On Paying Attention.

From my Buddha mantle collection.

It's funny how once you start paying attention in one area of your life, you find you're paying attention to all sorts of things. It picks up momentum like a rock going downhill or a bird taking flight. Click the link below to learn more:

Buddha Mama Sans Drama.

Evil Twin Chic.

I Dream of Evil Mandy.

One of my co-workers just informed me that I look like I Dream of Jeannie's evil twin. This delights me of course. If I could purposefully cultivate a signature look, it would definitely be of the evil twin genre.

If you would like to hear about my non-evil-twin side, you can read about my attempts to do 90 prostrations and 99 chants to make up for my slackerism. And then you can watch a short demonstration video by my three-year-old daughter. We're getting all multimedia up in hurrrrrrr.

I Got 99 Prostrations.

On the Muscle.

Welcome to the gun show, suckers.

Yesterday I was at the gym in the free weight area. I sort of hate working out in the free weight area because it's all big burly dudes … and me. I try to be as inconspicuous as possible and not make any eye contact with anyone, but still, I'm uncomfortable.

Fortunately, I usually get one of the benches on the end of the row. Yesterday was no different. I picked the bench on the end. I selected a couple of sets of weights and put them by the bench. I commenced doing my sets. I stand to do the bicep curls, lateral raises, shoulder presses, etc. I sit on the bench while I do the triceps extensions, bench presses, etc. I do push ups, squats and lunges on the floor next to the bench. I repeat this three times. You get the drift.

In no way am I any different than the long row of big guys doing their exercises next to and on their benches. And mind you, mixed among the big guys are also empty benches. So there I was, completely minding my own business, trying to get my three sets out of the way so I could get the hell out of the free weight area as fast as humanly possible because I'm not entirely comfortable there.

And then some dude walks up to me.

"Are you using this bench?" he points at the bench that I am standing next to, on top of which rest my weights and my warm-up jacket.

"Yes," I say and smile. He gives me a disgusted look.

"I mean, are you using it for anything other than putting your weights on?" he is snide and looks at me as if I'm some addle-minded chick who doesn't know what I'm doing. What the hell, I think. Can't he see how ripped I am?

"I'm doing presses on it!" I say and smile, even though inside I feel like ripping into to him. He gives me another disgusted look and then marches off to another area of the gym. I have no idea why he's so pissed and I have no idea why he asked me of all the people in the long row of benches. Was it because I was the only woman? And why didn't he simply go to one of the empty benches?

I continue doing my exercises, but while I do, I feel myself getting madder and madder. I feel regret at covering up my anger with false joviality and friendliness. I mean, I couldn't even be curt and short with this guy. I covered it up with a smile and a friendly tone of voice. I suddenly realize that I am angry at myself.

I'm mad at myself for being mad in the first place. Why do I have such big emotions over such small stuff? And then I get mad at myself for faking being pleasant and nice to this guy when clearly he's an asshole.

So I'm torn.

Should I have put this guy in his place and shown him that it's not nice to pick on the only girl? Should I have pointed out that there were other empty benches for him to use? Should I have not felt offended to be singled out like that in the first place?

I mean, maybe he's writing his own blog post right now about how some dumb chick wasn't even using her bench other than to put her weights on it and it was so rude of her not to let him use it. Maybe he didn't want to work amongst the big burly guys either?

I know there's always another side to things, another perspective. But I'm still pissed.

I asked my therapist about it and she pointed out that it's not a problem that I have these emotions. It's a problem that these emotions feel so big and that I feel the need to conceal them. So in that regard, this little incident is useful. It reminds me that I still have some work to do on Big Emotions.

I'm not a Buddha quite yet. At least not at the gym.

Dreaming of Paris and the Life of an Artist.

Paris Letters by Janice MacLeod.

I'm on vacation this week so I've read two books. Reading, when it's good, puts me in a dreamy state. Really good words put me in a trance and make me want to put my own words on paper.

The two books I've read are The Paris Wife by Paula McLain and Paris Letters by Janice MacLeod. I'm a bit of a Francophile, if you didn't know. I took a good ten years of French between middle school, high school and college and I spent a summer in Paris as an exchange student. I've often fantasized about sitting in the cafés of Paris and writing like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. So you can imagine that reading two books about writers running off to Paris to live the life of artists has completely enamored me and made me fitful and dreamy.

I find it encouraging to remember that Hemingway worked tirelessly on his drafts. I also find it encouraging that he wrote entire novels that he didn't publish or that he started over and recreated from scratch. I'm a bit of a perfectionist myself and I feel relieved to see that you can be a perfectionist about your work and want it to be the best it can be. You can't trust anyone else's opinion about this. Right now I'm just laying down the first draft of my first book. I'm in the final quarter of the book and that really means nothing to me as far as when it will be finished. As soon as the first draft is done, that's when I'm going back to the beginning to revise, add in, delete and tear asunder. I want this book to be the best it can be. I can only tell this particular story once.

I also find it fascinating that The Sun Also Rises was basically the truth. It was Hemingway writing about an experience that he and his friends had in Spain, during the bullfighting season. He changed names and some details, but the heart of it was real. I debate doing that with my memoir. It seems fiction gives you so much more freedom. I've already changed all the names in my book. Why not call it fiction and give myself creative license to do what I want with it? It's tempting.

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain.

Hemingway and his first wife also threw caution to the wind and ran off to Paris with very little money and nothing real to believe in except his talent. They didn't have a score of published works to rest on. And in the same way, Janice MacLeod quit her advertising life and ran off to Paris to live the life of an artist. She was a bit more responsible in that she saved up for the trip, but she essentially did the same thing. Sold everything. Quit her job as an Associate Creative Director in an ad agency and took off for who knows what?

It's all damn inspiring. I don't know that I can quit my job and run off to Paris, of course. I've got two kids and a husband. My life is tied to Detroit. But hey, Detroit's the Paris of the Midwest, don't you know? Okay, stop laughing. But I can be an artist in Detroit. Hell, the town is full of hipsters and artists and a creative spirit. I can be a part of that. I can write anywhere.

But to do it. To really do it. That's what I admire in both Hemingway and MacLeod's lives. They really quit the rat race to focus on their art. MacLeod gives me an instruction guide to do this. What if I saved like crazy? What if I had $60,000 in my savings account to take a year or two off and focus on my writing? Bet I could do it.

MacLeod says it all began with cleaning out her underwear drawer. A small step. Getting rid of the pairs she didn't wear anymore. That led to getting rid of all the extra, all the waste, everything that was tying her down. She also stopped shopping and simplified her life radically so she could save money.

I want to go home and attack the linen closet/medicine closet in our upstairs hallway. I could start there. I want to stop shopping. I want to save and simplify. I can't necessarily quit my job and maybe I don't even need to. I'm not an ACD so I don't have the level of responsibility that MacLeod has. My life is a little simpler as a humble copywriter. I can do a lot with my time. My nights are mostly my own. I can tap away at the computer and write my book. I can save money so that if need be, I could quit. I can get rid of more and live more simply in order to create more room for the artist's life.

I'm inspired dammit.

What more could you ask for from a week's vacation and two books? I recommend all three.

Sweet freedom. Grace really knows how to live.

Talk Constitution to Me, Baby.

Happy Valentine's Day to this guy.

My husband is a lawyer. He's also really smart. And hot. That whole combination makes me weak in the knees. Smart. Educated. Aggressive. Hoo boy. 

*Fans self*

Me, I'm not so aggressive. I'm sort of passive unless you go after someone I love. Then I can get all up in yo' face. But my preferred mode is conflict avoidance. My husband, on the other hand, is a conflict-embracer. At least when it comes to work. His style of arguing could be described as "Scorched Earth."

And I find it extremely attractive. He's like a cerebral gladiator. He often sends me his briefs or his motions or whatever other legalese he's been writing or fighting over. I don't know what they're called, but you get the idea. He's an excellent writer. He writes the most entertaining and succinct briefs. Sometimes they are poetry. Sometimes they cut through bullshit like a knife. And I love that. Of course he's never satisfied with them and that's why he'll find this whole post ridiculous and embarrassing.

But damn he's smart. And he's verbal. Did I mention that already? And he comes down like an axe on a felled tree when he's defending someone. It's his entire M.O. His raison d'etre. I suppose he felt unprotected and abused as a child so he has spent his entire adulthood and professional career protecting people who feel helpless and threatened. Some might say that a corporate litigator is not a protector. People are always joking about how evil lawyers are, but now that I'm married to one, I see it differently. If you think about it, he is protecting people who are risk of losing everything they've built. Their companies, their livelihood, their wealth. And he comes down like the angry hand of god and strikes fear and terror in the enemy.

And his clients love it. They feel protected by him, and I in turn, feel proud of the work he does. I write advertising slogans. I try to sell people stuff they don't need. Fred protects people and fights for them. And people make fun of lawyers? Jeez. There should really be way more copywriter jokes than lawyer jokes.

So you have me, the seemingly peaceable Buddhist, the conflict-avoiding gentle spirit. Him, the scorched earth spewing, rage inducing, verbally spry, argumentative fighter. In some ways we seem like we're opposites. But really, we're alike.

We both felt unprotected as children. While I sought out that protection from others, he became that protector himself. I know that for as long as I live, if anybody ever fucks with me, they will have the full fury of an angry, talented, smart, lawyer coming down on them with the full force of the law and a lifetime of pent up wrath over injustice.

He grew up on the wrong side of the tracks and he saw people who were helpless to defend themselves before the law. Now that he's on the side of the law, no one is going to abuse that power. It's funny to me, because he's a lawyer who hates cops. Despite his fancy education, he still carries the distrust of the po-po that he got from watching the police abuse that power in his neighborhood. Rather than feel cowed or frightened of power, he has seized it and he carries it around like Thor's hammer.

And I admire the hell out of him for it. I find people who defend the rights of the unprotected heroic. I find the guy who will stand up to the bullies admirable. I find him brave and strong. And so when he starts spouting off about the Constitution or some Supreme Court decision, I feel my neck get hot.

"Tell me more about the Bill of Rights," I say, my heart beating faster.

It's a lot like A Fish Called Wanda but with less foreign language and more constitutional law.

This is my way of saying, Happy Valentine's Day, baby. I feel protected and loved with you on my side. You're the best lawyer and the best husband I've ever had.

Tiny Little Mopeds in Your Mind.

My employer is moving to downtown Detroit after being in our current building for a bazillion years. It's a good move because the city where we are currently located is a pretty depressing place. There's a retail area/strip mall that is completely empty. There are "WE BUY GOLD" signs and a Planned Parenthood. Don't get me wrong. I'm a huge fan of Planned Parenthood. I got my prenatal care there when I was first pregnant with my son and didn't have medical insurance. But Planned Parenthoods are not usually in the most desirable neighborhoods.

I went to a nail salon once by work and it looked like a place where former nail technicians go to die. The bottles of nail polish were all dried up and there wasn't a bottle of disinfectant in sight. I think the last time it had received a good scrub was probably somewhere around the Carter administration.

I have a co-worker who used to get blowouts just down the street from our office on Fridays for $20. She was so excited she found a place to give her hair a blowout for $20! The only problem was that the hair stylist gave her said blowout while simultaneously smoking a cigarette. My friend did notice she smelled like smoke on Friday nights. So we renamed the $20 Blowout, "The Smokey Blowout."

Anyway, it's quite industrial, this stretch of a highway. It cuts through the east side of Detroit and carves a path through a town that's been left behind to slowly rot into the concrete that surrounds it as folks move further and further north and leave this old Blue Collar town behind. This is the kind of town that was inhabited by the workers of the many automotive plants that loom along this stretch of road.

Most days I look out my window and see concrete as far as my eye can see. Concrete parking lots. Concrete buildings. Concrete sky. It's a town that's been built up and beaten down by the very industry that sustains it. Anyway, moving to the thriving entertainment district of Detroit will be quite an improvement for us in many ways. Downtown Detroit has a lot going on (despite what you may have heard) and we will be right in the middle of all of it. I'll also be able to have lunch with my husband on occasion, who also works downtown. We'll be like real city folk instead of the boutique suburbanites we've become.

So there are moving boxes and oddities littering the halls of my office building now. We have to box up all of our personal belongings and take them home. Only our desk chairs and our desktops (if we have them) and two containers of office supplies and other necessities will be moved to the new location. I walked by a typewriter today. I saw an empty Miller Lite can in the sink. I sifted through artwork that my son Cracky made for me when he was a toddler and I had just started working here. He drew me as a large balloon-like lady with sticks for arms and legs. I'm so enormous that I dwarf everything else in the picture, including his Defensive Tackle father, himself, the sun, the moon. I am that god-like and all-powerful. Seven years later and I still think he sees me that way.

In other news, my teeth ache from a new Invisalign-type device my orthodontist has inflicted on me in order to shove a wayward tooth back into place. It's like the first week of braces all over again. When I take the retainer off, my teeth feel loose and wiggle in their sockets. My gums throb with the beat of my own heart. I believe orthodontia would be a good torture device. I'm surprised our leaders haven't looked into this. I mean, sure, yeah, it's cruel and painful. But all of our war criminals leave with nice straight teeth! You can't Geneva Convention us for that.

Just kidding. I don't even know what the Geneva Convention is. I write ads for a living.

I started off the week with a bizarre form of food poisoning from red kidney beans. Did you know that they're toxic when they're undercooked? Yes, yes, they are. You either need to eat them out of a can or you need to make sure you boil them for 10 minutes on the stove. Do not cook them in a slow cooker.

REPEAT. DO NOT PUT DRY RED KIDNEY BEANS IN A SLOW COOKER.

If you get nothing else from my blog today, please get that.

Apparently cooking dry kidney beans over long periods of time at 80 degrees or less increases their natural toxicity 4-5 times. I was so violently ill, I didn't know which way or out of which orifice things were going to rocket out of my body. (Apologies for the graphic nature of this kind of poisoning.) After the third or fourth trip to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I briefly wondered whether I could simultaneously reach one end of myself towards the toilet and the other end towards the sink. It was that bad. And worse. But my husband says there are some things I probably shouldn't say on the internet. This coming from a man who is known for being inappropriate and having no boundaries. So, I think I will heed his warning and keep my description somewhat vague. Needless to say, I lost 6 lbs in 6 hours on the Hell Bean Diet. Cook yourself up a batch this weekend!

Then, after all that, I got in a disagreement with my husband. (Re: He was wrong and I was right and he refused to see that.) I guess two people aren't at their best when they've projectile evacuated all the liquids out of their bodies through every available orifice. And it wasn't really a fight, fight. Like, there weren't any punches thrown and I didn't take a baseball to his brand new car. Haha. I know he just flinched while reading that. But truly, I hate conflict of any sort. So does he. Whenever we have a disagreement, we both go and nurse our wounds silently in our own little pain caves. I think we both feel as though each hurtful word has been administered like a baseball bat to the tender hood of a BMW. Hahahaha. Just kidding. (I bet he's removing all the bats from our garage right now.)

All kidding aside, I do feel beaten down. Have you ever noticed that when you start off your day with a good hard cry, you feel it in your eyeballs for the rest of the day? I can still feel the salt in my eyes, left there like tiny crystal reminders of an earlier pain.

God. Relationships suck. They are so much work. They get right down to your deepest, darkest places. The places you were most hurt when you were most vulnerable. They conjure up the ghosts of our youth and reenact them like a morality play and you're the only sinner. Blergh. "Working it out" and "Compromise" have been the mantra of my adulthood. These are relatively new words for me and so I'm having to navigate this whole "Conflict Resolution" thing like a stranger in a strange land. I thought running away from conflict solved conflict? If I run away, the conflict is far away. See? All better! This new way is complete bullshit if you ask me. But I guess the trail of disastrous relationships that I've left in my love-wake suggest that maybe it's time I tried a new way. So fine. I'm doing that, but I'm doing it under protest (even if it was my idea).

Aside from all that, I'm stuck in a rut in my book. I'm about 2/3 of the way done and I feel like it's become monotonous. I feel like I'm telling one chronological story after the other, with a neat beginning, middle and an end. I want to break free and not write in any order or not meet some specific plot device. My writing coach is helping me with that. She's given me some free-writing exercises to play with this weekend that have nothing to do with plot. I just want to roll around in the words and luxuriate there. My tiny womb of words. My dreamy cocoon of images from my youth. I want to say something beautiful that has no point.

I want to paint you a picture of a lovely boy and how he looked when he pulled up into my circle driveway in the full lush of spring. I want you to know what it was like to run out of that dark house and into the bright sun with a boy on a moped waiting there for you. I want you to know what his heartbeat felt like when you wrapped your arms around him and got away. Any away. Didn't matter where. And he never asked too many questions. He never judged.

"How bad is it?" he would ask.

And all have you had to say was, "Bad" and he would drive you away like a white knight on a tiny little moped.

Yeah, so it might've been bad, but I had a boy on a bike who would come and get me and take me away. Sometimes life gets to be too much and I close my eyes and I scoot off on a little Honda moped in my mind.

Beep beep, baby.

God it's good to drive. To have a license and a credit card. Maybe it'll take me to the mall where everything is shiny and beautiful and new. It's never that bad if you have someplace to go. Someplace to be free. Someplace where nothing ever changes, beans never go bad, and you never have to compromise like a grownup ever.

Yeah, I wanna go there.

Nude Year Resolution.

I don't care for New Year's Resolutions. They seem like opportunities to disappoint oneself. If I'm going to enact change in my life, I'm going to do it throughout the year and not in one grand statement per annum, thank you.

But if I do make a New Year's Resolution, I try to make it fun. Usually it involves sex or going on vacation or having friends over more often. It never involves weight loss or quitting things that are fun. You get the gist.

So this year my resolution is to go to bed naked every night.

(Sorry mom and dad. And apologies to my son who may google my name someday and find this. I tried to warn you. See? You should listen to your mother.)

Anyway, if you're naked fun things are more likely to happen. Clothes get in the way. They communicate distance or at least offer a bit of a challenge. Going to bed naked every night is an invitation. An open door. The gateway to Sexy Town.

Just kidding. I would never say "Sexy Town." Well, not without laughing.

However, even if it doesn't lead to sex, naked skin leads to more direct contact. Skin on skin contact. I think humans never lose that infantile need to have skin on skin contact. We need it to thrive. All of us. The warmth of skin is healing. The warmth of skin can save lives. If you're freezing to death, you're supposed to strip down naked and get into a sleeping bag together. Or something like that. I read it somewhere, once upon a time. It's the kind of folk knowledge that comes from living in Michigan and other cold places.

It's also 12 degrees here on this New Year's Day. The cat won't get off me. I'm wrapped in a fuzzy blanket and wearing a turtleneck. I've got the thermostat cranked up to 72 but still I feel a draft. Seems like just the right time of year to make a resolution to get under the covers each night without a stitch of clothing.

I've never really been a fan of pajamas anyway. They're so fussy. They get in the way. Seems like we were made naked and we should be naked more often. Give your skin a chance to breathe. Maybe rub up against the naked skin of whoever is in your bed. Yes. I'd say let's have more of that this year.