Lots of love...

This weekend was a weekend full of friendships and love.

Friday night began with a happy hour date with a long time friend of mine and a relatively new friend I've been drawn too due to the fact that her soul shines.

We hit up Manhattan Steak and Seafood Happy Hour.  The place is pricey but the happy hour was rad.  You sit in the bar area and eventually a jazz trio shows up.  Perfection.

There was a group of elderly folks closer to the band and throughout the evening they would dance.  Sometimes couples whisking each other around, sometimes a couple of couples trading off and at one point the whole lot of them got up and did some sort of line dancing looking thing.  They were a joy to watch.  My favorite was the couple that danced the most.  They looked into each others eyes with such love and the floated around the dance floor as if they were the only ones in the world. 

This led me into telling the girls about how my grandparents met at a dance in Laguna Beach.  My grandma had come with another man, but when my Papa laid eyes on her he was smitten.  The rest is history.

At one point the musician announced there was a wedding and the couple was coming into do their 1st dance.  We looked around wondering if we had crashed a wedding but it was obvious we had not.  The couple breezed in and danced to Unforgettable.  It was so beautiful and we were so thrilled to share such a special moment with strangers.  It was pretty dark but one of the gals snapped a photo.

The food and wine was delicious!  It was the house wine on happy hour and sometimes I worry they can be a little bitter, but this was a glorious red.  We shared calamari, french onion dumplings (which completely fascinated us - it was like french onion soup in a bite!), sweet potato fries and sliders.  Yummy!  The waitress at one point commented on me being very well hydrated.  (I was downing water in between wine) and she said "That's why your skin is so beautiful!" 

The jazz trio was awesome and I found myself lulled into the music more often than not.  It turned out to be a lovely evening of food, music and friends.

Saturday evening me and some of my childhood girlfriends got together for Thai.  We caught up on each others lives and shared laughs and concerns for some of the troubled kids.  We hit up my favorite Thai place in Orange - Lanta Thai Fusion - and I had the dinner special which includes wine!  Again, I was a little worried it not being good but it was delish!  Our dinner chat spilled out into another hour chatting in the parking lot.  These are my best friends and I love them dearly.

Sunday brought the emotional final clean out of my grandparents house.  My mom has hired a woman to do the Estate Sale.  How it works is we get out everything we want then turn the key over to her and don't come back until after the sale.  Mom still has a lot of stuff she wants to go through so a handful of friends came over and we worked most of the day loading up cars, cleaning out the house, making many trips back and forth, lifting, packing, crying, laughing, discovering all sorts of things.  I injured my hand due to an overly heavy stone turtle and all of us had our backs barking by the end of the day.  Mom cried often.  We found an old stash of my Papa's liquor, which come to find out may actually be his fathers.  The boys are actually going to drink it. 

It was so much fun to watch them find treasure and get completely enthralled with some of the older stuff.  It was a lot like a time warp.  I shared many stories of my Papa with the boys and told them how he used to love working with his hands and building things.  Everything.  I got misty a few times and felt the presence of my Papa throughout the day.

I got a shot of me and the boys with the booze in a sort of goodbye cheer to Papa. 

One of my friends said this should be it's own reality show.  Lemme tell ya - with that motley crew it really could be.

We couldn't have got everything done without the help of these guys as well as my sister in law and my mom's dear friend Deb.  Mom and I shared a moment as we cut some roses and left the house. 

The week before had been rough, lots of crap happening to alot of friends.  Learned of some more crap that morning and my heart just breaks for so many around me going through a rash of shit.  Between that and the day at the house I was dirty, tired, in severe pain,  over emotional and reached a new point of exhaustion I hadn't been at in awhile.  I needed a positive end to bookend my weekend. 

Another new friend in my life and I headed to Shiki after I warned him I wasn't all that presentable and shared laughs and stories over too much sake and sushi. 

Crawling into bed that night I smiled.  I'm so grateful for the people in my life.  You never know what kind of an impact people make.  It's truly a beautiful thing.

Funny Come Back...

I just had to share.

I work with some pretty interesting folks.

We have a patio out in back of our building that a few of us lunch at quite often.  So I can understand when someone got annoyed and posted this sign:

Now, I am lucky enough that this hasn't been an issue for me but I can see how it would be and could ruin a perfectly yummy lunch.

We do have an employee here who often brings his adorable pooch to work.  I've been out on the patio when he has had to "do his business" and he's always taken very far away from said patio to do so.  Plus his frequent walks, etc. I never even thought of this as a problem.

Well, someone thought it was.

What I appreciate here, is instead of getting upset/angry, the response was quite hilarious:

Well played kids.  Well played.

Stuck...

I am 38 years old and I have absolutely no idea what to do with my life from here on out.  Call it a midlife crisis.  Call it nearing the big four zero.  Call it what you will but it’s starting to get to me.

Let’s backtrack:

High School and prior for me were a drug filled, screw the government, I don’t need anyone telling me what to do with my life, killing it in sports until I tore my meniscus, killing it onstage when I thought I found my calling, killing it on the yearbook staff when I thought I wanted to be a writer and a photographer, skating by with excellent grades because I took things like Livestock (raised a goat) for a science credit and brought my ceramics teacher McDonalds so she would let us make our bongs and pipes, and pretty much stuck my middle finger up and any sort of authority.  Boom.  Graduated with a 3.8 and snatched my diploma wearing my John Lennon purple sunglasses, Birkenstocks and I believe I was stoned.

Pretty much my life

Yup.  My life.

Enter a community college.  Yes community because I didn’t want to go to a 4 year college or a university and I didn’t need to take my SAT’s and I shot my chances at that Tennis scholarship when my knee ripped apart and I didn’t give two shits about school to actually apply myself.  So OCC it was.  I filled my transcripts up with WD’s (Withdraw from class) because I got in a heated verbal argument with my Speech Teacher and I thought one of my history teachers was racist and the World Religion guy put me to sleep and I and loved and aced Mythology and Human Sexuality classes.  Then I took one Scenic Design class, met folks from the OCC Rep and my life changed.  I ended up throwing my life into theatre.  The OCC Rep was a place to learn every single thing you need to know about theatre and we did.  I met some incredible people, professors and made some life long friends.  Out of the Rep spawned three very well known theatre companies that made a stamp on the OC Theatre Scene and one of them still stands.  Academics again fell by the wayside.  I had found what I want.

Hoping adding funny pictures will break up the long ramble

After staying way too long at OCC I was gently booted as one of our professors did to those of us who out grew the Rep, just before that Rude Guerilla and Hunger Artists were born.  I did a few shows at RG but landed at Hunger Artists and that was my life for years.  I ended up running the joint for a while and the company saw one of it’s most profitable years then.  When the time came for me to step away I became active again at Rude Guerilla, joining the board, throwing my life again into a theatre company. 

I met my husband in there somewhere.  Thought I had found the man of my dreams.  We lasted almost 8 years, married for 5.  He turned out to be a lost little boy who never did learn how to get his shit together.  I was in denial for so long not understanding how one person could lie so much.  Oh and then there was the cocaine and oh of course the draining my nest egg and leaving me in drowning pool of debt I’m still trying to recover from.  May of 2004 that came to a bitter end.

In November of 2008 the company I worked at for 10 years went under, leaving us all with no severance, no retirement, no nothing.  In March of 2009 my beloved Rude Guerilla closed its doors.  Not long after that Hunger Artists shut its doors. 

When I moved home I tried to take that opportunity to try the successful acting thing once more.  (I had tried somewhere in the running theatre companies years).  I’d get new headshots, find an agent, now unemployed I had the time.  But I hated it.  I hate the scene.  The people are so soulless and the whole industry is so full of bullshit and corruption that I just couldn’t stomach it.  I have friends still fighting the good fight, and some are getting work which excites me to no end but I learned very quickly it wasn’t for me.

One of my headshots.

Those early years I had fallen in and out of depression, drinking, partying sometimes all night long.  I was sick all the time.  Negative.  Angry at the world.  Then in 2010 I had a bit of an epiphany.  I needed to get my shit together, change my way of thinking, get my life on track.  And I did.  I quit smoking, jumped back on the fitness train, started taking better care of myself, started seeing a therapist to work on changing my way of thinking, stopped having casual sex and wanted to start looking for the real thing.  I was doing it.  Slowly.  Very slow going but defiantly moving forward.  I got a new job.   I started feeling better.  I honestly think I was so busy focusing on trying to get my life on track I didn’t realize I had lost the passion.

Then the hemorrhage.  Everything changed.  My perception on life.  Everything.  A year after that was focusing on getting back to my normal health and being able to tackle life like I did before.  No hesitation.  But that anger was gone.  That fight.  Life was different.  There’s now a fear and a time limit it seems.  My feisty "fuck you authority" is still in there but it’s quelled.  I focus more on kindness now.  I cry at EVERYTHING.  I seem to be gravitating more towards stability which I’ve never had in my life and that’s something I’m finding difficult to do.

So here I am today.

 I jumped on the OCR (Obstacle Course Races) train back in 2011 and loved it.  But it’s turned into something different now.  There’s a culture and I’m realizing I’m not a part of it.  The competitive side in me wants to jump in with both feet and join the crazy extreme athletes (some my friends have actually succeeded at this) and start doing these hardcore.  But I’m starting to realize this isn’t an option.  1^st of all I can’t afford them.  Jesus have they got expensive!  But mainly my body can’t take it.  Oh yes, I know there are 70 year old gramma’s doing these, and folks with disabilities, and people who have had multiple surgeries, and on and on.  But I’m also learning to listen to my body.  She’s a little beat up.  When I’m in pain I’m a bitch.  Plain and simple.  I’d like to continue doing them once in a while, but I need to step back and realize I’m not a competitor.  I started doing them because they were fun.  I want to go back to that.  A race I was supposed to do yesterday was cancelled and they are offering a “Hurricane Heat” as a make up.  Well, I got really excited and was all about it, but then I realized – it’s for the hardcore folks.  The runners.  Not for me.  This is when I got a little sad, but do need to accept, I’ll never be one of them and that’s ok.  I’m not going to be a triathlete or 3rd place in my age group for Spartan because I just don’t have the time/money/passion to train like that.

Never gonna happen

Theatre has taken a back seat.  My Papa was very ill for over a year which put me on a self forced hiatus so I could be there.  Now that he’s gone I haven’t jumped back in.  I do have a project coming up that I’m super excited about but it’s not my entire life anymore.  There’s nothing out there that sparks that passionate flame in me that Rude Guerrilla used to do. 

I wanted to go back to school.  Was thinking of majoring in creative writing.  I have the option here at Chapman to do so, but the math.  I know I know I know I should just suck it up, but I also HATE wasting time and the amount of time and energy I would have to put into taking enough math to enroll here would not be worth it to me. 

I’ve dabbled in art, crafts, writing, photography and although I feel I’m decent at some of these things I certainly don’t excel at anything.  Nothing sparks that excitement or passion. 

I’m watching everyone around me at work move on and up and I stay.  Not sure where to go or what to do or how to apply myself.  I’m watching all of my friends – I swear all of them – having successful relationships, marriages, children.  I may want that?  I've seriously thought that having one kid would be really fucking awesome but I don’t know. 

Here is where this surprising longer than I expected blog came from – what am I doing?  I’m in a big ol fat giant rut.  I don’t know where to go from here.  I lack inspiration.  I lack passion.  I constantly battle now with the “I didn’t die so I should be grateful every second of every day” mantra.  Which I am – I really am – but I still feel like I’m sitting on a train that’s going in one big circle.  I have absolutely no idea where to start.  

I will continue exercising as much as I do because it keeps me healthy and feeling good. I will continue to do theatre when the right project comes around.  I will continue the battle of "should I do online dating because I'm getting that desperate" argument with myself.  I'll still do the random OCR that actually looks fun when it comes around.   But that's all I got.  It's not enough.  I need that drive I used to have.  That ambition.  It seemed it didn't have direction before which was ok back in the day but it's different now.  I feel like I'm older, more mature (I sound like my mother) so I need something.  I need to find out what the hell I want to do with my life.  Any ideas?

My grandma said I was fat...

Well those weren’t her exact words, but as I walked out of the room she said very loudly, as she always does hell I’m embarrassed to take her out in public sometimes due to this, to her caregiver “Boy she’s getting heavy!”  At first I thought she was talking about someone on the TV.  Then she followed it up with “It’s such a surprise with all that walking she does.”  We had just ended a conversation about me walking to the Orange Circle with a friend for lunch.

I was appalled.  First of all let me clarify something – I’m not fat.  In fact, I’m probably the healthiest I’ve ever been.  I’m no waif, but I’m solid.  The last time I was at the Dr. I was perfect.  All my numbers are in the right place.  In fact – perfectly in the right place.  The doc jokes how healthy I am – gold stars all around.  I don’t have a six pack belly, it’s a bit soft.  I weigh a little more than the average 5’4, 38 year old woman because I have a lot of muscle.  I’m not fucking fat.  My grandma is just an asshole.

So why does this bother me so much? 

Body Shaming or Fat Shaming or whatever it’s called right now is a big deal.  In fact, I’m listening to an audio series called Stop the Beauty Madness and as some aren't really doing it for me, a few others are really interesting.  Below are some of my favorite images from the campaign.

I felt the need to blog because this has been on my mind for a while.  Well, forever.  As it is with 99.9% of women.  I’ve never really blogged about it but with all the times I’ve put my foot in my mouth lately, and as proud as I am at how healthy and fit I am, with these kinds of campaigns having to happen, with our society’s obsession with beauty, with a group of women on social media that are constantly flipping out about their weight or looks or something, with me dealing with it in some aspect every single day and now with my own grandma saying I’m a fattie – it’s time.  I don’t think this blog is going to necessarily go anywhere but I feel the need to get at least some of it out.

It’s a delicate dance.  There are women who are obese and unhealthy.  There are women who are a size 0 and unhealthy.  There are women who are built larger but healthy as a horse and same goes for the ladies built with slight frames who are very healthy.  Society is obsessed with beauty and weight.  You’re constantly reading about celebrities having to always be thin and beautiful.  Now photo shopping is a huge thing because it’s been brought to light how much of it is done out there giving people bullshit images that they think they have to look like to be accepted.  It’s not just women – its men too.  People are committing suicide over this, bullying others over this, constantly fighting your own self-worth.  It's awful!

I have other friends who call themselves “former fat girls/boys” and they too are so scared to ever go back.  Some have gone to scary extremes, some are super healthy and in fantastic shape now, some bounce back and forth and I watch it take such a toll on them emotionally and it breaks my heart.

What do we do?  How do we stop it?  What can I do?  Problem is – I don’t know.  I try to encourage friends who are battling weight issues to walk with me or do something active.  I think I’m helping but I’ve realized I’m not.  There are those out there who have a food addiction.  This is just as serious as a drug addiction but it’s not looked at the same.   I used to complain when I would gain a few pounds and a friend who may be larger than me looks at me as if I’m insane.  Um – foot in mouth.  I’m now an insensitive asshole.  But then the next day a tiny skinny friend is bitching to me she’s put on some weight.  WTF!  Why are so obsessed with our weight?  Oh wait…I know…because that’s how we’ve been raised.

The same goes for “beauty”.  Yes, we try to tell ourselves and others that beauty is on the inside and out and beauty comes in so many shapes and sizes and it does!  But do we really buy that?  I have a friend who stops men in their tracks.  I got to the point where being around her made me feel so self-conscious because everyone thought she was so gorgeous and I felt like such an ugly piece of shit.  We got into an argument once about the different problems“pretty girls” and “not as pretty girls” have and I was instantly furious to think she would have any of the same problems I have.  It’s not the same!  Actually it is.  We all battle different battles whether it’s weight, looks, intelligence or whatever.

I love fashion.  You wouldn’t think so when you look at me but I love models and runway shows.  I love to watch America’s Next Top Model, yes because the photo shoots are always unique, but also because of the want-a-be models.  I love to look at fashion magazines and watch the interesting models on the runways.  Does that make me an asshole consumer buying into society’s image of what’s pretty?

I've had horrible self esteem my whole life.  My biggest issue growing up is I "looked like a boy."  That's what they told me.  I had a mullet like hair do at one point.  I had braces forever.  I was not a "pretty" child.  I look in the mirror now and I do like what I see.  I think I have a great smile.  My freckles are cute.  But that little ugly girl is still in there.  I find myself squeezing my tummy wondering if it will ever be flat again.  I find myself lifting my chipmunk cheeks wondering if it would make me look prettier.   I rub that damn bump on my nose constantly wondering what I would look like if it was just filed down a little bit.  I don't post pictures I think I look ugly in.  I'm in love with photo filters.  It's ridiculous.  I want to say I've totally conquered that low self esteem but I haven't.  I look around at my friends with boyfriends/husbands/families and wonder why I never can seem to "attract boys".  Yet - now a days I catch myself in the mirror and think "Look at that shoulder muscle!"  "Holy shit I look good today".  I scrunch up my face and think I still look kinda cute even when I'm making a stupid face.  I never used to be that way.  So ya - I'm think I'm better.  But totally confident and strut down the street with my head held high?  Not quite.

But - I posted this no make up photo that I think is pretty cute and the campaign now has it on their website:

 I mean I am more confident!

I’m hoping listening to this campaign will give me some insight.  Reading more articles.  Researching anything I can.  I want to boost my own self confidence but also help and inspire others.  I try to listen to the woes of friends and peers.  How can I be more sensitive?  How can I be of help?  Is there even a point?  Is society ever not going to be obsessed with body image?  How can we teach our next generations that you don’t have to look like a cookie cutter image of what society thinks is beautiful?  How do we tell them it’s boring to look like everyone else?  Yet…here I am…still hurt by what my grandma said and find myself looking in the mirror a few more times a day trying to see what she saw.  

Ugh.  I don't work out anymore to look good I work out to feel good.  I survived that squeak with death because I was healthy, not because I was pretty.  I can conquer OCR's because I'm strong.  I really do feel fucking great.  So why the blog?  

This is such a touchy subject but I don’t know what else to do other than write about it.  Beauty for me is health.  If you feel good you look good.  You can see beauty in people’s eyes, in their souls, in their laugh, in their little quirks that they don’t know they have.  I love to watch people just be themselves. 

Where do we go from here?  I don’t know.