“What is with all these people throwing their hands up?” my friend was saying to me.

He wasn’t talking about me, but I knew I was guilty. There was THIS thing, and then ANOTHER crazy-making other thing that I needed to rant about.

I was beginning to see his point: throwing my hands up in the air, to give up and give in to frustration is the stance of the victim. If I do that, I am letting life give me a stick-up.

“Hands in the air! Give me all your valuables!”

My most valued thing is my ability to do something in the world. Getting my hands in there and doing what needs to be done, that’s all I’ve really got. Here, you can take my wallet and my watch. I won’t need to keep track of the passing of time if I am doing nothing with it anyway.

I was born to do the things that I can do–to be more precise, to do the things that only I can do.

That takes getting engaged. That takes using my strength and my heart and my hands to grapple with life. So glorious to realize that I can take my hands down, put them at my sides and get some leverage on what matters.

But what matters? What should I do?

I should do what matters to me. It’s as easy and as hard as that.

I get to do what I do. I get to be me.

Doing what I do means taking the chances my days give me. I should leap at the chances to engage with the world around me and the people around me.

In the elevator last week, door opened on a guy in a t-shirt.

“Going up?”

I asked him what he was there for.

“I am here for voice-over work.”

Oh. An actor.  And now we were at our stop. “Good luck, I hope you get the part.”

“Oh, I already have it.”

We separated; I had to pick up my package.

I live in the shadow of Hollywood. I have had dealings with actors before. He stayed in my mind, because he was far less arrogant than most actors I meet. He didn’t treat me like a two-dimensional audience like they usually do.

He was still waiting in the hall when I came out with my package.

I wanted to talk to him some more.

But I had no reason to.

Except…life is to engage with.

I had no reason not to. Dive in!

I approached him, “What’s your name? Should I go like you on Facebook?”

“Oh, I’m not on Facebook.”

“You’re an actor right? Are you in anything?”
“Nothing you would know…”

“Well, I’m trying to be a fan, but I am having a hard time figuring out how.”

He laughed, a shy laugh.

“So you only do voice work? You should get a job doing animation.”
“No, animation means you have to have a funny voice…like a cartoon voice.”

“That’s true. Your voice is kind of gravelly. I know! You could be a dog.”

“I like dogs.”

“There! Tell your agent to get you a dog.”

It was a lovely conversation, which was very much the sort of conversation that I tend to have. He laughed, and it restored my faith in actor-kind.

This engage-with-life idea was working.

Yeah! Go forth and express self-hood! Don’t repress! Dive in!

So that evening I go express myself into a flame war online.

…Really? REALLY?

Someone was threatening to set his hair on fire to prove that I was wrong.

Sigh

Not everybody is going to love me all the time.

There are going to be people who don’t see it my way, and some of those people are going to decide that someone’s hair needs to be set on fire.

Yikes! It can be so unexpectedly dangerous to be me. THIS is why…*hands thrown up*…

Here I go again. Didn’t I just get over that? That’s not fun anymore. There are obstacles, there’s bound to be. But if I hang on to the truth of what I know, and I keep trying it will be ok.

With the possibility of way better than okay.

Italicizing Foreign Words

I guess I had let myself get into a rut.

a few spots, habits of places and conversations.

Yes, I do like to go to the same spot and get exactly what I expected

Sometimes.

But there are happening spots, here on the World Wide Web.

And I’ve shaken up my routine a little.

It’s fun to get out there.

Hi Everybody! The show starts wednesday. Don’t Miss It!

There are times when it is possible to decide to be happy. Other times it seems impossible to make that choice.

I think that choosing to be happy is always in the options at any time.

But sometimes it’s not within reach.

Today I can reach it and I’m so happy

“We are just going to have to read translations.”

My book club friend and I had been talking about what book to read next. We’re choosy, and we have already run through so many–MOST–of the good ones.

We’ve shot the canon.

So. For our next book to read, what do we have left? I refuse to spend the rest of my life re-reading books. There must be something more out there.

By chance, the next weekend, I was introduced to a spanish language undergrad. “Can you point me to a few good novels from Spain?” I asked.

“Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Zee-Ay-Eff-Oh-En.” She assured me he was the real deal.

The Shadow of the Wind is where I began. One of the major catalysts for the action of the story is a place called the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

Now, taking a moment to be personal here, I am a writer. See that? I just wrote that.

As I have learned more about writing and written more, I approach books differently. I am now always aware of the author when I am reading. I used to be able to forget about the author, but now I am aware of the author’s choices when he or she decides to tell the story a particular way.

For example, I read Until I Find You by John Irving and loved it. Hooray! a new author! I went to read more of his works. Then, not very far into the next book, a little boy got his eye put out in a freak car accident. I could not forgive the author for mistreating a little kid, and refused to finish the book. I don’t think he had to do that! Even if eyes of little boys are sometimes put out in real life. I didn’t think the author had to go there.

Back to Zafon: the Cemetery of Forgotten Books is an enormous labyrinth, a very secret place, where books will be protected. They will not disappear, they will be preserved and saved. The stories’ action start or is affected by this place.

In the next story by Zafon, The Prisoner of Heaven, the hero is an author. He writes sensational horror for money, and finally gets a chance to write a REAL story. He writes and pours his soul into this one, and it is dismissed by the critics. His evil publisher pulps all but a very few copies, and he is devastated.

He knows this one is better than the popular stuff he has written, and goes to the mysterious bookseller’s shop, staggering with  broken heart and having nowhere else to go.

‘You once told me of a place where you could keep a book, where it would never be destroyed and be safe forever.’

Oh.

Oh, Zafon. I understand now. That’s what the Cemetery of Forgotten Books is about.

I am preparing my latest book for publication. This one is the one that matters. I have spent ten years running my soul through a meat grinder to tell this story. And I am about to make it into a book, which has every likelihood of being ignored.

If I had to sell it to a publisher who had a right to destroy it, I might be in the same spot as the brokenhearted hero. It *could* be destroyed by unscrupulous people.

I am not giving up my rights to my story, because I don’t have to. But with great gifts come great responsibility. I will have to find a way to tell the whole world that they need to hear my story. And the whole world is notoriously uninterested in me.

It is possible that this ten year story will bear the same fate as my little 5 month Miriam the Camel Driver story; a few people read it and were delighted.

A very few.

I know there are at least 10 people who will read this Big One. And I know that many more people’s lives would be changed if they read it too.

Be fickle, Fortune, and let this one be discovered. But if not, even if my 10 were the only ones that read it,  for the sake of ten it is still worth it.

What else was I gonna do with those ten years? My soul was going to be ground up anyway.

If you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything. So, with my busy life, I’ve been turning to meal shakes.

I have a big plastic cup and a fork to mix the powder and the water. I take this with me all over the place, because I have to go all over the place for my job.

I have a few plastic cups, but I have one fork I try to use.

Chris and I took special care to select and purchase our silverware set, and we love the feel of our soup spoons and the heavy butter knife handle.

My travel fork is one that I’ve stolen from a cafeteria. It is a crappy little fork, and that is how it should be. I am super careful to protect this fork so that it will stand in gaurding against the *real* loss of the precious household fork.

I want to hold on to the bad fork so I don’t even risk losing the fork I really care about losing.

This reminds me of another societal crappy thing we work very hard to protect. George Carlin famously refers to the Seven Dirty Words. Of course, there are more than seven. They are words we protect. The dirty words, the cuss words, the profane and the naughty ones.

They are held in reserve, not said on the radio or on TV. Well, they are said on cable–the kind of cable you have to pay extra for.

The dirty words are protected, even though they are expecially tough. In fact, the protected words are so very strong that they have an unbelievable array of meanings. Nearly unlimited. And they are some of the oldest words of any language, english included.

Why are we so careful to protect them?

I was raised to never ever use these words. I never ever heard my mother or my father curse. My dad, when upset, said “Good Night!”

None of my friends said swears. We were even reprimanded from the pulpit not to say “Gosh!” because it was too close to taking the Lord’s name in vain. It was decided that only an exclamation of “Man!” was acceptable.

They wuz crazy.

At my current job, when I started, I noticed immediately that I worked entirely with men.

Men who cussed.

Here’s the thing about cussing: Cussing is a form of escalation. It is a yellow alert. It’s intimidating. It’s threatening.

I made a very quick decision; to fit in I would bring it. If the boys were going to cuss, I was going to cuss more.

It’s not that hard.

But I felt I needed their respect and to be seen as an equal.

On the  threat spectrum, where zero is no threat, cussing is a step down the continuum that ends in somebody getting killed.

I don’t want to get killed. I dont’ want to get beat up or even punched once.

So. In the same way that my crappy fork stands in protection of my good silverware, cussing stands in the place of bodily harm.

It makes sense that we are careful, and that I should be careful with the bad language. It is incredibly powerful and does it’s job very well.

There was a study done recently that talks about these powerful words even having a painkilling affect. Many of us instinctively yell one out when we hammer our finger or stub our toe. It turns out, it works.

Except. We start to build a tolerance if we over use the words too much. We have to protect them, and ourselves.

They are that special.

Dude at the gas station in front of me was trying to cash a check.

“No we don’t do that here. Go to the bank.”

“When does the bank open? This is my ride home”

“10 am. It is 7:30 now”

That’s a long time to wait.

I followed him out. “What do you need?”

“Oh, I’m just trying to get home.”

“What do you need? Gas?” I didn’t know if he has a car or was riding the bus

“Yeah…”

I rummaged in my purse. I wanted to give him a five, but all I had was 20s. I gave him two ones.

” oh thank you! Let me give you my business card so you can hit me up.”

” oh that’s ok.”

He took my two dollars to the cashier to buy gas. Then I thought, oh that may have been him making a pass at me rather than him offering to repay the money

Or it could have been both.

Sometimes it’s hard to be a Good Samaritan in a dress. Still felt pretty good.

sometimes people are so incredibly wrong, that even if they happen to be right they are still wrong.

If something is true it is true

Whether Einstein said or whether I said it, if its true its true

How do I know it’s true?

Empowering resonance.

Something is congealing. I have been so despairing lately of finding Excellent and Quality in every day life.

And then I was challenged regarding those definitions, and told that intuition would be a better guide for finding and defining these traits.

INTUITION! Oh please.

Really?

Really?

so we start with a search for a better definition, a more precise or usable definition..and end up with a measurement that is totally useless.

Or at least totally amorphous.

Which is sort of mockingly useless. Like “If you were more intuitive, you would understand how to use intuition to deal with your life.”

So. Intuition was blocked, so I thought more about quality and excellence.

So, I want to do something excellent. And I want to do quality work.

Side bar: I imagine it is possible to do something excellent that is not very good quality. For example,  Eggers wrote an excellent book (excellent because of the way he got it out there and how many people were affected by it) _A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius_, but I don’t think it was very good quality writing. I read another book _The Stone Diaries_, which is very high quality writing but not an excellent story.

All right. Perhaps Excellence must be coupled with vision. Someone or a group of someones must have the vision of the thing, the Stuff (item, organization, product) that will be excellent. Then the quality of that is to be worked out in practice, but the Vision is the start, and the persistence of vision keeps the excellent idea moving towards its excellent execution.

i have visions every day that i don’t execute. Execution must be coupled with Excellence

So then, for the life cycle of excellent, we have Vision,  Execution, and Excellence

Maybe.

And then today. Out of nearly nowhere, I hear somebody talking to me about “nature”

as in, my nature, the nature of who I am

aw crap. Is that intuition again?

No, this one smells different. They are cousins, though.

It is my nature to do the things I always end up doing.

In my case, that means striking up conversations with strangers.

I LOVE that.

and it also means having a set of things I want to work on and accomplish in a day, and being proud of the high quality work I’ve done at the end of the day while planning the next day’s work

It is against my nature to go limp and  not run full out towards a goal.

I think that when I go against my nature, the cognitive dissonance is so clanging that I have trouble hearing my intuition.

which is what makes it so hard for me to figure this intuition thing out

So here I go again.

I intuitively act according to my nature. I am in tune with myself when I do what comes

NATURALLY

to me.

If I am doing something that does not come naturally, then I am constantly tamping down my own alarm system–my intuition–to continue behaving unnaturally.

IF, however, I do what comes naturally, i can then begin to respond in my own unique way to people around me.

It is OK for me to act like myself

it is acceptable for me to act like myself

It is in fact

THE BEST EXPRESSION OF THE GLORY OF GOD FOR ME TO ACT LIKE MYSELF

which is to say:

I ought to lean into this acting-like-myself thing. I ought to run after it

LIKE I”M BEING CHASED

because, after all, that it my nature. To do it hard.

and also, it’s a spec. It’s a requirement.

Like, I would say no if someone suggested that I stay up for 36 hours and not sleep.

I can’t do that.

And if someone suggests that I not pursue my vision of excellence…

I can’t do that.

I would have to say no.