Duh Part 1 (of Many More, I’m Sure)

The location for most of my epiphanies are strange. Today I had one while staring at myself in the bathroom mirror. I was straightening my hair and it occurred to me.

 I’m not totally happy and I haven’t been for a while.

There. I said it.

Yes I can put on a great act for friends and family but deep down something isn’t right and this has been going on for a … long time.

Luckily for me, the epiphany didn’t end there. The missing piece is that I’ve been reserved since my last relationship. Okay, its one thing to have been hurt and hold back a piece of your heart but I think what I’ve been doing is holding back a huge honking chunk of myself.

And not only from potential dates and mates but from EVERYONE.

I’ve been so terrified of being my usual wear-my-heart-on-my-sleeve-send-you-a-care-package-just-because-you’re-down kind of girl for fear of being hurt that I’ve all but shut down. No shit then, that I’m not happy. I’m not ME.

 Now, I wonder when the epiphany for fixing this mess will strike? On the toilet perhaps?

Why?

Though I like sushi, I really do… I promise this blog isn’t all about sushi, though I am craving it right now.

I got the idea for the title of this blog yesterday when a coworker of mine asked me to lunch next Monday. I told him that our favorite sushi bar has half priced sushi for lunch on Mondays, hence sushi Mondays. Hey, it just sounds good.

 Now, where is the number for that sushi bar? Must. get. sushi. NOW!

Esteemed

In typical Friday night fashion, I am sitting at some resturant-slash-bar or another having a few drinks with friends. This is just how we roll in good ole Dallas, Texas. Since the margaritas are especailly good tonight, I have more than one. Uh..I have..two. Am mega giddy and boisterous, as I tend to be when drinking. Since I’m really not a heavy drinker, a little alcohol goes a long way.

Of course, Cake, my trusty friend and companion for all things alcoholic is right there beside me, laughing for the hundreth time as I make a joke and proceed to laugh whilst thumping the table and yelling between giggles ‘I CRACK MYSELF UP’. I do this even when sober (though probably not quiet as loud) so I don’t know why she’s laughing just as hard as I am.

“Oh I forgot to tell you,” she says, when we are done giggling. “I went to lunch with Bill today.”

Bill is our ex-boss and both Cake and I got to know him on a friendly basis when we worked for him and enjoy the very gay Bill’s company very much.

“We were talking about you,” she continues as I roll my eyes exaggeratedly, which sends us both into another fit of giggles.

“Umm hmm,” I say “because y’all have absolutely nothing else to talk about.”

“Oh we DO, but he was just saying how he thinks you’re absolutely beautiful and its a shame that you don’t know it,” she said.

“OH GREAT SO A GAY GUY FINDS ME HOT,” I must of said it a tad loud, since the entire bar turned to stare at our table.

“UH yeah,” Cake chokes out. She’d just taken another sip of her drink. Ill-timed, right before my outburst. “He said that if he thinks you’re gorgeous and he’s gay he just wonders what straight men think when they see you, its a compliment of the highest order.”

Hmmm…is it really? Or is it just the gay guys that think I’m cute. This is the second time in a week that a gay man has told me how hot I am…where are the straight ones? Cake seems to think that I scare them off with the perpetual scowl I wear on my face when one approaches or looks in my direction. Maybe she’s right, maybe I dont smile. I give off the ‘stay away or I will cut you’ signal because I am not ready for anything at all. But I fear that if I don’t let this armor down soon, I will freeze this way, just as your mom told you that “your face would freeze that way” when you incessantly stuck your tongue out at your little brother. Maybe I should take this compliement from Bill, let it stroke my ego and my self-esteem and smile at the next hot man that happens by.

Love at the IMAX…

…Or something like that!

This is a conversation that took place between me and one of the closest people to me, recently. When asked what she wanted her code name to be for the purposes of this blog, she originally said “Betty”, because she loves the show Ugly Betty and I know she relates to it, even though she is literally one of the most gorgeous people I have seen up close. The kicker with her is that she is not only beautiful on the outside, but on the inside as well. Her heart is as equally beautiful as her face, if not more so. AND as if that weren’t enough, she GETS me (as so few people in this life do…) she really gets me. Hence, this conversation… which cracks me up still..

By the way, “Betty” doesn’t quiet suit her in my opinion so I took writer-ly license and changed it to “Bettina”, which I suspect she will hate but I think its pretty.

Snarky (ME) :i’m watching this show where this guy is proposing to his gf, its a reality show

Snarky: whatever i’m so over love and shit

Snarky: for real

Bettina: change that shit quick

Bettina: thats why im watching deep blue sea, that IMAX movie

Bettina: no love

Bettina: just mating

Bettina: right up our alley!!

Snarky: it doesnt phase me anymore

Bettina: i dont want to watch that love and proposing shit, im over that crap

Bettina: im ready for some TURTLES

Snarky: no , when you’re over it you can watch it

Bettina: its too corny for me

Snarky: she’s like crying booohooo i love you

Snarky: shut up he’s going to cheat on you in five years

Bettina: leave your ass all fat with his kids

Snarky: i’m so evil, no wonder i’m going to die alone

Bettina: we grumpy and cynical

Snarky: yeah i ‘ma stay cynical forever

Snarky: i hope you don’t, its too late for me

Bettina: its not a plague!

Snarky: No, i’ve seen the dark underbelly of love

Snarky: i will never again be the same!

Bettina: underbelly of love? Ewwwww, thats not a pretty picture. By the way, I’m watching still watching that Deep Sea IMAX movie

Bettina: i wish i was a fish, im serious too

Snarky: i know you are, scary stuff

Snarky: see fish dont love

Bettina: didnt u watch NEMO

Bettina: they love!

Snarky: uh those are cartoons

Bettina: wait, maybe I want to be a whale

Snarky: ewww nooo i want to be a pretty tropical fish, whales are ugly

Bettina: there u have it! If I’m an ugly whale, no one will want me and no one will break my heart

Bettina: pretty is a curse!!

Snarky: oooh i want to be a turtle and and just go into my hard shell

Bettina: THATS why im a crab! My sign is cancer

Snarky: i’m sorry if you were a crab i’d eatchyu

Bettina: no way! you couldn’t, i’d stab you n hide.

Snarky: yeah i’d find a way because you know i lub me some crab!

Bettina: omg why are we playing pretend?

Bettina: we’re talkn about this stuff like its real

Snarky: we talk about love like its real

Snarky: how is this any different

Bettina: your right neither is real

Bettina: i wish i was at imax right now

One of My Childhood Heroes..

OKAY! So maybe she’s STILL is… or maybe this is how I feel at the gym. You may never know!

Happy Father’s Day, Pops

It has been six years since we lost my Dad and in these six years the memory of him has faded from being vibrant and 3-D to being blurred, like an old sepia-tinted picture, beautiful.

My Father and I did not always have the ideal relationship in my eyes. Growing up, he was not expressive with his love for me. The hugs and kisses between he and I were almost always initiated by me. Though I had no doubt that he loved me, my Father always held me at arms length saying that I was a girl and I would one day leave him for my husband’s house. Maybe he loved me so much that he felt that he would not be able to take the grief when that day came, maybe he was steeling himself against that my entire life.

Dad would never live to see the day that his little girl left his house for her husband’s, he left us before that would ever happen. Of course, it makes me sad that he will not be there when I get married but what breaks my heart is that he will never play with my children. My Father loved children, anyone’s children, with a pureness unlike anything I have ever seen. He had the most compassionate heart and it showed in his interactions with my little cousins, the neighbors children or just a baby in a stroller at the store. His face would light up and children would respond to him with the same kind of enthusiasm. I believe that children can see a good and pure soul because they are untainted by the world and I am sure that they saw that soul in my Pops.

If seeing him interact with other people’s kids was so thrilling, I can only imagine what seeing my Father with his own grandchildren would be like. Even though my children and my brother’s children will never phyiscally know their grandfather, I plan on telling them as much as I know and remember about him. I plan on telling them abou his idealism and his kindness, about his pureness (which is the one word that stands out in my mind when I think about him), about the way his eyes lit up and his humor, his charisma which captivated almost anyone he came into contact with and about his sense of family and duty and how he worked so hard for us until the end of his life without once complaining. Dad had a very tough childhood and worked hard for everything he had, but he never begruged anyone anything. He taught his children how to be good, strong human beings with a huge sense of compassion for any and everyone. Dad instilled in us that all people are equal. He taught us how to be classy and to be the bigger person in any situation. Best of all, he taught not on a soap box, but by example.

Happy Father’s Day, Pops. Wherever you are, I know you are in a good place and that you are home. Thank you for all of your sacrifices, your love and your lessons. I will carry them always and pass them on and I will love you always.

Note to My Future Self

Dear Future Self,

I know that there are days that you do not, under any circumstances want to go to the gym. You are, after all, intrinsically lazy and oh-so sedentary at your very core. However, I would like you to remember those first two weeks in June of 2007, when you started lifting weights five days a week and doing cardio just as often. Remember how your body responded immediately to your escalated activity level? And how you felt the firmness in your triceps right away? Remember the swagger with which you walked into the office each afternoon, after the lunch time workouts? Remember the day you woke up SO cranky and decided that the lunch time workout wasn’t happening that day? And how you sat in the meeting at ten o’clock that morning not listening to what your VP was saying, instead having an inner argument between the lazy side and the fit diva side of your brain? You’d talked yourself out of going to the gym but right after the meeting, you half ran to the car, on auto-pilot and made a bee-line for the gym. Remember how you worked your aggression out on the weights that day? And that you felt so much better when you got back to the office. I think you almost had a smile on your face and I KNOW you felt infinitely satisfied when your boss told you how good you were looking and that your hard work was paying off. Now Future Self, I know something is bound to happen where this routine of yours that is working for now like a well oiled machine. You’re going to get stressed about school or about work or about home or about the latest man who broke your heart (or vice versa) and that is inevitably going to wreak havoc on getting the fitter body you’ve always wanted, but take it from your Past Self, don’t give up. Don’t lose the focus you had when you started this routine, don’t forget how good you felt about yourself and how you carried yourself just a bit taller. You’re doing something wonderful for yourself but you need to continue it and be persistant at getting what you want. You can be a quitter and not as tenacious as perhaps you should be. Every time you feel like you want to quit the gym or take a little break, don’t. You’re only cheating yourself. So suit up, show up and get it done. For me? Pretty Please?

Love,
S

True

There are two reasons to why I started this online diary: I started it after a breakup, as something new to occupy my time. I needed something that did not involve excessive amounts of crying, ice cream or other boys and this was my way to do just that. To put my energy into something creative, something that was just mine, a sort of nod to myself, giving myself permission to be self-centered and creative. I know I can come off narcissistic, especially on this blog because it is after all my blog and it is about my life but sometimes it’s hard for me to talk (write) about myself. I, like other women, have been conditioned to believe that I as a person don’t really matter; that what I have to say is neither necessary nor interesting. This notion is deep seated in me and I don’t wear it on my sleeve but its there. In my Women’s Studies classes in college, we talked a lot about women’s voices. Not their physical voices per se, but their ability to express themselves, their confidence in themselves speak in a way that they would be heard. Until recently, my personal voice was not interesting to me. I know other people may have differed on this, but deep down inside, I wasn’t sure that I had anything worthwhile to say to me. I am slowly beginning to realize that I am worthwhile, and thought what I have to say may sound redundant in my head, it is worth talking about and worth documenting.

This leads me to the second reason why I started this blog…because I am lazy. In college and in the few years following graduation, I kept a paper diary. When I go back and read some of the entries now, it brings back memories of days gone by, it also reminds me of what a long way I’ve come. Some of the entries are sheer amusement and others are plain sad in the simplistic and often skewed way I viewed the world. I stopped keeping a diary right after my dad died, partly because I was afraid of what might come out on paper and partly because I was just too busy dealing with the grief and life change for me and my family. When we were finally okay again (years later…), I found it tedious to actually write stuff down because who writes anymore? We just type. By that time, I also typed faster than I wrote so here we are, in blog world, five years too late.

My decision to make this blog public was at first a natural one. I was tired of keeping things to myself and letting them fester. I need to put these words out there, into the Universe. I thought it would be okay for my thoughts to be public. I wasn’t going to be shy about what I wanted to say but people I know read this blog, everyone from ex-boyfriends to my brother. When I realized what this meant, that my musings and rantings and randomness would be out there for them to see, I stopped writing for ten-ish days, not sure of how to proceed. I felt the need to be constantly entertaining to everyone, to write neat little entries that were witty and tightly bundled and grammatically correct. I was suddenly shy of anything raw or “weak” coming out, splayed all over the Internet for all to see. Not only to see, my biggest fear was: “for all to judge”. Because we all know that we can be judgy (me included). Maybe I was projecting my own jugdy-ness (yes I make up words) onto my loved ones and friends. Should I now censor myself so as not to offend exes and mortify siblings? Is that being fair to the reason I started doing this in the first place? I didn’t want to offend and startle people, though anyone that knows me knows that I have an innate gift for both offending as well as startling. In my day-to-day real life, I can be very inyourface and outspoken. Why then, did the thought of people I know reading this blog scare me senseless and made me want to go hide under the covers? Probably because these words are immortalized on the Internet and there for all to see, to go back and reference. For certain exes, it gives them a leg up on me. They (by they I mean one ex in particular) know exactly what I am thinking while they can remain an enigma to me. But you know what? You’ve always been an enigma and not in a good way. Sure, it was exciting and intriguing in the beginning when I was an innocent young-twenty-something and you were the older, wise-in-the-ways-of-the-world, successful man who swooped in and saved me, or so I thought. Now, seeing as years have passed and I no longer place you on a pedestal and bat my eyes upward at you, it may just be sad that you can’t let anyone in. I don’t mean just romantically, as I’ve seen you shut people out socially, in little ways. You always trail off when talking to people you’ve just met, especially when it’s about yourself. In fact, you will always try to steer the conversation in the other person’s direction and are happiest when the other person is struggling with life or career decisions so you can advise them on the steps they should take to fix themselves. What’s with your need to always keep a huge chunk of you to yourself? I’ve never seen you be open and honest or proud to be you. You’re always quiet, always calculating, always assessing, plotting. Frankly it can be a little creepy. I wonder what you’re hiding but it doesn’t consume me anymore. If anything, it amuses me when I think about it in passing.

Back to the point, my mission (and I chose to accept it) is to write like no one is reading. While I’m at it, I will also dance like no one is watching. Though the “loving like I’ve never been hurt” thing is going to take a lot of work and is at the bottom of my list. That is one line item that I am not ready or willing to tackle for a while yet.

Things I Learned: 60 days, M Free

Its been about 60 days since I broke up with M but it seems like eons ago. Something about this break-up is different, somehow I’ve learned a lot about myself in the days and weeks following it. I don’t think this has ever happened before, where I’m not really thinking about the guy or the relationship but I am thinking a lot about me, who I am and what I want. This is not to say that I don’t think about the bad times and the mind games that he played and the solid, utter state of confusion I lived in while he was in my life and I still occasionally wake up unbelievably pissed off, like I dreamt about him all night but I’ll take these pissy mornings, that are few and far between, with a grain of salt because what I’ve gained from letting him go is immeasurably greater than I could have ever imagined.

Here’s what I’ve learned post-M so far:

I have to truly like myself as a person before I can love myself as a person. I have to truly truly love myself as a person before I can love someone else. Right now, at this very moment I am in between that magical place of like and love, with myself and it is w-o-n-d-e-r-f-u-l. Right now, loving someone else seems distant and scary and I don’t want to do it.

Math and free weights are really not as hard as I made them out to be, neither are cash flow statements.

I don’t need a ‘last call’ of the night to fall asleep, Letterman in the background is enough.

Friends are usually all you need.

I really need to let myself heal from all of the past relationship hurts I avoided before. And it may take time. And that’s okay.

Sometimes I think I’m broken, but I’m not…for the most part.

Ex-boyfriends are “ex” for a reason, leave them that way.

I AM my own person. Sure, I’m hella quirky but I fall in love with my own quirks a little more each day, narcissistic as that may sound.

I AM fucking narcissistic, what of it?

Never put anyone on a pedestal so high that when the pedestal breaks, they come crashing down with a thud and break into a million pieces at your feet.

I am not what I’ve been trying to be for a long time. I’m not traditional the way my mother wants me to be. I’ve been denying parts of me to please her and others dear to me. Right now, I’m learning to embrace the real me and live me out loud, regardless of what I think others will think of it. If they are genuine and meant to be in my life, they will accept it.

I’m tired of round-hole-square-peg-syndrome.

I’m a good flirt just for flirting’s sake…and there IS a such thing as innocent flirting.

I can and have stopped measuring myself by my relationship status.

There is a huge difference in self-awareness between my early twenties and almost-thirty self. HUGE. Back then I thought I knew it all, now I know that I don’t know anything at all.

There are (many) other things in life as or more fulfilling than a relationship.

I don’t really want to try anymore, just live.

I’m happy that M came and went from my life. His leaving (or my kicking him out, since I am narcissistic) had its purpose and I’m lucky to be able to see it clearly so soon after the fact.

Thats pretty much it for now, not bad for 60 days worth of introspection. Would I take him back now? Still negative.

Dramacidal

I almost dropped a weight on my foot at the gym this afternoon. My friends Boo Face, Shawty and I were working out (obviously names have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent but they will attest to the fact that these names in some way fit them or are an inside joke between us) when Boo Face said that someone was “getting dramacidal over something she said the other day”.

“DRAMACIAL!!!!” I laughed and simultaneously almost dropped a ten pound (look at me, with the heavy weights) dumbbell on my right foot. “I love that word!”

Lately I’ve been feeling such a camaraderie amongst my female friends and I . I’m sure it was always there but I was always too busy in the land of testosterone to see it. Since making a conscious effort to be single and flirt as minimally as possible, I have been surrounding myself with the women that I care about and its been so much fun. Since I’m also trying to live in the moment, in the here and now rather than the there and then, I’ve also been thinking about who these women are and how they impact my life. They’re women of all shapes, colors, ages and backgrounds yet they all enrich me in some way.

My female friendships are nurturing in the way that my relationships or platonic friendships with men never are. These women can lift me up and make me feel like I can accomplish anything. They have rallied around me in times of crisis, even if they are not in close physical proximity or driving distance and laughed with me over silliness. Whether it was this afternoon, working out with my “crew” or the other night at dinner, trading profound life experiences and stories of loss with Dee over Indian food I treasure these experiences more than any times I’ve spent with anyone with the XY chromosome.

I love the fact that not all of my female friends know each other or are friends with one another because it gives me a broad spectrum of perspectives. In comparison to some of them, I’m the shy one, while in comparison to others I’m the outspoken one. As I come into my own and finally feel comfortable in my own skin and my own head (filled with intellect, emotions and a few bats, no doubt) I just am who I AM with them. There are no facades or games, nor do there need to be and I love it.

This one’s for the girls who make me happy to be part of your worlds and make you part of mine. Whether we’re crying, laughing, fighting, kissing (ON THE CHEEK people) at the gym to see if we can make that guy on the treadmill fall off, talking over hot chocolate or picking each other up and brushing each other off, each and every one of you is beautiful and special and I’m blessed to know you. Thanks for letting me be dramacidal, because as we know, drama is indeed my middle name!