Tonight on the inside

Tonight, I am seeing Danny Elfman live in the pit at the Hollywood Bowl. This is the epitome of Halloween. It is Danny Elfman for pete's sake. Former lead singer of Oingo Boingo and creator of the Nightmare Before Xmas soundtrack which is like a Halloween goth girl bible. 

So I am ready. Last night, he did ten Oingo Boingo songs. I'm hoping for eleven. My favorite "Oingo" song is "On the Outside". It's from their Only a Lad album and captures how us "outsiders" feel. I've written about that song in this blog before.

For me, Oingo Boingo is one of the backbones of 1980s music. It is new wave, it is a lil punk, and started out in 1979 as very experimental and theatrical. 

As a fifty something year old woman who is just finding her performing side, and true voice, I am going to use this night as inspiration to remember how music is, and will always be, my muse.

So let's dance! It's a dead man's party people!

Breathe again

I feel like I have to breathe. Just breathe. These last few years have been a whirlwind. Covid, a podcast, two books, so many events, appearances and writing performances and now, a new foray into post conviction at work.

It feels surreal. Dream like. Magical. I've been on a merry-go-round. Spinning round and round so fast it seems. I need a break so I'm taking a two month hiatus from events after a reading next week. 

Of course, I'll still do the podcast. It's all pre-scheduled. Plus, the more I do it, the easier it gets. And the less prep it takes. At this point, I'm more than 30 episodes in. Can you believe it? Plus, I gotta get back to my writing and working on my play. But that's for January. Till then, I'll be working, podcasting, and snuggling my shih tzu. And husband. In that order. 

All of this is just to say, remember to breathe. Trusting in the universe and yourself is key. So right now, that's all I'm gonna do friends. 

Breathe in. Breathe out.

That's Life

What is life? What's the point? What's the purpose? 

For me, I've recently realized, it's teaching. Teaching students, most of who seem so young to me that I would call them kids. But they're not kids, they are adults in community college.

I used to be one of them. Wait. I am one of them. We don't give up our roots by growing. The roots just get embedded deep into who we are. So my blue collar community college roots are me, both then and now. The UCR and USC law degrees were icing. In a way, transferring out of community college to university was my birthday cake to a new me you see.

The students so inspired me. They're hungry, and idealistic yet also made cynical by systems that hamper and hinder them, especially the incarceration impacted students. Those students were my favorite because they were fighting the odds, and were so resilient they shined bright. It made me cry. 

It made me want to fight for every single one of them to get to university and achieve their dreams. 

So that's life. That's my purpose. Now I just have to see this dream come true. Like almost all my other dreams. My first step is to help curate and moderate a reading by incarceration impacted students. It's gonna be something special. Promise.

Full circle

 Last week, I was the writer in residence at Pasadena City College. To write how amazing it was is something I'm not sure I can do. I was so present that it cannot be captured. I was super busy. Teaching a number of classes a day and doing a public workshop and reading along with a faculty and student lunch as well as writing one on one workshops with students.

It was a dream come true for me to be teaching the community college population that I used to be a part of. You see, these are the students I've written my books for. To give them hope and let them know they can succeed. 

It was the time of my life. One of the best parts was teaching a class of incarcerated impacted students. They were so open and honest and most of all, talented. I cried when some of them spoke. 

My last class really stuck with me. I taught about weaving in the personal and political into one's writing. I read a poem by Cherríe L. Moraga, and thought back to meeting her at Stanford when I had my first story published in a literary journal more than a decade back. She praised me and raised my esteem in a way I will never forget. Never ever.

I knew I'd come full circle in a way. I knew my job was to inspire other young writers and thinkers to do their best to tell their tales. And most of all, now I knew for sure that I could and would. 

Life goes on

Life is so wonderful yet strange. I'm 51 years old and yet, I feel so much younger in my head. If you would have asked me where I would be at this age, I might have said married with kids and a law career. Instead, I'm married with no kids and have two careers, a law career by day and a writing career on the weekends.

Now this might not everybody's cup of tea. But it's mine. Writing to me feels organic and cosmic. Performing feels true to me. I can lose myself in both and when I disappear and I am just in the moment and doing, that's where the magic lies.

This next year should be even more exciting. My goal is to start the staging of the play of my memoir. At the very least, I would like to do a table read. Then it's screenplay time. There are also more projects in the works. I have a fiction piece of flash that I've been working on, and I'll be helping to curate a few more events. There's my blog that I would eventually like to turn into a book of essays, as well as my podcast that I'd like to convert to audio so that I can stream it on different applications. 

What I have realized is that life goes on and we either roll with it or get lost in the mundaneness of life. So I'm gonna rock and roll with it. 

The heroine within

Growing up, I would always imagine myself into stories. First into my mom's Harlequin romance novels and Judy Blume's books then later, into Shakespeare's tragedies.

Books have always been my solace. So it makes sense that I became a writer. Perhaps me and my twin sister were born to be writers and creatives and tell our tales. Maybe it gestated in the womb.

Life has sometimes been hard to muddle through. I know I'm so privileged to have a great husband and job, an education, a house and the gift of writing, but I have had my share of dark times. The only way I've ever been able to deal is to escape into the written word. During my bouts of depression and anxiety, I wrote to calm my mind. 

When my dad died, I started writing my long memoir that was (finally) published earlier this year. When I had to reconcile not being able to have kids, writing saved me from a dark, deep well of sadness. Writing put light on the pain and healed it. When Covid hit, isolated at home for months and months, I wrote my chapbook. Writing has saved me time and time again. It is my everything and other than my husband and family, it is my priority.

This is just my way of remembering why I write. I write to understand myself and my life. It's a form of reconciliation. It's to find myself and the heroine within. I saved myself you see. And that's why I write.

It's about damn time

Last year, I was recovering from surgery on my fiftieth birthday. I was in horrific pain and basically sleeping all day. We had to cancel my Vegas trip. So this year will be the do over. It's my fifty first birthday in a day, and it's gonna be a doozie.

Vegas is my place. I love walking into a casino and breathing the filtered air. The clanging of the slot machines, weirdly I know, calms my mind. The girls dancing on the tables. The music in the background. 

Even the beforehand. Getting all dressed up in my room at the gorgeous hotel Circa. The rooms at Circa are epic, blue velvet retro Art Deco rockabilly fabulousness. Music playing loud. Horrorpops, then maybe some Buzzcocks or Cure and always Bowie. Doin my lashes. Lipstick, red of course. Thick eyeliner. New eyeglasses. Shiny, sparkly shirt with tight leggings. Boots. Then I'm ready and raring to go. A fancy drink in a roof bar before dinner makes it even more special.

It's sublime. Maybe I should enjoy going to fancy museums or walking the beach at 51, and I do enjoy those things, but there's something about sin city that just "gets" me. I even love waking up early to go shopping in the gift shop at the hotel. Later, out and about. Brunch in old town. Walking Fremont street. Laying by the amazing pool with the DJ playing 80s. Play my song DJ. 

So that's all I gotta say. And now it's time to go have some fun, and let go, and forget all the stress and trials and tribulations. 

To quote Lizzo, "it's about damn time".

Lifetime

Life is so strange. It goes by fast. Sometimes too fast. Sometimes too slow.

Friday night I was driving home from LA. I made the mistake of letting my navigation call the shots and took a route I didn't know. It was a little scary driving at night on fast moving freeways (with some scary overpasses that give me massive anxiety) that I was not very familiar with. I was on the 105, the 405 and I think a freeway called the 90 (not the 91 IE friends), all to get to the 605 freeway which I know well and which intersects with the 60, the I 10, and my usual freeway of choice, the 210.  

Well, of course, the minute I hit the 605, boom, there was a freeway closure. A police officer weaved back and fourth to slow traffic down in the lanes right ahead of me and I yelled out an expletive that begins with an F. Traffic was at a dead stop. 

By this time, it was 11 pm. I called my husband from the Bluetooth and told him, this is gonna be a while. Starting to get frustrated, I sighed. Huffed and puffed. But then, I took a deep breath and just surrendered. I put on a podcast and when that finished, I played some music (Lizzo, who I am obsessed with). Blasting the music helped raise my mood, and I sang along and the time passed. Within thirty minutes, we were moving again and I was home, like Cinderella, about midnight. Shoes intact. 

What that showed me was that life and time are relative. It's what you make of them. I could have ruined my beautiful literary night where I had a wonderful time by getting angry at the traffic that I couldn't control. That could have been the story. Instead, I just let go. And shined. And it was fine. So fine.

October Moon

Last night, I drove to Venice for an event at a literary theater/nonprofit called Beyond Baroque. It's a super cool venue. A few of us writers from the Macondo Workshop were reading stories about family and then we were doing a Q and A on craft. The event wasn't until 8 pm, but I left a little early to meet my friend for dinner. We had pizzas at a little Italian place down the street.

After dinner, we walked back to Beyond Baroque and I met up with everyone for a sound check. Then it was time to start. It went quite well. We had a nice turnout. The two hours flew by. The readings were incredible. Each reader had a different spin on tales of family. I was so impressed by the writers on the stage, all of whom I'd known and admired for years. I felt humbled to be included among them.

It is surreal really. That I get to do this. A community of writers is something I always dreamed to be part of and now that I am part of a writing community, communities really, I can hardly believe it. I don't feel worthy most days, but I'm trying not to block myself with negative self talk or imposter syndrome. Instead, I just tell myself that I am good enough. Because I may not be everyone's cuppa tea, but maybe, just maybe, I am at least some people's double espresso treat.

Today, my goal is to decompress, regroup and get ready for my birthday in less than a week. My goal is to visualize and meditate on what I want this next year to be. I think it's gonna be a big year. Not just because I'm turning 51. It's more a feeling in my soul that something huge is awaiting me, right beyond my view of the horizon. 

Amazingly enough, I'm very happy where I am in my life. Very grateful. Overjoyed really. Overwhelmed and over the moon.