The Girl I Was Too Lazy To Be Yesterday

First a few stats on the September issue of InStyle Magazine…..

638 pages

156 amazing pieces under $100

119 Pairs of shoes

94 Best new bags and boots!!!! (They had the exclamation points on the cover but come on boots Woo Hoo!!!)

It has been a slow summer.  I’m pretty sure I fell off the face of the Earth about May and I haven’t been able to pick myself up since August.  I would like to say that I have been on a mission of self discovery, but God if this is self discovery then I so need a refund.  In all honesty I haven’t been able to stand myself lately, and have felt something between being lost at sea and drowning all at the same time.  I have no excuses.  Actually I have lots of them but none of them are good enough to mention.

Last weekend I picked up the September issue of InStyle magazine and got to lay on the couch in utter silence and absorb all 638 pages.  While I plotted my assault on fall with the zeal of a military general, I came across an ad that said, “Be the girl you were too lazy to be yesterday.” 

At first I was offended and all those excuses that are not good enough to mention reared their heads in protest.  But….they all start with but.  But it’s the job.  But there’s not enough time.  But I have to clean the house and mow the lawn, and when do I get time for me.  By the time I had all those buts circling in my head I was so mad at the company that I vowed I would never buy a pair of shoes from the website.  How dare they tell me what I was supposed to be.  Let alone tell me that I had been lazy, the nerve.

But…..hadn’t I been lazy?  I started to wonder.  In the Spring I had passion.  I had a renewed sense of peace and a penchant for drive by gardening.  I had the peace of a glass of wine after work and just watching the world flow by.  I also had the determination to finish my first book, and the drive to start pounding away on the rewrites, but then it got hard.  The excuses started again.

 It’s not a good enough story.  Something isn’t right.  A lot of good it is doing me sitting in my dresser.  Wish I could fix it.  What if it isn’t even worth fixing? And the biggest most heart wrenching excuse there is, what if that is all I can do.  What if I had unwittingly wrote my own 867-5309?  Would I be destined to just have that lone unpublished manuscript sitting in my dresser?

So I got it out.  I read it.  Yes it had problems, and I had no idea how to fix them.  I spent the rest of the summer with it laid out on my desk and a legal pad full of notes on top of it.  I even started writing the second book, and stopped.  I stopped because I got lazy.  I stopped because I was afraid.  I gave up.

Here I was with a manuscript I didn’t know how to fix and an ad in InStyle magazine telling me to be the girl I was too lazy to be yesterday.  I’m still contemplating that ad, but I’m recovering. 

I’m finding that knowing with all your heart what you want in life requires more courage than one person should be able to possess.  That there is a fine line between giving up, and starting over, and sometimes the smallest steps make the biggest impact.

A friend of mine posted on Facebook today “the first step to beginning your journey is to find the path.”  I posted back that I was pretty sure mine began with yellow brick, and while at this particular time I feel more like the cowardly lion then Dorothy, I still am a firm believer in a killer pair of shoes.     

Love or Something Like It

My July copy of InStyle magazine is very worn, doesn’t help that it was pretty small this month which unfortunately happens in the summer between seasons.  However, like a Phoenix it will be reborn in September when the fall fashions splash across the pages promising to whisk us away from the oppressive heat to the land of cozy sweaters and knee high boots.

What caught me today was the ad for Cartier.  Visually, it was a very simple ad.  Just a rose gold bracelet with a few diamonds and the engraved brand name that probably is only overshadowed by the blue boxes of Tiffany & Co.  On the black background in red lettering it read “how far would you go for love.”  For some the answer is pretty simple, and even if you don’t want to think about it some people go to hell and back for it every day. 

Love makes you feel things that are only reserved for God’s.  It makes you do things that you should think better of.  It inspires men to sculpt, to write poetry, to look at the stars and wonder what is beyond the blackness.  It also has its own barbs , some of which are laced with such anguish that we as humans wonder what it is all for.

Today has me wondering.  It also has me looking at an empty left hand.  Yes, I have been married before, and what I’m wrestling with now is am I just not suited for the kind of thing that made so many mortals fill museums and people give Hallmark cards?  It’s like being slapped in the face repeatedly by what should be the simplest of endeavors, one man plus one woman equaling eternal bliss. 

I write about relationships.  I write about human emotion.  I write about love and heartache and demons, because let’s face it we deal with all of these things in one form or another.   Most Americans are exposed to 3,000 advertising images a day.  Worldwide, companies spend over 600 billion dollars a year to come up with and deliver those images.  They play on our emotions.  They play on our wants and our needs.  Sometimes they even play on our fears.  So for Cartier to ask me how far would I go for love? All I can do is contemplate the response.

Would I sit in Purgatory waiting?  Yes I would, over and over again. Because sometimes no matter how bad the hurt, it’s all worth it.  In the end it hasn’t changed that I am a romantic, hasn’t changed that I believe in knights in shining armor.  Even if the armor isn’t stamped by Cartier.   

My Life In Nail Polish

First a brief history:

The Egyptians used nail color to signify social order with Red being worn only by royalty and pastels by women in lesser social circles.  The Chou Dynasty chose gold and silver in 600 BC.  The Incas decorated their fingernails with pictures of eagles…..As for me.  Currently it is Essie Plumberry with a discoball overlay because I’m not allowed to wear Stepford Wife pink anymore.

My friend Julie and I have a bit of a sickness about nail polish.  For me I don’t know if it is the creative play on words or the tiny bottles filled with candy colored liquid that I like most.  At times just looking at the display makes my heart grow three sizes like the Grinch at Christmas.  It also makes me wonder what this obsession is with the myriad of colors that I wear on my fingernails.  Here is a bit of a surprising fact.  The primary ingredient in nail polish is nitrocellulose cotton.  This flammable and explosive ingredient is also used in making dynamite.

I had to think about that for a bit.  Basically I’m walking around with the equivalent of a bad Looney Tunes cartoon in the making on my fingers.  But I think they are pretty so I continue to buy bottles of nitrocellulose and plasticizer mixed the pigment.   Yes I know the truth will never catch on. 

What does catch on for me are the painstaking hours of mixing the perfect red or the most soothing of pink.  Even after that more hours of coming up with the perfect name, Like Susie Loves Cowboys or I’m Not Really a Waitress.  By the way the people at OPI are amazing.  It doesn’t stop there though.  They have to make girls like me want to buy that perfect red or most soothing pink. 

We sell ourselves every day in packages of our own construction.  Lately mine has been pretty shitty as I have tried to move from one life to another.  I’m ready to end this phase and move on to something more suited for me.

 I’ve never been one to plan for a future.  Yes I have always wanted to know what happens, but plan something?  Dear God I don’t know where I am going to be in 5 hours let alone 5 years, but for the first time ever I know what I want and I’m making a path to get there.  It is part of my perfect red

In Having New Eyes

     Fashion is full of good and bad ideas.  Fendi baguette bags good.  Neon leg warmers bad.  Coco Chanel gave the world the little black dress.  Ferragamo gave the world the stiletto heel, and I have given the world…..  I sit here for a moment and I think about it.  See I finished a book.  No easy feat I am told, but to me it was really more a matter of discipline than anything else.  It currently sits in the bottom of my nightstand waiting for me to sift through the ashes of thoughts and badly written sentences to be reborn like the phoenix.  I have no doubt that it will happen, because I have something much stronger then ash on my side.  I have constant whispers of you’ve got this from someone more remarkable then I could ever imagine.

      I also have beautiful cards in my mailbox that touch me deeper then the sender will ever know.  It makes me wonder if Coco Chanel sat around in her studio going over designs of something so seamlessly perfect that the world would make her an icon.  I wonder how often someone whispered to her you’ve got this when she was told how drab and depressing her little black dress would be.  I wonder if Ferragamo stood strong while around him people laughed when he told them women would worship his design and men would simply fantasize about those shoes at the end of fishnet covered legs.

     I haven’t had much to say lately and I have had even less discipline, but I am being told over and over again that I got this.  The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Not With a Bang but a Whimper

In 1925 T.S. Elliott wrote The Hollow Men.  I remember reading it in Ms. Pfeiffer’s English class my senior year of high school and thinking to myself within its dark somewhat twisted words, that made me think of scarecrows going to war, it was probably the most powerful thing I ever read.  Its themes are overlapping and fragmentary, much like the rest of Elliott’s work, but it was in its dark beauty that I found meaning beyond post-war Europe.

Elliott writes “We are the hollow men.  We are the stuffed men.  Leaning together headpiece filled with straw.  Alas!”  I think of those little scarecrow men leaning together supporting each other and knowing that they are not alone.  Was it what Elliott had in mind when he wrote it?  Probably not, but it makes me realize that we as humans are always looking to be whole.

Last night I wrote “The End” on my manuscript.  I completed a goal I had had in my head since my early twenties, and at one point decided I would abandon if I hadn’t done it by thirty.  Good thing for me I decided not to keep my word.  What I realized in those last moments as the music roared to life and the closing credits rolled in my head, was it ended like Elliott wrote “Not with a bang but a whimper”.

It is the quiet things that we do in life that sometimes have the greatest impact.  It is the things we don’t seek praise for, but find fulfillment in that sculpt us.  In the moment that I wrote the last line, I knew that it had ended.  I knew that I had crossed a line somewhere between the closest thing that I knew of child birth and graduation. 

When Barbara Walters or Ann Curry ask what happened on that momentous day when I finished my first novel, I hope to tell them I mowed the lawn.  I hope to say that I sat in stunned silence on the phone with one of my closest friends as she screamed “You just fucking wrote a book.”  All I could do was answer her yes I did and stare at the wall because what I knew all the time was possible just never appeared to be probable.

Next month I will take my first steps on the unfamiliar road to publishing.  Like Dorothy I will start at the beginning of the yellow brick road and follow it all the way to the Emerald City.  And like Dorothy, I am definitely going to need a pair of killer shoes.

Mixed Materials...Create a blend of textures

 This week I will put the book to rest.  While I am excited beyond belief, I am also very apprehensive for the future.  It is one thing to know how a manuscript becomes a book.  It is a complete difference to know how a writer becomes and author.

 I believe that anyone can write a book.  It takes discipline, a bit of madness, the ability to listen to people that don’t exist, and a few bottles of wine.  Of all of those things discipline is the hardest.

See over the past few months I have been procrastinating, as the characters in my head have been pacing, sometimes beating against my brain for release.  I have buried them in the laundry, balancing the checkbook and dishes because I don’t want to let them go into the world.  I have asked myself all the questions that parents ask.  Are they ready?  Have I done enough?  Did I teach them what they needed?  Most importantly I turn the questions to myself.  Am I ready?

I can love the book with everything that I have.  I can hide the pieces of myself that I desperately want to expose to the world inside it, mixing the material of reality with the texture of fiction.  I can say the things I wish I was able to say aloud.  I can be stronger than I ever imagined I could, but eventually I have to take all those parts and hope that someone will see in them what I see.

We mix the materials of our world every day, from the clothes that we wear to the company that we keep.  Sometimes we pair silk with denim.  Sometimes varying heights of heels with varying lengths of skirts.   Others we mix and match our lives blending a palate of happiness, disappointment, fear, and triumph.  If you are a woman you can have all of those things in the same day, and you still get up and do it all again.

It is the mixture that defines who we are.  That can change us.  At times it is the mixture that makes us get up in the morning as we stand in front of the mirror moving portions of our personality forward and backward like the picking of an outfit.

Ultimately underneath the layers that build up across our psyche over the years we seek acceptance.  We seek to understand the word unconditional.  We seek the ability to stand raw and beautiful, and know with every fiber in our bodies that we believe in the things we say the things we write.

I have learned more about myself then I ever thought I was capable of knowing.  I have been taught more than I ever thought I was capable of being taught.  I have been blessed more than I could ever imagine, and I have been grateful more than I have ever known.

Color Your Life…Lust for vibrancy doesn’t stop here

First ‘89ers Day a brief history:

In 1889 President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed the two-million-acre region of Unassigned Lands open for settlement.  That April, an estimated 50,000 men and women lined up across what is now Oklahoma to make a mad dash for their own little piece of the good life.  By the end of the day on April 22, 1889, both Oklahoma City and Guthrie had established cities.  As Harper’s Weekly put it:

“At twelve o'clock on Monday, April 22, the resident population of Guthrie was nothing; before sundown it was at least ten thousand. In that time streets had been laid out, town lots staked off, and steps taken toward the formation of a municipal government."

This year marked the 82^nd Annual ‘89ers Day celebration in Guthrie, OK.  For some it is a sentimental time to come back to their hometown, cookout with friends and family, participate in the grand spectacular of the parade, carnival, and chuck wagon feed.  Yes, I really did say chuck wagon feed.  For me it was a chance to spend the evening with three of the most amazing women that I know.  Though our life experience has been varied, it is our roots that brought us home well that and perhaps the chance to date carnies.  Wait, I am definitely going with roots.   

My day yesterday reminded me of the ways that we color our lives.  The hues we adapt with chameleon like grace as we move through the world in search of peace, happiness, and Gucci.  The friends that come into our lives and what leads us home.  The things that define us in ways we may not be aware, that are sometimes poetic, sometimes ironic, sometimes just damn embarrassing, but we continue to grow to change. 

In the past three years I have been a veritable child with a pack of crayons, no not the little 8 pack, the big 64, running rampant in my own life.  I have been on a quest for vibrancy, a desperate explorer of experience.  Searching for those things that make my heart sing and that spark of life where the outside world falls away to a wonderland of the five senses.  My friends, bless their souls have decided, perhaps unknowingly, to take this journey with me.

 I will never say that trying to live a life outside the lines is easy.  It is full of people that want to roll their eyes at you or make snarky comments behind your back, sometimes even to your face, but it is in those moments of color I realize that vibrancy doesn’t stop here.  Last night my friends and I witness a couple that redefined color despite their penchant for white jeans and black leather.  It wasn’t the way they groped one another on the dance floor as their white clad legs seemed to meld together ironically to Prince’s Purple rain, it was the way they were totally and completely together.

 See fashion will come and go currently according to In Style magazine the “it” color of the month is marigold, last month it was honeysuckle, and the next month it will become something different.  We change like the color wheel bringing in hues based on our experiences from the black of a broken heart to the pale pink of kindness.  Those shades grow and change as well gaining and losing vibrancy as we make our way across our own big box of 64.

What I learned about life last night I learned from those two people on a dance floor.  To accept someone you have to be willing to be seen with them when they wear feathers and a raccoon tail on their hat.  To truly love someone you have to be willing to take that hat off their head and wear it yourself.   To be an acquaintance with someone you have to share a common bond even if they aren’t coloring their world as you are yours.  To be friends with someone you have to be willing to pick up your own crayon and help them fill in the lines.

I have more friends filling in my lines more than I ever could imagine and I was blessed enough last night to share an experience with them.  It is through our experiences that we have been able to enrich each other’s lives in way that we are probably not aware of.  Even if sometimes it just means letting a friend know that they could totally rock an outfit better then the girl walking past the bar or just getting a simple message that says I believe in you.  Without their lust for vibrancy I wouldn’t be where I am today and able to do what I can do.