Lent

Lent was a big fat fail this year. Might I make a new goal and start again? I wouldn't rule it out. I wouldn't rule it in either. 

Make up box

Well this is my new makeup box which obviously I love. 

Nail Files

When you are an obsessive nail biter, there's a fun thing that happens called a nail file emergency. Monday on the way to the gym, I had one. I stopped at Walgreens then found myself sitting on a stationary bike with blood red nails filing like mad. Obviously this fits my very stylish and extremely  extra persona. 

But the best part is that once I was done filing my nails down to nonexistence, a sixty some odd year old guy came up to me and said "Can I borrow your nail file?" And I thought he was kidding (Obviously) but he said that he had a nail that kept catching on his gym shorts and he was serious. So basically my obsessive compulsiveness saved this guy's workout. You could probably say that I'm a hero. 

Pretty Girl

In 2002 when things were really stressful with dating (for example, I had to talk to a guy), I would listen to this song on repeat :

http://youtu.be/P0neh4spY8g

The song actually had nothing to do with anything related to my life, but it was early in the Millennium and everything was very EMO. 

Little did I know that 16 years later I would be listening to this song on repeat again when distressed about dating. Again it has nothing to do with what's happening in my life, but if there's one thing I have learned over the years it is that if I need to process some EMOTIONS, music from high school is one of the most effective ways to do it. Please remember that the height of Dashboard Confessional awesomeness was in my high school years, so the emotionally raw material is multitudinous. 

Needless to say as I got really for yoga, drove from yoga to guitar lessons, got ready for my massage etc, I have been listening to Pretty Girl on repeat. The song has been at the back of my mind because that's often what I call Gracie, pretty girl. "Hey pretty girl," soon turned into "Hey...pretty girl is suffer while he confesses everything." And then I remembered that listening to songs on repeat is top five ways to cope with difficult emotions. I had already done yoga guitar and diet coke, so it was the only thing left to do before a nap. A nap that I'll have you know I am about to take. As in, I'm typing this in bed. Which is a big fat Lent failure as my goal was not to use my phone in bed until Easter. So now that I've failed at that and begun to emotionally processed my distress, I will be headed for a nap. Like resetting a computer and feeling much better upon awakening. 

Guitar Lessons

I'm taking guitar lessons again. It's a thing that I do on and off sometimes. My guitar teacher Larry is in his 60's and is a super cool rocker who is also a clean shaven BYU professor. He's fantastic. The thing that has been really great about him is the way that he teaches by starting with the basics. That might seems like an obvious thing to do, but let me explain. Previous teachers have had me show them what I know and taught me from there. Larry did that. Then he had me start and the beginning and go through each lesson from there. Last lesson I went in telling him how I really srtruggled with tablature. I can read it but it doesn't really make sense to me-I can't process it in a way my brain understands. And he flipped to the tab page in my book. Then he went back about 20 pages to the part where you learn to play notes from the musical staff (is that what it's called? like treble and bass clef piano notes). I can play basic piano and he is teaching me literally all of the musical staff (scale?) on the guitar. 1-2 strings at a time and only in 1st position. He told me to play it for 10-12 minutes a day and that's it. Then I can work on whatever songs I'm working on for fun. 

There's something about that. Start with the basics. Go through them again. Then learn new things a little bit at a time. Practice them enough that they stick with you. Then play something fun. This is exactly the way I want to live my life. 

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was born today. Feminist writer and all around Genius. If you don't know about her, start with the movie The Hours. There is a scene with Julianne Moore that is perhaps one of the most powerful scenes I've seen dealing with suicide. 

Thanks to Google for reminding me of her big day, I've done a lot of thinking about the Shakespeare's Sister section of A Room of One's Own. It makes me so grateful  to be alive now and to be a woman now. It is because of women like Virginia that we are where we are. That we are able to do what we want. That I can sit writing this in my own room. In my own house. Is this the future she imagined for women? And if not, what can I do about it? How can I be Virginia for a future woman? 

If you've never read A Room of One's Own, here's the crux: 

"Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this; it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. Shakespeare himself went, very probably—his mother was an heiress—to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin—Ovid, Virgil and Horace—and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it is well known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in the neighbourhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. That escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practising his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of the queen. Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter—indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of her father’s eye. Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring woolstapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer’s night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother’s, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager—a fat, loose-lipped man—guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting—no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted—you can imagine what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last—for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows—at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so—who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?—killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle."

New Years Resolutions

My goal is to listen to the top 20 songs from every year 1960-1979. I have to be honest, 60-63 were a bit rough but 1964!!! The year the Beatles come onto the scene and The Kinks. I never really realized how much the Beatles changed the game. Rock and roll started, and man I love it so much. 

She's a Jar

"She's a jar with a heavy lid."

What does that lyric by Wilco even mean?! I don't even know but it's one of my favorite lines. 

Also, 

"My face gets sick, stuck like a question unposed."

"Just climb aboard the tracks of a trains arm in my fragile family tree. And watch me floating inches above the people under me." 

What does it even mean? 

It doesn't matter because I love it so much. 

And don't ruin it for me like someone did Brick by Ben Folds. Just let me have this crazy happy lyrical mystery. 

Toxins and such

Leaving my massage therapy appointment and there's obviously a serious TOXIN FLUSH happening. 

I wanna see you be brave

Brilliant Cate posted an article reviewing two books, one of which was Room by Emma Donahue. I read it and was struck by this phrase. 

"Scared is what you’re feeling. Brave is what you’re doing.”

If anything applies to my life right now that does. Today I laid in bed most of the day after taking anxiety medicine and got up long enough for a walk, for therapy, to spend some time with my mom (the kindest and most validative person on the planet). Today there was a lot of crying. A LOT OF CRYING. But I'm still here. I may be  scared out of my mind and be unable to eat because I'm so wound up,  but that doesn't matter. 

BRAVE IS WHAT I'M DOING 

Brave is getting out of my bed to take my dog on a nice long walk before therapy. Brave is all the work I’m doing to improve myself: at therapy, with my family, in my other relationships. Brave is buying a house and painting it by myself. Brave is changing electrical outlets and meeting new people, and talking to people when it’s scary. Brave is going to work even when my brain feels like I'm never going to be okay and might even die while I'm there. Brave is being compassionate and helping people through their struggles even as I am engulfed in my own. Brave is setting boundaries and standing up for what is right. Brave is dating. Brave is choosing to be vulnerable with people who have earned my vulnerability. Brave is saying no when something social is beyond my emotional reach. Brave is cuddling in bed with my dog while wishing I could disappear, dissolve into nothing. Brave is every day I get out of my bed and do something, literally any little thing  that may help me someday feel better than I do today.