Just Stuff

I was lying on our new couch when I smelled a whiff. Ammonia. Damn shih-tzus, I thought to myself. A while later, I awoke with a migraine. I'm very sensitive to smells and I get an instant headache if I smell gas or pee.  I spent hours removing all the covers (thank goodness they were removable) and washing them on the delicate cycle (twice) and making sure the pad was clean and hang drying everything on our staircase.

The next day, my husband fashioned a gate out of a screen that keeps the darn dogs from accessing the upstairs (he's MacGyver like that) when we're at work and now we have our fresh smelling couch back.

What's the point? I know that's what you're thinking.  Why is the minutiae of my life important? It's important because when I started to get upset about the couch, before I knew it was salvageable, all I kept thinking to myself is, those damn dogs.  I got angrier and angrier the more I focused on it.  I couldn't even look at the dogs I was so upset.

But then, I had to ask myself, is this anger and anxiety the right reaction?  Is making yourself sick over a couch sane? I decided it wasn't and countered the negativity by thinking, but I love my dogs.  Then I said it aloud like a mantra. "I love my fucking mutts even though they almost ruined my brand new couch."  Then I dropped one more F bomb for good measure and the anxiousness and anger went away in a poof, like magic (but not).

Truth is, my dogs give me so much joy.  So much joy.  They take me outside of myself.  Every morning I feed them and I walk them (more like they walk me) and they kiss and snuggle me. When I get home from work, as soon as I open the door with my key I can hear them at the door jumping around, "Mom's home!".  Door opens and Chewbaca jumps into my arms and I hear his tiny heart beating fast as I hug him. And Frodo waits his turn, because he knows that Chewie always goes first, and then I pick Frodo up and he looks at me with his Mogawi looking face and black soulful eyes and he licks my nose.  At night, Frodo sleeps by my side and if I wake up in the middle of the night and can't sleep, I stroke his soft fur.

A couch can never do that. It's just stuff. And we fill our lives with it as if stuff is important. My Mercedes never gave me a hug or asked me how my day was. Ultimately, my Prius gives me much more joy than the Mercedes ever did, probably because of the Sirius radio. And, all the stuff I buy, everyone buys, it really means nothing.  Most of it will be recycled or lying in a dump somewhere long after we're gone.  Now that's not to say a nice dress or some new makeup doesn't lift my spirits, it does, but my point is that when the stuff means more than your family, your pets, your time, and your own self, then that's a problem.  When getting more stuff and paying for more stuff is your existence, then you are your stuff.  And I personally would never want to be a Living Spaces couch.  I would much rather be a shih-tzu.

When the loss of a stupid couch can ever outweigh, for even one second, for even an instant, the love of my furry best friends, then that is just ridiculous.

And it did, but only for an instant.  None of the stuff matters I know.  But this is just a reminder in case I ever forget.

Bliss

I haven't written for quite a while and I feel off kilter, unbalanced and anxious.  Life is busy.  Summer is ending and I am awaiting a response on a screenwriting month long fellowship I applied for. Things feel surreal, as if change is on the horizon.

Yet, isn't every day a new day? An opportunity to make a change? This is the longest I've ever been at a job.  Almost seven years.  I love being a deputy public defender. It's challenging, rewarding and I get plenty of vacation days.

Being me is hard.  I work really hard, play hard, then need to recharge my batteries.

I guess what I am trying to say is that I am in a pickle.  When do my dreams become a priority?  There is only now I think. This typing on a screen watching the words appear one at a time.  It is the only time I feel real, and at home.  In short, it is bliss.

Shouldn't we all go for our bliss? I know that is true in theory, but reality is much harder.  Pragmatism kills an artist's soul and I have become much of a pragmatist in my forties.

Perhaps too much of a pragmatist me thinks.

Voices

Early this morning, I was scrolling through Facebook, when I landed on a video interview of Sandra Cisneros. She was talking about how she found her voice. She talked about how the MFA program at Iowa was so toxic for her that she got angry, angry enough to write House on Mango Street.  She said she wanted to show her own female perspective of the barrio. A place she felt trapped and scared.

My childhood, like Cisneros', was also sometimes rough. We didn't have a lot of money.  Dad was a truck driver and Mom was a waitress and they both worked their tails off to pay the mortgage on the house (until they lost it after Dad bought a bar adjacent to a trailer park, but that's another story). They even took out a second to put in a pool (as a child I had no idea what a "second" meant, only that it caused my mom much consternation). That pool was my childhood for me in a lot of ways. I learned to love the water so much that I swam competitively in high school (until smoking did me in). My sisters and I spent hours in that pool. We used to jump off the roof to our neighbor's dismay who called our mom after seeing us do the high dive old school style. "But Mom, we put pillows all around the pool," we screamed back at her.

Most of the roughness of my childhood was caused by the fights. If there is a music genre to my childhood it is punk rock, all chaos and anarchy. Some days would be fine. Dad would come home and cook us pork chops and other days, he wouldn't come home and Mom would scream and kick us out of the house and go look for him at the local bars. Head hanging down, I would walk with my sisters to the park wondering when we could go home. I have vivid memories of sitting on a swing at the park or hiding in the plastic cheese sculpture dreaming of another life.

Yet, don't we all replicate the past in some way or another? While I would love my adult life to be free of chaos and arguments, it isn't. At times, I create chaos out of thin air, chasing drama and chaos like it's my shadow. I follow it around like my best friend.

I know that I yell and scream because it feels familiar. But, I have learned some boundaries in my forty plus (please don't make me get more specific, I have stopped counting) years on this planet and that sometimes the trick is to just stop. Just stop. Close your mouth and stop yelling. That is my mantra.

Writing is the way I keep these demons at bay. To sit down and recreate the scenes of my childhood and the characters of my father and mother is like a massage. Sometimes it hurts and sometimes it feels damn good, but it is always necessary for my well-being.

I know more than anything in this world that I must make my voice be heard.  That will be the legacy I leave the world.  My work is who I am and I am my voice.

And I am also just a crazy girl from the Inland Empire sitting at an IPAD at six am typing her heart out.

Pursuit of Happiness

I'm sitting on a beach chair (we are still furnishing our house) watching Food Network thinking about happiness.  When I was in high school having enough money in the bank to go see my favorite new wave/punk bands was happiness.  In my late teens and early twenties, happiness was survival.  As long as I had money to pay the rent and go out dancing when I wasn't waitressing, I was content.  In my mid twenties, happiness was getting good grades in undergrad at UCR and later at USC Law.  By then, my priorities had changed.

Post law school in my thirties, happiness was work.  I know now that it shouldn't be the road to happiness, but back then, I bought into the fallacy that if you worked hard enough, or long enough, pouring out your sweat, blood and tears along with weekends and holidays, that it would pay off.  After my dad died, it made me realize that the sacrifice was not worth it.  I realized that time is the most valuable commodity.  It is worth more than any paycheck. It is irreplaceable.

What is happiness to me now? Happiness is watching my husband sleep, legs splayed out, on a Saturday morning.  And having time to cook dinner and walk the dogs three times a day.  And traveling as much as we can.

Yet, still, I struggle with finding peace and contentment.  A naturally ambitious person, I am always looking for the next challenge or project.  Maybe that is a good thing or maybe it creates that bubble of anxiety I always have welling up in my throat.

My next goal, let's call this my forties' goal, is to be a writer for television.  When you put your mind to something, the universe really does conspire to help you (See The Alchemist). That's not to say everything is achievable.  You have to have talent and have done the work (which is another way of saying, it has to be meant to be).  I feel as if all my life has led me to a place where I can imagine this into being.  Will it happen? I don't know, but I am sure gonna try.

Journal at 5 am

A good friend's mom passed away Wednesday night and yesterday, I visited her. I knocked on her door in Glendora and she opened it looking beautiful, in her Andie McDowell way, but I could see the sadness and grief in the slump of her shoulders and the shine of her watery eyes.

I didn't know what to say. I just hugged her tight. I know that showing up for someone in these situations is always the most important.  

The thing is that I didn't expect to be so emotional myself.  I was there for her, but really I was also there as a kind of payback for those who had been there for me when my father died.  I was there to remind myself that life is short.  I was there to remember that work should always be of secondary importance to family and friends.

This death was not about me or my grief, but I have dealt with so much heartache this last year that it seemed almost more normal to help her wade through it.  The day to day is still hard for me I must admit.  I find petty things trying. Perhaps, the reality is that I'm best in crisis mode and ultimately, it feels more comforting to comfort someone else through the deep abyss of grief and loss.

And, in a situation like this with a true friend, it is real and poignant.  We can let the barriers down for a day and take off the mask(s) we all wear and just be true.  I told my friend how much I valued her and that she was amazing.  I wonder why I never say these things (without sarcasm) in the normal day to day?  

Maybe in the end, it is just about being there for someone in the worst of times.  The good times are easier for most I suppose.  But, I'll take this any day even though it's harder because it makes me confront my own mortality and my own failings. I know I can be a better person. 

That's all I have to say this morning.  

The Lost Years

Life is not fair. That is what I keep thinking to myself as I lay in bed staring at the ceiling. I have not written a blog for a while. We are renovating our house to move back in after our tenants destroyed it and I have been busy painting walls.

But, it just struck me how hard I have had to work for everything I have achieved. Even this writing, it does not come easy and I have had to work and work at it. I let my writing go for many years while I was in undergraduate at UCR and law school at USC, trying to get done by thirty. I finished by the skin of my teeth after spending my early twenties just waitressing to survive and muddling my way through junior college.

After graduating from law school, my life was supposed to start, but I took a large law firm job in Houston and my life floundered for three years. What I had worked so hard for meant nothing.  Most days, I cried in the shower before work. I didn't find myself again for many years. But even in Houston, I wrote looking out my high rise window. Faltering words at first. Then later, narrative poems poured out of me like water that had a fiery aftertaste.

I call those years the lost years. They were my most fertile lost years. I never thought of having a baby. I was too busy. I mollified myself with my paycheck.  Bought a lot of stuff I didn't need.

There were many good times. In 2006, I took the California Bar and moved to San Francisco where Adrian was in dental school. We had a great apartment and a great life, when he wasn't at school and I wasn't working. I flew back to Houston often in my new job at another big firm. I hated staying in hotels so my insomnia got worse. I jumped to a smaller firm and the hours were even worse. All I did was revolve my life around deadlines and work.

Then my dad died and everything changed. I realized that art was happiness. Family and love was the panacea to life. And, I made a change.

Now, here and now, my life is very different. I take as many days off as I can. I try and live life for my art. The baby making goal ended in heartache, but I refuse to give up on my dream of a child, if not a baby.  It will happen somehow, someway.

I have worked so hard for everything in my life that I know persistence matters.  Prayer matters.  And in the end, I know that I matter.  These words matter.

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High Hopes

I have learned a lot these past couple weeks. I have learned to let things go and forgive. Resentment and anger is toxic and only impedes. I do not want to get too specific, but I have realized one thing for sure, I care what people think too much. In the end, we need to love ourselves more than other's opinions of us. And I have realized that I am fabulous dammit. I may be kooky and a little clumsy (ok maybe more than a little), but I am definitely talented, super empathetic and a very good friend.

I have also learned that if you practice love, forgiveness and kindness, it comes back to you. If, on the other hand, you are negative about others, that also comes back on you. That old childhood taunt, I am rubber you are glue, whatever you say bounces off and comes back on you, is too true.

My point is that life is too short to be mad or resentful. We are all just ants in a farm running through our day, but I want to be that ant that moves a rubber tree plant. Cause I've got high hopes.  High in the sky, apple pie hopes.

What are my hopes for this next year? I would like to finish writing and editing my memoir. And apply for a screen writing fellowship (ugh I need to write a spec script...). Get an agent. And get in shape. And start the process to adopt a child. Those are the things I am putting out there in the universe. My aspirations.

Like I said, high hopes.