what would you expect, since it’s only 5 a.m., of course it’s still dark.  i’m up earlier than usual so i took my dog out.  i’ve been succumbing somewhat to my winter laziness lately so the first outing of the day with dog consisted of a short trip to the backyard.  there i let loose of the leash and let hammy run around in circles for awhile.  he’s very much like a rocket ship.  he’s even shaped like one.  eventually he will pee, etc. and then we can go back inside for food.

this morning it was so dark and so cold.  the wind was howling from around distant corners, setting hamlet’s ears on edge.  the moon is almost perfectly half, and being scoured by winds is brilliantly clean and bright in the industrial sky.  all visible pollution is gone on a freezing day like today.  i’m not usually cold, but today the wind got through to me and i was truly wanting to get back inside for my coffee preparations.

so here i am, with the hot coffee.  no one’s been writing for awhile on this here website, so i’m giving it a try for old times sake.

even though i have a very important house hunt spinning inside.

this weekend i’m going out with a new real estate agent.  the old one went to florida and i didn’t appreciate that.  i felt dissed.  on sunday this new one is gonna show me a passel of stuff.  some of it i’m sure will be in wrecked condition.  that’s my price range, wrecked to marginal.  hopefully something will appear liveable, and i’ll buy it.  i just want to get this over and done with.  i hate moving again.  but this time hopefully it will be the last time.  because i am going to leave my crap in this one place, no matter where i may roam in the future.  i may live in other places, but the crap stays put.  no more schlepping the crap.  i’m also going to get rid of most of the crap, since my new house will probably be 500 square feet or less.  the key is in the yard.  a nice size yard with my gardens will do me fine.  who needs tons of living space.  not me.  i’m a two-room type of gal.  most people never use all the rooms they own in their giant houses.  what a waste to heat all of that space for nothin.

i’m just being a practical ecological gal.  i’m going to have well water.  later i might add some solar panels.  it depends on the location of the house.  if it’s vastly wooded, the solar prolly won’t work too good.  we’ll see.

i’ve got a handful of mortgage preapprovals now.  it’s time to shop for the best interest rate.  after i move i can find a new job.  i won’t have to do this job anymore.  i won’t even want to be commuting anyway.  not to mention i can’t stand the job.  i’ll get a new and pleasant job near my new house.  ya’ll can come visit me.  it’s right near a giant lake and we will take a boat and go rowing.  i’ll buy some life preservers and i’ll get one for my dog too.  then i’ll coax hammy to get in the boat.  we’ll go out sailing.

there will be waterskiers and we’ll try to stay out of the way.  there will be a lot of rippling of the waters.  hold on, don’t tip the boat.

it’s a huge lake, so maybe we’ll find a quiet cove.  and eat a picnic.  we’ll watch the water lillies as they toil not, but they do float.

hi, we got a buttload of snow.  it’s out there right now.  if i wanted to look out the window i could see it, in all its ugly urban glory.

but i’m pretending here inside.

i ain’t been writing cause i’ve been too excited this week.  i’ve had a one track mind, if you will.  it’s cause last week i found out i prequalified for a whole bunch of mortgages from all different banks.  so, i’m gonna buy a house.  and i’m like way too excited, all excited, and very excited.  i can’t think of much else, except when i’m at work and have to do actual work things.  then i can’t think of the house.

anyway, the only house i can afford in northern new jersey will be located about an hour west of here near the state’s largest lake.  that’s where all these tiny lake bungaloes were built back in the 1950’s.  that’s right up my alley.  a tiny house within commuting distance.  then later i can find a job closer to my house.  and i can buy a canoe and a rowboat and keep them on the lake so i can row.

but you see, i am feeling oh so thwarted today what with the snow and all.  i was hoping to look at houses this weekend with the real estate agent.  now with the storm, the area out there is gonna ice up and the real estate agents aren’t gonna clear all the driveways and steps and then it’ll be too dangerous for us to look at the houses.  see, it’s more mountainous and colder out there.  in the west.  in the west of jersey.  sure, girls from montana will find this hard to believe, but there is a slight elevation increase out by the lake.  and it stays colder longer.  so, more snow, more ice.  plus where i live now is closer to the ocean, which brings with it the warming waters of the gulf stream.  so our weather is a little balmier.  but today what difference does it make.  we have like four inches of snow out there with more falling.  i hope its winter’s last choking hurrah.

i was gonna write about patsy cline and pugs, but you see i can’t get another subject in my head for too long.

Today’s Words:
homophile
Patsy Cline
insectivorous
pug
spiteful
nick
sprinkle

i found this chinese fortune that i got several months ago. it says this week you will receive support from surprising sources.

it was a week of unusually long talks with clients.  the talks were long becuase it wasn’t the same old talk.  one client told me she always wished she could be a lesbian, but found that she needed to have the dick attached to something warm and nice; dildos just don’t work for her.  another client told me he worries a bit about offending others. he’s thick-skinned, and used to think others must be similar thick-skinned. he loves to be teased, and he thinks insulting people is a way of showing, look, i love you, i know you can take this. teasing you and making fun of you is my way of letting you know that i know you know it’s not at all serious.

so then i wonder, at the end of a call, what to bill the client.  today, i billed one client 45 minutes for our hour-long call. the line item onthe invoice includes the fact that 15 minutes was spent talking about happiness, causes thereof.

in other news, my amazing therapist said something so basic i’d forgotten it. you can move things not by taking on new responsibilities, or making agreements with other people. instead, make agreements with yourself.  i was watching too many movies, because i didn’t want to go through some stuff i need to go through.  so i have an agreement. no more than N movies per week. i’m a little embarrassed to name N in public. :-)  another agreement with myself was to stay off the internet. if i don’t need to be on the internet, i ain’t on it. that goes for the computer, too.  no more random clicking while hours pass.

this is definitely turning into a journal entry, with little chance that dolly parton may nudge her way in.  but, hey, since she did come up, and i did see a snippet of something insane on tv (at the gym the other day, at the gym!), here it is.  they had this game show only, instead of regular folks as contestants, they had celebrity look-alikes.  dolly parton and howard stern were among the lookalikes. these folks were scarily similar to their impersonnees, and you could also tell they had worked hard on the mannerisms, etc  which is too bad as it might have had a shred of authenticity if they were trying to answer inane questions while being themselves, rather than trying to answer inane questions while being someone else.  anyhow, i felt sad when they pitted elvis presley’s lookalike with marilyn monroe’s.  two dead, sad legendary characters in a wierd and chronologically inaccurate face-off, lord was willin’.

i’m writing the sort of stuff i skim over when i come across it in other people’s blogs. so, feel free to skim, dear one.  there’s nothing here for you but the news that i’m alive and — well — coming into something.  something that feels much better than what i was in before.  and a lot of tears, and some disappointment.  counterbalanced with the sureness i feel about spring coming again this year.  i’m pretty sure that, just like last year, we won’t get skipped over.

 the trick this year will be to stop and smell the spring, rather than comment upon it when it’s gone, and july is kicking my ass.  yup.  that’s the trick of my lifetime.  to live, while i can. 

 my artist’s way pals met last night, here at my house. we spent the first half hour at the mansion across the street, watching the eclipse.  if you didn’t catch it, you can simulate it by drawing the moon, then drawing a brownish-orange circle, same size as the moon, moving over the moon from left to right … voila. 

last night’s get-together was a potluck — sans planning.  we tought it would be fun to let everyone just bring what ever they wanted.  as a result, i made vegetarian enchiladas; and 5 peopled showed up with hummus.  i’m not really even a fan of hummus.  when they left, i announced that everywoman should take what she brought with her, i wanted no humii left behind.

the end

Today’s Words:
homophile
Patsy Cline
insectivorous
pug
spiteful
nick
sprinkle

I’ve been watching Sliders, which is this old TV show from, oh, the nineties maybe, where these folks get stuck sliding from parallel universe to parallel universe trying to find their way home. And each parallel Earth is similar-but-different. They meet their doubles and doppelganger hijinks ensue. So in one of those worlds, Patsy Cline could be a homophile, or I could own a pug.

There is a lot of buzz lately about our universe actually, and how the laws of physics being so fine-tuned to support life is pretty damn improbable. What could that mean? Why are we here?

I have a plant that I bought recently that has one remaining leaf. All the other fine glorious shards of green withered up and fell off. That one leaf though, is pristine and healthy. It sits there, its spiteful existence keeping me from tossing the whole thing. It mocks me. I couldn’t keep the plant healthy, but it won’t just die and be done with it.

My brother says plants from Fred’s are often sick so if it dies right off don’t take it personally. Ok, I’ll try not to nick my bedpost the number of plants I’ve killed. Why do we bury our pets but not our plants? There are no plant cemeteries, sprinkled with gravestones like “RIP Pothos, you were a viney wonder in your day”. We toss them in the compost heap. Must be mammal allegiance. Plants are nice but we could never bond to them. Except in that freaky movie with the insectivorous plant, L’il Shop of Horrors. Excuse me, carnivorous. That movie freaked me out and I’ve done my best to wipe it from my memory. Not perfectly, obviously.

I’m off to diagram the “forming storming norming performing” stage theory of groups and compare it to how people develop within the social game of the internet where groups are multi-dimensional, ever-changing, and have very fuzzy edges. I want to do a presentation at barcamp.

Today’s Words:
dog tag
gravitas
replete
trafalgar
peregrinate
sequel
hooflike

No gravitas here, I am a Joy Ninja! Yup, I got a new blog. Think of it as a sequel to Tao of Prosperity. When you’ve got your money situation managed, what do you want to do? Change the world! I will peregrinate through the various ideas I find revolutionary and beautiful.

Shine, shine, shine. It’s important that we all shine in our individual ways. Comparisons are over. What is important is not that we be better than the person next to us, but that we find what is uniquely ours to share. The only thing we are going to be uniquely excellent at is being fully ourselves. We must be replete with our own magnificence. One of my teachers once said something like, “Your magnificence is so obvious to you that you are unaware of it”. The Buddha said, “If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change”. Dan Millman wrote “There are no ordinary moments”.

Habituation is the problem: spiritual awareness is about un-habituating ourselves to that which seems obvious but really isn’t. For instance: we are alive. So what? Dude! That fact is so incredible! When another human being stands in front of you, how much can you see their tremendous soul, their beating heart, their incredible mind? Even when they are driving you crazy, can you see the beauty in it?

Well, this is not to say that I can, or that I am somehow graduated from this problem. It’s just to point it out.

I want to tap lightly on the brains of hardworking geeks everywhere and shine a light of dewy awareness into their circuits. I want to bring joy into the spotlight, and encourage a direct connection with it.

I am so happy! I feel at one with my purpose in life. I feel urgent and calm all at once - full of faith that it will all unfold, and excitement to be part of the unfolding. I am imagining dog tags that say “enjoy JOY”. I am sloughing off any remaining tiredness, pessimism, cynicism, and bitterness and embracing the future. It’s awesome.

I am reminding myself daily that I don’t have to know what I am to do next, or how it should all unfold, I just need to walk forward and show up for the ride. I just need to do my best and learn as best I can and be as real as I can.

I worry that my intense glee for life will get in the way of my message. That people will mistake it for some kind of savant-denial-of-reality-Pollyanna thing. Sometimes I just want to roll around on the floor and giggle with the sheer enormous beauty of the world. That doesn’t mean I don’t get all the pain. It means I don’t want to live there. I’ve found a way to live without self-torture, without self-mutilation, and it does last. It is real. So maybe I am a little high.

My secret message is to stop hating yourself. It’s pretty simple. Loving yourself, no matter what, and being your own best friend, the bestest friend you could ever imagine for yourself, the one you wanted your parents to be, or your lover - you do that for yourself, and you get happy. Because you have your own back. You know you will not blame yourself even when you make mistakes. You know you will let yourself feel OK even when things go wrong. You know you will no longer punish yourself for anything, because you are your own friend and you know you are innocent. You know you will find the best way you know how to be and you know you are good. And you really believe it, because you’ve made friends with yourself. It’s not something you are lying to yourself about–it’s something that’s finally true. You’re OK with you. That’s why I’m happy. Because I’m OK with myself. It’s not something anyone can give you. But it’s something you can do. And it’s awesome.

And then I want to say but first, you’ve got to be someone you can really trust. You’ve got to know how to go for what you want, and keep promises to yourself. You’ve got to say yes to your heart, because when you don’t, you break your own heart. And you’ll never trust yourself if you do that. Loving yourself starts with being someone you trust, inside yourself. You can love someone you don’t trust, but you can’t really be close to them. And you want to be close to yourself. You want to whole. You want to be undivided.

See this joyrant, do I publish it other than here? I’m still figuring that out. What is my voice? There is power in the rant. But I worry about its reception. But does it matter? Blogs are experimental. Risks, you’ve got to take risks. Fuck it I will.

Hmm. En passant. I had to look that one up. Apparently, it’s some kind of chess move. I never understood it myself, but one of my grade school friends (well, not my friend, exactly, but that’s another story) was really into chess. She went to tournaments in Jeff City over the weekend and played against other kids in the state. Then, she came home and blabbed my ear off about her latest chesscapades while I smiled and nodded. That is, until she mentioned Jay.

He’d been one of my best friends before I switched schools, and we’d promised to keep in touch, but… well, stuff happened, and we didn’t. It struck me as odd, though; I never could have imagined him playing chess.

Sure, I thought about trying to get back in touch with him. But it’d been years, everything had changed. So I guess he’ll just have to stay a memory of rainy afternoons and playing Nintendo.

today i’m just here to report that i have been waking up in the middle of the night lately.

it gets worse.

i start thinking about work and my clients and all the paperwork, the endless paperwork yet to be done.

it’s not a bad feeling really, just inconvenient.  i would prefer to be fast asleep in the middle of the night instead of thinking about the office.

so today i won’t use a spittoon or even those slimy folds of gray curled inside my skull-bone.

i’m so proud of myself cause yesterday i added to the spittoon.

well, i’ll see ya after i’ve gotten some shut eye.

Today’s Words:
abyss
idiot
indentured
swaddling clothes
natty
gusto
puerile

I feel like starry-eyed like the purveyer of a new revolution. It’s Web 2.0, man! It’s open source culture! Dig it! I’m writing notes everywhere, trying to figure out my thoughts. I’m reading articles about the rise of Barak Obama and Web 2.0 sensibilities. I’m finding the cool kids and plotting my strategy to be one of them. I feel like I’m in swaddling clothes still though, so much to learn. But I’m hacking away with gusto. The future is here, and I want to be part of it.

Meanwhile, I want to make wordlush better. We’re getting a lot of new users signing up from stumble upon traffic. This is my first community project and I’m excited to learn. How can I give it what it needs to grow, to thrive?  How can I help people feel at ease to jump in and write? What would help? Perhaps more writing prompts and ideas. More tools to facilitate interaction? Actually, I even need to understand what to expect–what is a good ratio of people-who-sign-up to people-who-participate?

Hmm, “puerile” so doesn’t mean what I thought it meant. I think I was confusing it with “putrid”.

just when you thought the weather would maintain a semblance of normalcy, it did not.

now we are engulfed in slush, produced after a midwinter evening’s snowfall met with a torrential downpour come morning.

the first walk with hamlet resulted in a thorough foot soaking for me, and a paw soaking for him.  the next walk of the morning i got smart and wore my expedition boots, provided to me by emily when i first moved “back east”.

with the expedition boots i no longer had to tip toe through the icy pools of floating slush- wads.  still, i tried to find some shallower areas for the sake of the dog.

i wore the expedition boots to work.  get this, people actually complimented me on them!  everyone adored my expedition boots!  who knew!  i made a fashion statement while being so practical.  thanks em.

hey, i’m almost completely cured of my illness at last.  but what’s great is that my voice is like all haggard so it sounds like i’m still suffering!  it’s great for the sympathy factor.

i had such a horrible vacation last week, and now this week i feel totally UP.  it’s really weird.  i’m almost maniacal with tidings of great joy.  what a contrast.

lay me down the abyss

in swaddling clothes.

i’m the natty idiot

you hated with gusto,

a puerile servant

indentured  by proxy.

and guess what.

after you are gone

i’ll plaster the walls with mosaic,

quilt the floors in diadem tufts

of lace and species rare -
ornaments you will not recognize.

I went to DIY Stories tonight, as a bystander. Yes, I resolved, before going, that I wasn’t going to tell a story.

There was a beautiful and intriguing woman present. About my age. Much nicer skin.

With a man about half her age. About Emma’s age. Much more fur.

I was hoping the intriguing woman would rise, and tell us why she dresses so intriguingly. Clearly, she had been down some interesting paths, to wear such a beautiful silk skirt, and to tie her L-Word hair up so freshly in such a hippy-yet-not-hippy kind of scarf.

She did. She told the most amazing yarn, about living as a hippie in Hawaii, and running into some trouble, but then being saved miraculously.

I cannot do justice to her story here.

During the break, I again tried to get Gwenn’s mom to tell some stories. She would start, then if Gwenn came by or she got interrupted in any way, she would retreat. In the hallway, she revealed that she would love to get up and tell stories, but she couldn’t do it, because her husband was there. I thought she was kidding, but she wasn’t. She said that “stories from her wilder times” make him agitated. Which of course made me want some of her stories all the more!

From another woman present, I learned that there’s a web site, it’s something like otherpeoplesstories.com — only that’s not it, I checked. If anyone can find this, I’m interested. It’s where people go to write down stories that were told to them by other people. I have some stories from my friend Bill that I always long to tell, as they’re so colorful, so populated by dangerous people. But I don’t tell his stories, cuz they’re his, and I have a few dangerous people in my past. Like Manny. But he’s dangerous in a way I don’t like recalling. Bill’s bad guys live out in the swamps and raise boars, and drink a lot, and bandy pistols in their kitchens, while telling Bill that if he ever gets any ideas about the dude’s wife, Bill will be very, very, sorry.

A dude told the real-life story of robbing a bank.

A lifelong fantasy of mine, told just like that. By living through the fantasy via the storyteller, it’s now, more than ever, utterly clear to me that I will never, ever rob a bank.

He said the FBI guy was really nice.

Other tidbits of mention. The banks don’t really care about missing money. The Feds, he said, replace monies routinely stolen from tills. Thus, it’s not directly in the ba

Another tidbit. I’d always known that, for safety reasons, bank tellers pretty much are trained to obey robbers. What I didn’t know is that it’s also a liability issue. According to the guy at DIY Stories, banks want to cover their butts nine ways to Sunday. So, if the robber says, “stand on your head or I’ll shoot these people!”, then the teller will likely stand on her head. Otherwise, the robber might actually shoot a bunch of people, because he’s upset the teller didn’t stand on head; and then customers — or the surviving relatives thereof — will sue. So, the teller does as told, not just for safety, but to cover bank’s butt.

Knowing these facts is what led to the robbery that this guy shared with us. His friend worked at a Wells’ Fargo, and saw the utter dearth of security measures–he said they had a black-and-white cam which would barely reveal the gender of the person being videotaped–and he and his buddy thought it would be a great idea for him to come in, with a note telling him to fill his backpack with cash.

Oh, the reason the FBI knew they were lying? His friend filled the backpack way too fast. He also said the FBI agent was a very nice guy.

Well, I can see that I’d like to just re-tell the fellow’s story. But that’s his story. My story is that I spent the evening listening to other people’s stories, and it was a soothing balm.

If you live in Portland, you can go to DIY Stories every 2nd Wednesday. More here:

http://www.vanadia.com/diystories

Love,

Emily