Vicarious Rising

Contentment Content

I haven't been feeling like blogging lately. It's funny how when things are going well, the need to gab dries up. I think some of it has to do with my inclination to keep my good news to myself, but generally speaking, I think most people tend to not gush on and on when life is good.

At any rate, spring time has begun on the top of my little hill here. I'm enjoying the changing of season and my amateurish antics at gardening and furniture assembly.

I still want to put up pics of my LA trip. We got to feed the hippo and rhino at the LA zoo because my husband's cousin has a friend who works there. It was the coolest thing and I got great photos of the animals.

In other news, my sister is getting married in October. I am happy for her. I think. I haven't met the guy. He can't be worse than the last guy she married. Right?

Hollywoodized

I'm back from my trip to L.A. It was fabulous. I'll try to get some of my photos posted this weekend if anyone is interested.

L.A. is a really interesting place. Its vibe is not really what I expected: anorexized, plastic and cruel. People were friendly and seemed upbeat. I liked it. Can't say I'd want to move there, but I wouldn't mind spending more time hanging out.

Speaking of hanging out, my son spent about 15 minutes lounging around in the lobby of our hotel about 10 feet from M.C. Hammer and had no clue who he was until the hotel staff told us. No parachute pants to tip us off. Some megawatt white Nikes though. My son is so bummed he didn't get to touch M.C. Hammer. I told him he can still tell his friends he hung out with him.

Mr. Hammer was waiting for the valet to get his car and for the rest of his posse. Yes, he did have a posse. They all seemed like pretty well behaved posse people, including the Hammer-man himself. They all drove off in a big black hummer with the license tag "LOOK 3Xs". No comment about that cause it would be rude to say anything about flagging careers. It would've done Mr. Hammer good to introduce himself to the 13 year old to get a fan in the new generation.

As if.

One funny thing that happened was when we drove up to the Hollywood Roosevelt in our chauffeured car (with a license plate that said DIVA, no less), a bunch of college guys were peering into the tinted windows trying to see who was in our car. I sat there giggling thinking how disappointed they were going to be. Considered throwing a jacket over my kid's head and rushing him inside. When we stepped out, one of the college kids said, "aw, it's just some chick." This made my day because I am very glad to still be considered a chick. He could have said, "aw, it's just some nobody" or "it's just some loser" or "it's just some slag/troll/cow/hag/bitch." I'll take chick with a big smile.

Oh, and because I failed to mention it, this wonderful adventure was the grand prize for a Burn Notice drawing. For those of you who missed the television show Burn Notice's season one last summmer, they just started rerunning the program on Thursday nights on the USA Network. It starts season 2 in June. I can't wait. My massive crush on Michael Westen has been soothed a bit by winning this prize, but I've been irked by having to wait so long for another fix of the show.

High Life

If anyone remembers a post from about two months ago, I won a trip to L.A. thanks to one of my favorite television shows. Welp, my son and I are off for our vacation tomorrow. The trip was supposed to include a meet-n-greet with one of the show's stars, but because of the writers strike and some other timing issues, that part of the grand prize will not be happening. Kind of a bummer, especially since I have a minor crush on the show's star. However, we will be staying at the Hollywood Roosevelt and dining at some rather excellent places courtesy the show and the USA Network. This chica is mighty excited.

Perhaps not so ironically, I didn't really want to share my good fortune with my family. I feel like they have this idea in their heads that I am "lucky". Or, perhaps better put, that I have an imbalance of too much good. Which is not to say they are deprived because they are far from it. But they have a way of making me feel terribly guilty when nice things happen to me. So, I tend not to tell them about them.

Actually, I tend to not tell them about much of anything. It seems safer to ask them about themselves and cluck at the appropriate times.

One of the big changes through recovery has been to allow myself to enjoy when good things happen to me. To not expect the hand of god to reach down and punish me for feeling joy and pleasure in the nice things around me. To indulge in the idea that maybe, just maybe, I do deserve a nice life for no other reason than that I am a nice person.

It really isn't funny how much time I spent destroying myself for every good thing that came my way. I really was my own worst enemy. In some ways, I got worse as I got better in my early recovery. I wonder if others have experienced that struggle. I'm sure many have. As I began to recognize reality and separate myself from what I had been told about myself, there was a real internal war going on that at times I wasn't sure I was going to survive.

It's too bad my family cannot share in my happiness. It would be nicer for me if I could share my life with them. But I have adapted, if not quite accepted.

Now, off to the land of make-believe. I'll try not to gawk like a total tourist. As if.

Let it Rain

My therapist and I are in the process of breaking up. It's a very strange thing to do with deliberation and discussion. I imagine this is the way we are supposed to grow up and leave home. But I think it seldom happens in this way. It is an unusual experience, and rather uncomfortable. I feel a lot of discordant emotions, pleasure and guilt, excitement and fear. But I think in the end sum, it feels right. It feels time.

Nearly.

Decorating my home has been a joy interspersed with headaches along the way. Most of the headaches seem to be shipping related, and unfortunately cannot be pegged on just one shipping company. This has me rather disgruntled, particularly since I am rather in love with online shopping. It give me the opportunity to patronize independent artisans and smaller boutique shops and discover new things the world over. But the merchandise needs to arrive and arrive in one piece. I never had much of a problem (except for the mail lady who smoked incessantly so everything smelled of cigarettes and she also would never bring packages to the door even when we were home: she always left the "sorry we missed you" slip in the mailbox right before I'd watch her drive off in her USPS truck.) until recently. I don't know what the deal is, but it isn't like everybody is spending tons of money shopping. You'd think the delivery folk wouldn't have much else to do but get their jobs done right.

One lovely item that just arrived is this Zen Rain Drop glass mobile I purchased from Leah Pellegrini's Glass Creations on Etsy. My office faces south and gets quite a lot of sunlight. I think this will look beautiful hanging in the windows over my desk.

Leah included a little business card-sized note on her inspiration of the mobile's design, and I thought I would share it because it reflects some of what I have been going through the past several months.:

In this image of lotus leaves in the early morning, we can see in the rippling of the water that one drop has just fallen. It is a precious moment, and one that is full of poignency. In surrendering to gravity and slipping off the leaf, the drop loses its previous identity and joins the vastness of the water below. We can imagine that it must have trembled before it fell, just on the edge between the known and the unknowable.

~Osho Zen Tarot

Leah says to "remember to let go and your life will thank you". I like the imagery of the lone, trembling drop of water setting itself free. But I don't like to think of it as wiping out its entire identity. Rather, that it is joining the part of itself it had been separated from, that it is being made whole. I kind of have to wonder if the vastness below is any more knowledgeable than the lone drop above. Or does it too change beyond the impact of superficial ripples when hit by the droplet? Maybe it doesn't matter. And I'm not so sure about surrendering to gravity. I'm not in any hurry to get wrinkles. But the rest sounds good.

There I go, ruining a perfectly good metaphor with literal interpretation. I'm having a hard time taking myself too seriously these days. I think that's progress.

Things I Can't Swallow

I generally like eating most things. But I ran into these at the grocery store and can't come up with a good explanation for them. They're broccoflower (which you've probably heard of) and orange cauliflower. I ask you, why? The damn things look like Play-Doh food. My phone photo don't do them Technicolor justice. The orange was really pastel carrot orange. Ick. Thought about buying them to make my son eat them, though. Because I am not very nice.

I suppose I could accept these mutations of vegetables as they are, victims of some sort of well-intentioned science experiment or perhaps a marketing scheme. I don't care to guess or investigate. It's not the brocco-orange-cauliflower's fault for being as it is. I should have compassion for its facsimile of appearance as an edible item. It too is sufferring. Maybe by seeing a pervasion of mutations everywhere, mauling the good vegetable kingdom of no fault of its own or the victims partaking in eating the vegetables, I can find peace of mind in my own corner of the world. I am not the only victim of unreal tinted vegetables. It's no one's fault things got out of hand. We should just accept the evils that happen, open our eyes to the pain and close our eyes to the fact that we are all still being poisoned. 'Cause there's no one to blame, no one taking responsibility. We're all just ingesting and being saints.

Yep.

I think I'll pass on the crazy colored engineered veggies.

Obviously this is hyperbole. I'll probably eat the weird brocco-shit and like it. It's supposed to be nutritionally better for you than regular cauliflower, the orange one with beta-carotene and crap. Clearly, I'm irked by something other than the molestation of leafy greens. But it was a fun analogy even if it isn't a perfect one.