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.

Between Prairie and Pencil....Finding something that hits midcalf.

Not too long ago I created a blog.  Obviously it was a secret because I haven’t written on it or amassed a wide following.  Like many projects of mine it sounded good in theory but impossible to come up with, so here it goes.

 As many of you know I have a fixation with fashion.  Again this is probably something else that has been in secret because I far from dress like it, but I adore clothes and especially shoes.  Particularly the kind I can’t afford, but where there is a will there is away.  Besides, my lack of funds for a Tiffany blue silk bag or the latest Antik Batik leather and suede purse is just a brief passing, because I’m a writer.

Now my writer friends out there will laugh because at the moment I don’t know any writer that is swimming in Prada, but if it happened to a single mom on unemployment then why can’t it happen to me?  And honestly why isn’t it happening now? 

This is the question that eats at me.  I have begun to call it the NOW factor.  In a world of instant gratification it is hard to deal with the fact that NOW isn’t how a writing career happens.  One can’t sit down at the computer pound out a 100,000 word manuscript, dial up Harper Collins, and yell stop the presses I have written a masterpiece and it is only noon! 

I am realizing that making NOW happen takes many hours of labor and discipline.  Discipline is the kicker.  To write 100,000 words you have to do it every day even when you hate it and you think it is crap and yes even when you read it to a friend and they say they hate it and think it is crap.  That is when NOW seems like never. 

It was on one of those never days that I was flipping through the May issue of In Style magazine.  I love In Style for many reasons, mostly because it is not full of annoying stories it is pages and pages of clothes.  There I came across the new spring length, the midcalf skirt.

As I looked at the picture and read the comments about how it can work for anyone, it made me think about how we all struggle for middle ground.  I myself am constantly trying to find that way to do it all be it all see it all and after all that try to work full time and start a writing career.  I am working toward that skirt in all aspects of my life, not to short not too long but just right and just me.  Here are some things I have learned about hitting midcalf.

·         Midcalf means it works for you.  Sometimes this can be difficult because we are always trying to work for everyone else everyday and think very little about the things that bring us the greatest happiness.

·         Midcalf means a little goes along way.  I can’t write 100,000 words in a day, but I can write 1,000.  In 100 days I will have 100,000 words. 

·         Midcalf means joy.  Finding joy at least once a day every day.  No matter if it is your favorite song on the radio or flying away to Paris fashion week. 

·         Midcalf means you’re covered.  Cherish your support systems, those people, places, and things in your life that you can always count on to help you brush yourself off when your stiletto is stuck in a crack.

·         Midcalf means living.  Living now, in the space you are in every day.

·         Midcalf means dreaming.  Even if you are living now, never stop dreaming about where you want your future living now to be.

·         And MOST important Midcalf means loving everything even when you don’t.  It is amazing the power of positive thinking to transform and change your life, your hopes, your dreams, and the world.

Some days I am swallowed up in that prairie skirt, floundering in what feels like yards of crinkled fabric made up of bills, work, dishes, sentences that lack structure, people that consume my mind and my time.  Other days I have that pencil skirt strut juggling lunch with friends and commitments like a pro, giving everyone the best of me and still having time to watch Zoolander while enjoying a bottle of wine.  No matter what kind of day it is I am always looking for those midcalf moments always looking for that perfect fall between prairie and pencil.