an adult, getting up early (ick!), hosing off and getting cute fast, jumping in the car, fighting traffic to the office, getting to the office, getting caffeinated and then following instructions all day, interfacing with a large variety of people (some friends, some annoying gossip-mongers, mostly butthole lawyers) – LUNCH BREAK – trudging through the rest of the day until 5:30 when I get to fight traffic for an hour or more, get home, then have a life with my relationship, dogs, family, friends, etc., anticipate Fridays, vacations and holidays and there you have it.

Now, things are different. Leaving the legal business to become a full-time massage therapist is something I have dreamt about doing for a long time. And things aligned in my life just so to allow me the opportunity to do that. But the ensuing feelings of being lost and starting over kind of swallowed me whole and I was so not ready for that. I had anticipated cartwheels and sunshine and unicorns at this point, not feelings of sadness and loss, sleeping too much but not very well, drinking too much, lack of interest in the usual things that bring me joy, lack of energy to even be around people. It’s been rough. And frustrating. It is in my nature to be happy and joyful, and every morning I would wake up and go “WTF? This shitty feeling is STILL HERE????”

Now don’t get me wrong: the nature of my job now is everything I thought it would be. It is rewarding in a profound way that I have never before known by pushing paper around behind a desk all day. I am helping to relieve people’s pain and suffering and stress, and I have a unique perspective on it since I, like many of them, sat behind a desk for so long and know where that particular brand of stress slithers into the body and sets up residence. But guess what? I am still new at this. Not only are my appointments sporadic and the nature of my job now very physical and tiring, making it difficult to plan my time with any kind of efficiency, but I am no longer the best at what I do. Can you say ego blow?

At my previous jobs, I am used to being the girl who works circles around everybody else and still has room left in my multi-tasking repertoire to solve my girlfriends’ problems, plan dinner for tonight, write a few blog posts, research some obsessive health issue of concern that I must get to the bottom of, make plans for the weekend and then still have time leftover to read Go Fug Yourself.

Now, I am the newbie. I am not the most experienced, efficient therapist in the house. You can’t multi-task while doing a massage – it is a solid hour of pure focus and quiet. Add to this the fact that I am starting at the bottom as far as earnings, which is also a huge blow to the ego. I’m used to being a major contributor to the household, dammit! Not so anymore. It’s like being in my early 20s all over again, that feeling of insecurity, of constantly worrying what other people think of you, if you’re DOING it right. I hated that shit then – I have to re-live it now?

I think there is also some post-wedding-honeymoon-time-of-my-life letdown going on too. You’ve seen the pictures – it really WAS that awesome. But now the anticipation of the whole thing is over and it will never happen again. I will never get married in Italy again, that was IT. And it was so great. What could possibly top that?

And then one recent Saturday night, sometime after my 12th beer or so (I’m exaggerating, but it was up in the high numbers I’m sure), it dawned on my drunk self that I was drinking to get away from feeling like shit. And that is the WRONG reason to drink, my friends. You drink to have fun, to celebrate something, to be with friends, to have a delicious wine with dinner or a funky cocktail in a fun bar. You don’t drink to escape. So I gave myself a break from the alcohol. It’s been eight days, and will likely last awhile since people keep telling me my skin looks fabulous. I can’t help but think it’s because of being off the sauce.

And then the other day whilst facing a mountain of dishes in the kitchen, I blasted “99 Problems” by Jay-Z and started to dance around the kitchen. And like a little kid peeking into a room where he sees Mommy and Daddy are kissing, I giggled sheepishly at myself and realized this is something the normal me would do. Am I coming back? Every day since that moment has told me “yes”.

I wanted to share this with you because I didn’t want you to think I have forgotten about you – I have been wallowing and unsure of how to even tell you this stuff. But I also wanted to share this with you because I want the nature of this blog to be more personal. I love that you are with me on this journey. Now that I have the time and space to focus more, you will be seeing more postings from me, I promise. And I hope you will keep reading. Dealing with problems, especially the ones we can’t see, is part of life, and I do still have a lust for it, even when it’s difficult to feel that lust.

Speaking of lust, The Husband has been so supportive and understanding through all of this and I know my ass has NOT been easy to live with. And for that, I am supremely grateful. To quote Jay-Z, “I got 99 problems but a bitch ain’t one.”

Nail, Meet Head

My acupuncturist rules. He periodically sends out little newsletters giving free health advice if he sees a pattern of inquiry about a specific subject coming up in his practice. But his most recent newsletter was more introspective and personal, and he had this to say, which basically sums up my viewpoint exactly. Next time you are in Encino or West L.A., give Dr. Randy Martin a shout-out.

"Of course I share with all of you, my prayers for a safer world, where we won't have the constant reminders of war and terrorism, which we have even today. And I pray for less divisiveness among our politicians, rather than the huge polarization we see among Americans who happen to identify more as conservative or liberal. I really feel these artificial labels merely work to isolate and overly dramatize our common issues. In reality, we all have a mixture of values, since we, as human beings are very complex. Wouldn’t it be nice if our talk show hosts, our political commentators and politicians spent as much energy on drawing us closer together, by pointing out commonalities, rather than further polarizing us by overly dramatizing our differences and making the "other" seem wrong or evil."