Archives for January 2015

Baby Steps

Thursday January 29, 2015LifeOne comment so far

I don’t know about anybody else, but I am the Queen of jumping back into things too soon. I am a horrible patient. It doesn’t matter if I have the flu and I am laid up in bed wishing for death for a week. The second that I feel remotely better I’m right back at it with a to-do list the length of my arm and attempting to pull a 16 hour day. Needless to say, this never turns out well for me. I usually wind up sicker the next day and reverse all of the good that staying in bed for a week did. You would think that I would learn and stop doing this, but apparently the learning curve of this particular trait is very steep!

It is with this in mind, that my daily mantra has become, “Baby steps.” Last July I was diagnosed with costochondritis – a swelling of the cartilage around my sternum and lower left ribs. For any of you who have ever broken/bruised/dislocated ribs, the pain is very similar and so are the restrictions. For it to heal, you have to stop using your ribs. Funny right? How in the hell do you stop using your ribs? They tend to move every flippin’ time you breath! But never fear, the pain will teach you how to breathe without moving your sternum or lower ribs. Meet your new friend, shallow breaths. And any other sort of physical activity, forget it!

Now I’m not a gym rat. I generally have to remind myself to go, but the second that I was no longer allowed to go, I had a hankering for a Zumba class like nobody’s business! I was, however, good. I followed doctor’s orders and by the end of October I was mostly pain free . . . until I developed a cough at the beginning of November and undid three months-worth of healing. Throw on the car accident in December and I was a hurtin’ puppy come new years. That being said, I discovered a wonderful magic elixir – Nopal juice, get this stuff it’s amazing on inflammation – that has decreased my inflammation dramatically. Subsequently, my ribs haven’t given me more than a twinge for over a week. Whoo-hoo!

Let’s go rowing and take a Pilates class, and play putt-putt golf, and check out the batting cages, and take the puggles on a five mile walk to wear there little butts out and, and, and . . . sit back down and reevaluate my choices. BABY STEPS. How about a short walk with the puggles? Maybe some Tai-Chi. BABY STEPS. Maybe I’m about to go nutso out of my mind because I just want to go DO things! Be active! Work up a sweat! Or maybe some nice gentle stretching would be good. BABY STEPS. It’s my new mantra. I hate my new mantra. But I’m going to be good. Baby steps. Ugh!

Purpose

Tuesday January 27, 2015LifeOne comment so far

I recently came across a blog post – that seems to be making the rounds so you’ve probably seen it as well – that I found very intriguing. It is entitled, “7 Strange Questions That Help You Find Your Life Purpose.” Huh? Okay, I’m game. I read through it and found that this guy may actually have something. So I decided that it would be an interesting exercise to answer his questions. True, I’m cheating a bit since I’m already pretty sure what my purpose is, but I’m going to play anyway.

1 – What’s your favorite flavor of shit sandwich and does it come with an olive?

A solitary sandwich with a pickle on the side. Writing entails large amounts of time spent all by yourself. Not only by yourself in a physical sense, but in a working sense as well. Those words won’t get on the page unless you put them there. The research won’t get done unless you do it, and the problem chapter won’t get rewritten unless you grind it out. Writing can be a very lonely business. I can handle alone.

2 – What is true about you today that would make your 8-year-old self cry?

I can’t remember the last time that I played on a swing. The sheer bliss of feeling the wind whip your hair back, the slight moment of weightlessness, of floating with nothing around to catch you as you reached the top of the arc and then the whoosh backwards as you descend. I used to love to swing, and though I didn’t realize it at the time, that was me time. My time to meditate and center myself. I think my 8-year-old self would cry if she knew that I didn’t have that anymore.

3 – What makes you forget to eat and poop?

Um, nothing. Seriously, I don’t forget. I get all sorts of hangry when I don’t eat regularly. And poop, hah! With my digestive issues, I would pay good money to be able to stop thinking about poop for a day!

4 – How can you better embarrass yourself?

Talking to people in a public venue, like say an interview. I’m a bit quirky. Okay, fine, you can find my picture next to the definition in the dictionary. Add this to the fact that I have very little inhibition and I tend to find myself in potentially embarrassing situations all the time. For example, over the weekend I found myself at a purse party – you know, there’s a hostess and she has a line of products, purses, storage containers, etc. Well I found myself looking at a purse and thinking, “Huh, I bet that would fit on my head like a hat.” Now most people would have had that thought, dismissed it and moved on with their day. Okay, most people wouldn’t have had that thought in the first place. Quirky, remember. However, instead, I found myself repeating the thought, out loud this time, and trying the purse on like a hat. I’m fairly sure that if the future entails me being in front of people, this is just the beginning. FYI – I was correct, it fit quite nicely as a hat.

5 – How are you going to save the world?

I grew up believing that I could choose any life path I wanted and no goal was out of reach if I worked hard enough. The fact that I was a girl never once was a part of that equation. I have since come to realize that not all girls were taught this. In fact, there are many girls out there that believe they only have a select few doors open to them simply because they were born a female. I want to change that. Not with rhetoric and catchy slogans, but by providing examples of women, who were just like them, who did extraordinary things.

6 – Gun to you head, if you had to leave the house all day, every day, where would you go and what would you do?

Coffee shop with books and my iPad. And forget the gun to my head, I’d do this willingly.

7 – If you knew you were going to die one year from today, what would you do and how would you want to be remembered?

If money were no issue (I’m going to assume that that is part of this question) I would visit and spend time with as many of my loved ones as I could. If there were time while doing this I would finish all of the books that I have started, but really the priority would be seeing those I love. And I would want to be remembered as a loyal, caring friend, who loved deeply. And also wrote a book or two.

What’s your purpose?

I May Have Been Abducted By Aliens . . .

Thursday January 22, 2015Change, LifeView all 5 comments

I have a sweet tooth, a REALLY big sweet tooth. For just about any and all things, the sweeter the better. Candy, pastries, cake, ice cream, dessert wine, sign me up and bring me seconds! I’m really kind of amazed that I’m not diabetic. That being said, I know that eating refined sugar is super bad for you, especially in large quantities. I’ve read enough articles and know enough about nasty diseases, like cancer, to know that a diet revolving around sweets can only end in catastrophe. So I’ve tried to cut out refined sugar before. Trust me when I say, that you do not want to be around me when I’m on a no sugar diet. It’s not pretty. In fact the only thing uglier is when I try to cut coffee out – think Godzilla films, the fire-breathing ones.

Therefore, I have embraced the coffee addiction and contended myself with trying to cut back on sugar, instead of eliminating, so that I don’t wind up in county jail for strangling someone with a red vine. Instead, I have been focusing on eating anti-inflammatory foods. When I did a recap of last year, it occurred to me that I have a major inflammation problem: sinusitis, otitis, costochondritis, gastritis, tendonitis, everything ends in ‘itis.’ My body is pretty much systemically inflamed. So, falling back on my old stand-by, I did a bunch of research to figure out how to alleviate this issue. Go figure, the answer is to change your diet, and address/fix any of the chronic inflammation injuries. So I’m seeing a specialist for the chronic tendonitis in my ankle and I’ve started taking a liquid supplement geared toward anti-inflammation.

Now with this supplement, you’re supposed to take it first thing in the morning, and to say that it is sweet is an understatement. It is so syrupy sweet that it is too much for me. This stuff is intense. However, it works, so I’m still taking it.

I’m going to pause for a tangent here because this stuff is AMAZING. Like I noticed a difference after taking it for a week, amazing. Like the pain in my ribs has gone down 95%, amazing. Like I might turn into their unofficial spokeswoman, amazing. Seriously, if you have inflammation problems get this stuff. It’s called Nopal Juice. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

In fact I’ve been taking it for two weeks now and I noticed something yesterday. While filling up my gas tank I ran inside to get some water and as usual perused the candy rack while waiting in line to pay. I decided against getting anything, paid for my water and went back out to my car. Now this in itself is not overly odd. I often choose not to get something because candy is bad for you and composed of completely pointless calories. I WANT candy, but chose to not eat any. This, however, was not the case. Sitting in my car I realized that I chose to pass because I DID NOT want any. WHAT?!?!?! Me not in the mood for something sweet? Who am I, and what happened to Kat?

Then I began to look over everything else that I had eaten during the week. None of it was sweet either, with the exception of a small handful of caramel corn that made me feel ill. Other than that, everything I had eaten had been composed of fruits, vegetables, grains, and meats. And all of it made from scratch so no added sugar lurking about to make it taste better. So I really thought about it, all of the sweet things that I love to eat, and none of them sounded good. Weird.

My conclusion is that there is something about that juice – which I think I will henceforth affectionately refer to as Kool-Aid – or I’ve been abducted by aliens and replaced with a healthier version of myself. It’s a toss-up really. Either way I’m going to keep drinking the Kool-Aid.

Ipso Facto

Tuesday January 20, 2015Inspiration, Live and LearnView all 2 comments

Over the past year or so I have noticed that I have had more people tell me that they are proud of me, then the sum total of times that that phrase has been uttered to me throughout my life. When it first started I was somewhat taken aback. I didn’t feel as if I was really doing anything that was all that different from what I had been doing before. As the trend continued I started to suppose that maybe I was simply spending time with people who were more liberal with their praise. Upon closer inspection, this wasn’t true. Some of the people who were saying this were people I had known for years. So if the people weren’t different, than clearly I must have been doing something different.

It was then that I realized that this trend started right around the same time that I had embraced my dream. I’m a writer, and as such I have always written, but for the majority of my life it has been in a casual way. I would write our family’s Christmas letter, poems, short stories, papers for school, etc. I had never looked at writing as a profession. As something to pursue as a vocation. It has only been in the past two years that I have changed that thinking. That I have started to pursue writing as a career.

In that pursuit I have acknowledged, what I must have inherently known all along, that to be an author is not just my dream job, it is my calling. It is what I was meant to do. The more I have embraced this, the more prolific I have become. The more prolific the more open I have become in sharing my work. The more I have shared my work, the more confidence I have gained in my work. One leads to the next and with each step it feels less like a dream and more like reality. The more it feels like reality, the more pride I feel in myself.

I am proud of myself, so ipso facto other people are proud of me. It makes a certain amount of sense. Although, perhaps the better line of inquiry is why I was questioning people being proud of me . . .

Expand Faith

Saturday January 17, 2015PoetryLeave a comment

Symbols are an odd thing
When one believes
They can move mountains
Clear paths
Heal wounds
But when one disbelieves
A symbol is merely a statue
A pendant
A thing
I did not believe
I only have faith in those things that are tangible
That can be felt
Held
Loved
But now I believe
Mountains did not move
Paths did not clear
But my soul did heal
For that alone
I expand faith

Comfort for the Faithless

Thursday January 15, 2015Live and Learn, LossView all 2 comments

I flew to Colorado over the weekend for the funeral of my aunt. She died way too young, taken very quickly by cancer. Fuck cancer! Let me say that again. Fuck cancer! As I had had the chance to fly back to see her before she died, my family told me that it wasn’t necessary to come back for the funeral. After all, two plane tickets in the span of a month can add up. But I know myself, and knew that I needed to go. For me the funeral helps bring closure. It is part of my grieving process. Yes, I have a grieving process. Sad to say, I have lost enough people in my life, that grieving really isn’t anything new. From the ages of 8 – 20, I lost a family member every even year of my life. Let’s just say that as the day of my 23rd birthday arrived I let out a huge sigh of relief. No one else had died. The streak had been broken.

Now I just seem to lose people sporadically. I’m not really sure which is worse. At any rate, over the years I have come up with my own path of grief. My own beliefs of why these things happen, and why life can sometimes be so cruel. I had to come up with my own beliefs because I don’t believe in religion. I do not believe in god almighty, or that Jesus was our savior, or that if we live a righteous life we will go to heaven. I know that what I just described is Christianity and that there are many varieties and flavors of religion to choose from, but at the end of the day, I can’t find faith to believe in the teachings of any of them. I just can’t make that leap. So I have my own set of beliefs and mores that I live by and most days they suit me just fine and I am not left wanting.

But this funeral that I attended kind of shook me up. It was the most god-centric funeral I’ve ever been to. Before you ask, no, my aunt was not religious and neither is the person who set the whole thing up. So why the service consisted almost entirely of scripture, or explanations of said scripture I don’t know. It did though, and the priest offered up his condolences and then spent his time is reassuring us that this was god’s will, that Maggie was now in his presence awaiting the arrival of her loved ones. That we were to take comfort from the word and the promises of our lord.

This is all well and good, and from the looks of some of the people present, this did indeed provide them with some comfort. For that I am glad. However, my question becomes, where are the faithless supposed to go to find comfort? Where is our Gilead so that we may find a balm to soothe our aching souls? Is there any comfort for the faithless? That service was not meant for me, or anyone of my ilk. He may as well have been speaking in Latin, it would have meant the same. And I guess that isn’t an easy question to answer, as those without a proscribed faith all have different beliefs and therefore must find their own paths to peace of mind and soul. It’s really made me think and to some degree reevaluate the beneficial nature of an organized religion.

I still can’t make that leap of faith to believe myself though. I was however, able to find closure of my own amidst the very religious service. My aunt was a big Elvis fan, and one of the songs played was “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” which I just so happened to write about last week. It is my favorite song, and unbeknownst to me, it was hers as well. So that is something that I will always have. Go figure. My balm was found in Graceland.

Remember Me

Saturday January 10, 2015PoetryView all 5 comments

Sailing smoothly through the night,

Troubled thoughts disrupt the calm.

A restless heart throbs its displeasure,

As the beats echo through the mind.

Remember me.

Remember you where? Help me to remember.

Remember me as the waves wash over your feet,

With the hot thrill of adrenaline at every tide that you meet.

Remember me.

Remember you when? Help me to remember.

Remember me in the laughter and the cheers during games,

In those moments of pleasure; we once had the same.

Remember me.

Remember what? Why can’t I remember?

Remember me in the strength of our last hug goodbye,

In the “I love yous” as we fought back the tears from our eyes.

Remember me.

I will remember you in all that I do,

Because I will always remember the love that I have for you.

The Year of the Fool

Thursday January 08, 2015Happiness, Live and LearnLeave a comment

I will rarely give a definitive answer when I am asked about a favorite movie, band, song, color, etc. The reason being that I tend to go through phases. So I generally respond by saying something to the effect of, “My favorites right now are . . .” That being said, I think I really do have a favorite song. A song that no matter my mood, no matter what phase I’m in, it just speaks to me: “Only Fools Rush In.” Of course the deep croon of Elvis makes just about any song memorable, but for me it’s the lyrics, no matter who is singing it. For somebody like me, who plans out everything, there is something so incredibly romantic about getting swept up in the moment and doing something for the sole reason that it feels right. Somewhere deep down inside, you know that it’s the right choice, the right path. You don’t have to wait for time to tell, or to do research, or to weigh the pros and cons. Instead you rush in with a wide-eyed idealism that everything will turn out as it should. It was meant to be.

Or maybe it isn’t. But instead of dwelling on the ‘what if’s’ and the fear of failure you give it a shot. Whether it’s happiness, love, a new career, whatever, you give it a shot. Too many of us live day by day letting fear determine our path. You stay late at work to finish a project. Not because you want to, or because you necessarily enjoy the work, but because you’re afraid that if you don’t get it done you will be fired. You stay at the aforementioned job even though your heart yearns to do something else, because you’re afraid that you won’t be able to make a living following your dreams. You refrain from asking out the person that you really like because you’re afraid that you might get hurt. Fear keeps us from living how we want to live, and I think fear keeps many of us from being happy.

I actually think that some people are afraid to be happy. They dwell on all of the things that are going wrong, and when nothing is going wrong, they invent things that will keep them miserable. Or simply because the people around them are miserable they are afraid to be happy, and so are miserable too. I know that I have definitely fallen victim to that. Which is probably why that song resonates so much with me. It’s a reminder that sometimes you have to rush in. Sometimes you have to be a fool. You have to have faith that you will wind up where you need to be. You have to acknowledge that sometimes the reward is much greater for the fool, than it is for the person back on the sidelines who hesitated and stayed put. Maybe this is the year of the fool.

Resolutions: Type-A Style

Tuesday January 06, 2015Change, Live and LearnView all 3 comments

As I very much feel that I spent most of last year injured/sick or both, I do not feel that 2014 was a very productive year. Yes, I did accomplish some things and some goals were met. But as far as my type A, over-achieving, go-getter personality is concerned, I slacked off big time. So I’ve decided that 2015 is going to be amazing! Things will be achieved, bridges will be built and crossed and puggle butts will be walked on a regular basis.

At the very least it will be better than 2014, which shouldn’t be very hard, as that bar is set pretty low.

So I have attacked my new year’s resolutions in fantastic type-A organization. First off, I really liked an article that I read where a girl set herself 21 things that she wanted to do before she was 21. Brilliant idea! I have completely stolen it and I came up with 34 things that I would like to do before I turn 34. I figured doing 33 before 33 would just set myself up for failure since my birthday is in March. So instead, I’m giving myself a couple of extra months and going with 34. Ambitious, yes I know. However, they’re not all life-changing things. I’ve got “Throw a Dinner Party” on there. Hard? No. Something I’ve been talking about doing for quite a while? Yes. On the list it goes! See an orthopedist to fix my ankle. Hard? No. Something I’ve put off for years? Yes. Not only ‘on the list it goes,’ but I’ve now made that call and have an appointment next week. Boom!

Other things are harder things, or at least more time-consuming things. Here’s where the type-A comes in. For those things, I sat down and broke the task into smaller manageable bits and then set them to a timeline. For example, I want to read the entire Shakespearean Canon. Which when looked at as one big task is incredibly daunting. However, if I read 4 acts every week for a year I will be done. That is totally doable. Other goals have a gradual implementation, adding a little something more every month or so. Some don’t even enter my timeline until July or August, but they’re all on the timeline and that’s what matters. Well they’re almost all on the timeline, I’m not quite done yet . . . it’s a lot of goals. But once I am done they’re all going on a calendar with checklists and color-coding and daily tasks. It’s. Gonna. Be. Epic. And no, I’m not drinking more coffee than usual. Why do you ask?

Kinda like this, but awesome!