Validation and Unending Grief

When I reread my post from this morning I wonder what exactly happened to cause such a crash and burn 12 hours later? Sorted costumes. Repacked a fabulous show with good memories. Made a pot of English Breakfast tea and mixed it with fresh lemonade and sat on my back deck with the little dogs and rested a bit from a job well done. Worked on my ongoing project from this morning. Did some laundry. Watched some good bad reality cooking shows because, well . . . they are better than cooking.  I went to walk my pack and I guess it was right there, on your favorite block that it hit me hard and deep once again.  I honestly think that I might have to move when D moves up to San Francisco.  I definitely love love LOVE the warm and gentle beauty of Santa Barbara gawd knows I do, but there is something so lonely on the block where I live now.  My house is the sole bastion of residence almost. I am flying solo and even though I have never lived alone UNTIL NOW, when everyone leaves downtown it is so completely deserted except for drunks who stagger past when the bars close.  I feel frozen in time somehow and I know eating a cupcake will help.  Getting back to my great book will help.  Not so long after Sancho died a man said to me: "What is up with you? Did you think he would live forever?" Yeah. On nights like this one  I miss you so and I thought you would always be by my side. FOR REAL.

SANCHO

A Blessing and a Curse

This Saturday morning is a brilliant one. Sitting here at command central, high above the street, I am surrounded by the sky reaching arms of trees filled with singing birds. Downtown is sleepy at this hour even and hasn't yet remembered that commerce is its business. I can imagine surfers in their slippery dark seal suits waxing their boards and preparing to catch the perfect waves which I just know are breaking right off shore. Sometimes it is perfection itself to live here.  When my mind is scrabbling about like a mouse seeking shelter, in between theatre jobs is always the worst, I drive myself and everyone else more than a little crazy.  So last night I pulled out my two precious boxes of scraps (thank you Linda!!!) which have survived numerous "You have got to change your life and what you do with it for gawd's sake purges!!" and started piecing completely discordant but colorfully raucous squares together for the back of a sit on the floor and watch movies with pillows and yogurtlandia (sorbet! no dairy!) blanket for someone I love beyond words.  NO I will not make them to sell. No I will not put them on Etsy.  Even though I am completely frustrated with all things connected to sewing, stitching, design, costuming, selling, Etsying, etc etc etc--when I can think of something to make?  My sewing skills are my saving grace for sure. And with the sun hitting it from behind, my house is lit with color.  I have stitched cloth together my entire life. It is my longest magnificent obsession.

Love always!!

Dead Wood

YEP. This is me celebrating a wonderful moment with all of you, my loyal and much loved cyber followers.  I know tonight will bring dog walks, a marvelous sunset (warm!), some wonderful emails to read from a friend who writes for gawds sake, and at the end of all that . . . sit down. Are you? OK. One of my dearest friends down south will laugh herself off of her couch when she reads these next words, but after A YEAR of dragging them out, TONIGHT I celebrate the final episode of Deadwood.  A series which I have scowled at, cussed at, squinted through my fingers at, and watched with so much swaggering adoration for some of the characters, the setting (the mud! the pigs!), and of course, the costumes.  Here to snuggle up with me are my VEGAN WHISKEY CAKES, with dark chocolate vegan ganache dusting their little tops and a frosting of vegan whiskey buttercream to seal the deal.

I close with the words of the man himself: "The world ends when you're dead." ~Al
Love always!!!

Negative Self-talk and the State of the Universe

Me of course, single therefore the camera in one hand technique standing in the soon to be abandoned man cave of my youngest "child". SF here he comes.

One wall of my every inch is covered 17 year downtown bungalow home studio.

AAAAAH!!! So many FABULOUS memories of time well spent. Seriously.

Command central with Grandpa lording over it all. THANK YOU Sancho. xoxoxo.

Yeah. Ha ha ha ha. I really do sleep right in this room!!! With dogs!!!

Dearest readers, And no, I am not unbalanced or delusional, I really mean that address--"dearest".  When I look up my teeny, tiny blog in the immensity of the online my opinion is soooo meaningful blogging world I choke up a bit when I see how many have signed on and read my writing!!! Seriously, and I do so love seriously!!! Don't you? So, to begin with, THANK YOU. Ahhhh, we are alive in one of the great climates and times of fear, paranoia, melancholy, and just because I love the sound of this word, ennui. It is a saturated time of visual images and wordy documents and pithy tweets and instant connection. And because we live in one of the highly "developed" countries, we can worry about frown and smile lines, phone, food, and car choices,  and instant gratification in all areas.  Sometimes this works out to fabulous advantage, like booting up "Despicable Me" and cuddling up on the teddy bear rug with your not so wee granddaughter and enjoying a divine respite in the midst of a midsummer (almost) night. Nothing, absolutely nothing is better than spending time with people you love.  We already know this!!! But other times this constant and continual comparison and evaluation of all things about ourselves and our lives can be nothing short of punishing. In past writing I explained to you why I quit FB. The elitest drip feed of vacations to all places exotic and expensive, the millions of shots of attractive people with perfect teeth, the brazillions of descriptions of fascinating lives and successful careers became a perfect medium for self-abuse.  Many people have documented this already. And therein lies one of the key points to my rant. BTW, don't you just love the use of words like therein? LOL, almost makes my 25 year old student loan debt seem worthwhile. When I was a kid, don't you dare yawn!!! I promise this will be succinct!!! When I was a kid, I had a horrible plastic torture device called a cage where teeny white mice were supposed to live and have tea parties and raise babies and live in happy mouse harmony.  They bred and bred wildly as all mice do I guess, they just adored each other so, and one day--as I prepared to lower in their well-engineered food pellets GASP!!!! One of the mice WAS EATING ANOTHER!!!!! Holy mother of gawd--I ran sobbing-and just in case you are wondering? NO ONE sobbed better than me-scrawny, homely, prone to emotional outbursts pretty mush---ha, ha, ha--see how I wrote mush for much?  it stands-- a perfect mistake!!! all the time, bookish (just the fact that I love that word proves that I am bookish!!!), and a TERRIFIC sobber . . . to my mother who had less than nothing to say and then to my father who squinted at me over his paper and said: "Mice do that when they are too crowded." and DANG--I believe sometimes that we are those mice in the plastic box.  All racing about, trying to keep busy, surviving to exist, standing on our respective cyber soapboxes and yelling to no one, welcoming death from a polite distance, avoiding life, worrying, judging, and speaking to our inner selves in a negative way.  I am going to dedicate this to some of the women I know right now . . . WE ARE REALLY REALLY GOOD at negative self-speak. Volumes have been written to document this, you know that is true. Borders had entire shelves devoted to this topic. Every single Oprah mag has a dozen articles addressing this so why oh why good gawd Lise do you have to chime in with your two bits? Well, I will tell you--as I said yesterday--my two bits are BURNING A HOLE IN MY EVERLASTING POCKET!!! This next part helped me as much as my great "sad" experiment.  I found a quote in a thrift store book which changed my life. Sounds like a wonderful bumper sticker, doesn't it? Here it is: "See everything as if for the first and last time." I love this quote because it reminds me of that awful good Anne Rice Vamp film, you know the one, where Lestat says (I know, it is awful good like I said and painful kind of but we love it): "Now, see with your vampire eyes!" and EVERY SINGLE TIME I start to slap myself across the face with a negative thought ABOUT MYSELF, I focus my eyes in and JUST LOOK AROUND.  And I practice, truly practice seeing all things around me for the FIRST and LAST time.  TRY IT. 100% guarantee as to changed for the better life outlook. Another terminally unique experiment is to imagine the ABUSE you heap on yourself at a moment's notice was happening to 1) someone you love OR 2) your child self.  You would NOT stand for it!!! Not for one second!!! I know all of you well enough to say this without a doubt--you would come screeching to the rescue, you would cross any rickety bridge, slash your way through anything and everything all Lost style to rescue that person--ahhhhh my head is going to explode if you do not agree!!!! See? See what a cruel thing it is to think of ourselves as anything less than who we truly are? And until you have sat with yourself, truly sat with yourself--in that destitute gutter, close and dark closet, plastic box cage, quiet hour, and or vast volumes of journals-how will you know EXACETLY as Alice would say, WHO you are defending? You must become unafraid to see yourself in the bright light of day and love that light, love that day, love that brightness and realize that you are it!!! Yeah!! We are it! Wow. What an opinionated preacher I have become, haven't I? All right-substitute "I" for all of the "yous" in the above paragraph and it becomes clear that we are in MY head.  But seriously beloved readers, how much time do you have to waste? Have you let the media fool you into thinking that despising your looks, thoughts, feelings, accomplishments, relationships, incomes, talents, ideas, intelligence, position in all aspects of life is worth your involvement even for a nano second? All AMAZING time wasters!! All AMAZING life wasters!!! So be done with all of this NEGATIVE SELF-SPEAK. My beloved daughter muse sends me the MOST adorable and inspiring shots of art studios all around the world and from bygone eras as well as present day. We ooh and ahh over them because they are wonderful, but try this experiment with me--snap YOURSELF in an UNSTRAIGHTENED UP moment  in YOUR oh so perfect and precious life. Come on. Do it. Don't be afraid. Now post it somewhere. Send it to someone. Pretend that you are seeing this captured moment for the FIRST and LAST time. It IS cool, isn't it? YOU are cool, aren't you? BTW, do NOT think I posted this picture of myself because I think only good and great things about myself. Oh no, no, no, no!!! You know I struggle mightily with women of a certain age hanging onto past lunacy issues times ad nauseum!! But I am following my own dare I say brilliant advice!!! The time is NOW!!! Because face it my darlings . . . we are those mice in that box and we must stop EATING EACH OTHER!!!! LOL!!! You knew I could turn this into a vegan post!!! Love always and THANK YOU for reading and PLEASE send me your experiments in this moment of life . . . ah, MOMENT!!

Me and France and the Politics of Sad

OMG. So here we are . . . you, an unknown age. Me? Closing in on 60, and I am going to declare right here-LIVE ON THE CYBER HIGHWAY-that being alive is good. Better than good. It is damn good. It is freakin' awesome. Even on grey days. Even when the media is exploding with stupidity. Even when you are surrounded by idiots, haters, and people who preach division. Even when buzz saws wake you up with their not to be ignored whining at 7:01 when gawd knows you probably should be up and thriving, but you are still snoozing because you spent last night FEASTING on a free Hulu British 5 part series called "Mrs. Biggs" which is great for oh so many reasons!! Shut up buzz saws!!! I had to watch the last part and that kept me awake with green tea until . . . OK. 3 am. But it is all good, all great like I was saying, because a tiny pot of coffee later, some caffeine fueled inspiration from my beloved daughter muse-the world's greatest known painter BTW-and we are together here cyber flying once more. I am going to breathe life into my blog AGAIN because I simply cannot help myself. Rather than endlessly torturing my FB friends with complicated oversharing and sometimes less than astute but always fairly irreverent constant cupcake postings, I will simply download all of my high jinks and daily escapades into this familiar blog. VOILA!!!! As I simply must say. So TODAY I bring you one of the coolest and most useful figuring out Lise's life experiments that I have ever done . . . are you ready? It is a game changer for sure and even though I cannot believe that I just said "game changer" aloud, I will proceed. Livestrong has many perfectly shaped, happy, bright white toothed people all pretending to be worried about fat and calories and fat and calories and berries with unpronounceable names and exercises and endlessly the emails come to my box with all sorts of LIFE CHANGING advice, which--as an aside--almost always involve not eating butter!!?? but I digress--anyway, I read about a man biking across America, watched his little videos and read his story. Something in his words sparked: "I made just ONE change in my life." Because of his ONE change, so many other things that he had been trying for, attempting and failing, and not even imagining happened for him. And they were all good. He asked: "What one thing can you change?" and oh I hopped on that bandwagon so quickly! Always the retired English teacher, I pulled the pencil from behind my ear and began my list. Wait. My walls are COVERED with inspirational every things. I have tried my Happy Face blog, I have drawn out months of my life with each day neatly decorated and blocked out with yet more happy faces and yet more inspirational quotes and oh no oh no oh no . . . was this just going to be a repeat of my past folly? ACV didn't work. Drugs didn't work. Therapy didn't work. Diet changes didn't work. Exercising didn't work. Change of mate, job, bank, hairstyle, wardrobe, perfume (yeah, a weakness of the French kind), car, routine didn't work. Although, in truth, most worked momentarily or for a short spell. I remember clearly the day I looked at my book stacks which were threatening to take over my house and realized that 75% of my books were written by people long dead, ones who had killed themselves, profoundly depressing, and solidly in the life is hell on earth don't even try to make it better or imagine anything different just suck up and get over yourself this is life OK? genre, and WOW. That was a powerful moment. I had SIX COPIES of "The Stranger" for gawd's sake. LOL. That is pretty damn funny. I think I had literally  everything Oates has ever written. My gas oven door was a place of permanent threats. Seriously? How much had my love of dreary Hell's Kitchen writing influenced my thoughts and feelings? A lot of those books, piles of them hit the thrift store. And I am no Pollyanna!! People think of me as "sweet" but OMG, I don't think they know me all that well because I hang out at the local neighborhood bar of Cynical and if Lewis Black wasn't married? I think I would find him and stay with him all the time so that I could yell along with all of his rants. I can be pretty damn sarcastic. OK. BUT HERE IS WHAT I INVENTED AND TAKE IT AND MAKE IT YOUR OWN: I decided to eliminate the word "sad" from my vocabulary. Yes. You heard right. One little three letter word. SAD. As in the I use that word all the f'ing time. I have said "sad" probably more than ANY OTHER word in my entire lifetime. I simply described everything in my life as sad. My tea kettle sang itself dry? Sad. I have too many bills and not enough money? Sad. I am getting older? Sad. The little old man at the store looks lonely? Sad. Chickens in cages smaller than a piece of paper? Sad. Babies aborted at 5 months? Sad. I cannot get published? Sad. People drive too fast? Sad. The Sojourner raised cookie prices? Sad.  My rent got raised? Sad. My hair is getting thin? Sad. My car needs vacuuming? Sad. People walk and text? Sad. I have nothing new to read? Sad. My kids grew up and left? Sad. No one calls? Sad. OK. You understand what I am saying. At first IT WAS SHOCKING. I was like the hilarious TV show where everyone cusses so much there is a bleeeeep every other word. My jaws literally hurt from the many MANY times I clapped my hand over my mouth to stop the word SAD from coming out. IT WAS UNBELIEVABLE!!!! I had allowed my use of the word sad to color my ENTIRE EXISTENCE. It was my own personal pair of sadglasses. AND BECAUSE OF MY SAD EXPERIMENT, MY WHOLE LIFE CHANGED. Don't worry--caps in most cases indicates something I think is so dang awesome or dare I say profound--it is not yelling. Although I do honestly feel like yelling my NOT SAD ANYMORE story. And here is how it works--because I NO LONGER attribute my kneejerk response of "sad" to every imaginable situation and experience and exchange-I am forced to examine my life from different perspectives.  The price of good food is not sad, it is a challenge. New laws on the books are not sad, they are worthy of investigation. Rude people are not sad, they are to be avoided. Hating my looks is not sad, it is worth confronting. Lacking sufficient work and involvement is not sad, it is a life pursuit. AND WITHIN DAYS, my entire life changed. Seriously. I am not kidding you. I was able to CRYSTAL CLEARLY avoid and distance myself from people and situations which were depressing and unchangeable. I was able to attribute SAD to the REAL tragedies and sadnesses in life-world starvation, treatment and health care of our esteemed elderly, animal abuse, racism still rampant, wars in many places, you know-things that are genuinely sad. There you have it. My "just one change" has caused TREMENDOUS CHANGES IN MY LIFE. Thank you for reading once again and now I will ask you: "What ONE thing can you change in your life today?" And BTW, haters and the "everyone already knows this" tribe need not respond. Just move on over to another blog. There are billions of them.
LOVE ALWAYS!!!