Archive for the ‘Lifestyle’ Category
JUST as I finished writing that last post about being all down on California, my Pandora station randomly served up this song by Clevergirl, a former artist on my former label. And the song? The one about me. For real. About driving an open highway and drinking good coffee and having great friends and the freedom to just make decisions and roll with it. A certifiably West Coast sort of vibe.
Sigh. Makes me happy. Thanks, Clevergirl, for filling my ego bank with watermelon jolly ranchers, eyes with tears, and writing something as rad as “It’s summertime/ I’m on the road/ Fill the tank and feed my soul/ I dream of things/ You make them true”.
Look out. I’m about to dump a fish gut bucket of hope and despair all up in this, about the unattainable and grand Rome that is New York City. I’ve done it before. I’m sorry. I just can’t seem to process.
Tomorrow night I’m headed east to be the officiant and lesbian of honor for most fun wedding ever. I’m super honored and excited to be a baller in this hell of a good time ceremony and I can’t wait. We’re closing down a gorgeous bar in Brooklyn for the good part of Sunday. I bought a dress that is slinky summertime city awesome. I’m wearing the strappy sandals that I bought for my own wedding several years ago when Newsom opened the floodgates, but never got to wear because the voters of California dammed them up with awful cement bags before we could get inside. And because we couldn’t agree what to wear, but that’s another post.
I am still living in California, clearly. I smile at people and generally obey crosswalks. I get upset when fellow Bay Area inhabitants are awful to one another. I eat cheeses and drink wine that grew up about 30 miles from where I’m standing. It’s never humid or freezing, and my hair doesn’t frizz. Skies are usually blue, there is a totally amazing feeling of freedom in escaping to Point Reyes for oysters and wandering among coastal cypress trees, or hopping down to San Diego and teaching the kids how to boogie board before joining friends for a palm tree patio bbq in the easy summer sun. I can ski, surf, hike, dance, perform, work, thrive here easily. My kids are happy. I grew up under this hopeful night sky with clear full moons and it has all the makings of the rest of my life.
Except it doesn’t. I am positive that I have the best job in the universe. Like, the kind you don’t ever leave. If you work in private service long enough, you become aware that the golden positions are all about who fits you, much more than who you fit. Working for someone who’s right for me improves my life quality by leaps and bounds. And truth be told, that, and the amazing school my daughter attends, a handful of old friends, and widely available taquerias and decent coffee roasters are the only thing that’s keeping me here. (Yes I know, Brooklyn, you have Blue Bottle finally. Go, you.)
I go to New York with equal parts excitement and sadness. I want to be the person who pops in for a weekend, has a blast and then comes back to the life she prefers, the life she intends to live forever, all full of goals and thriving and sugar cookies.
On the bright side (see, I’m from California. I have to have one), the aforementioned perfect dress, a total Tahari score at Bloomingdale’s, makes me feel a way I’ve always wanted to feel: like the women in the opening of Something’s Gotta Give. Breezy and badass in a TOTALLY sexy way. Silly, I know, but it’s a thing.
Is it just me? I think it’s just me. I hate blog comments.
Simple yet tremendously popular blogs have tons of comments from people I imagine are wearing Target yoga pants and hopping online whenever Desperate Housewives goes to commercial, who sound like they’re cozying up to the teacher for a better grade.
“Wow such a great post. I wish I could be like you. Do you like cookies? I’ll make you some”
Then you have the ones who try to make snarky comments but fail embarassingly. I imagine these to be like my neighbor in Portland overweight hair-thinning gamer type with a pet lizard who roams free about the apartment. Smart sometimes when he can manage to put the bong down, but painfully introverted. Laughs with a short snorty honk. Oh, gamer. Poor you.
And finally, there are the ones who take to comment sections to air their bigotry within the freedom of anonymity. I don’t have an example of what those guys look like because it’s only on blog comments that I am reminded they exist. Oh, and in election years.
In the end, there are a handful of more authentic “love this” type responses from folks who just want to profess their enthusiasm, but what’s the point?
I turned comments off. Not that anyone was commenting, but I’d rather have a handful of undated little time capsules than a diary with a running peanut gallery and shitload of spam. I hope that’s not lame, I just don’t see the value.
Having spent every working day for the last 20 years within the intimate confines of the lives of the families I support, I have seen my share of freak outs. To survive in that moment as an outsider, you have to simply revere the fact that everyone needs to process in that sacred and important space, to emote and deal with their personal lives in their own homes. That’s where you get to make mistakes, say the wrong thing, feel bad, and ask for forgiveness later and feel okay about it because it’s not work, it’s family. Due to this tolerance level, suffice it to say that by the time I think someone is losing it, they’re well and gone past the goal post and have been running blind in the wrong direction for miles.
Throughout my career, I have been surrounded by an awful lot of wealthy doctors and lawyers who all speak a language that sounds like a teabag of English dipped in a hot, over-educated bath of anxiety and micromanagement. Summoning compassion for that personality takes a LOT of understanding if you’re the kind of person they make fun of behind closed doors (“No Ivy League degree AND a musician? She must be a MORON! How does she even make executive decisions? Does she even speak the LANGUAGE?”).. fighting on their behalf takes even more. Even if you’re faking it, you still need to do it because deep down you believe they deserve good in life.
Today a personal someone (not a work someone, thank god), freaked out on me. And I am just left with the plain reality that she did not give me the courtesy of calming herself down before lashing out, of taking the high road, and being a grown up.
Only once before in my life, has someone decided to discard all my efforts to honor the relationship, even if it was ending badly, and instead hide behind closed doors. To throw me back to the wolves. It stings.
In the end, all ou’re left with is a question mark as to how everything went so HORRIBLY wrong when you did everything you could to make it right, and the reminder that self-reliance is king and Emerson wasn’t whistling Dixie when he said it.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m an asshole to be married to sometimes, probably a crappy mom in my worst moments, and have done lots of shitty things to people in my life (Megan from the 1st grade, I’m sorry Reyme and I stuck our tongues out at you while we were getting on the bus after you peed your pants in class. I really do think about it still. Your mom was mean to you. It wasn’t your fault). But this time I know, I KNOW it wasn’t me.
And that’s where it ends, because the relationship is over. Somewhere out there, that person goes on living their life and so do you.
In tribute to this mess of a totally therapeutic post, I am posting the brillz Money Changes Everything performance of everyone’s favorite trashcan-kicking lesbian, Cyndi Lauper. If I could change the lyrics I would say that a sense of entitlement, often resulting from a wealthy upbringing, changes everything, but that wouldn’t really have the same lyrical zing.
I have never, ever in my life, been on a diet. I’ve never passed on a bread basket because of any rule or purposely abstained from dessert. Outside of the occasional health fast, I’ve never abstained at all. They first did this in high school: a training ground I probably missed, being distracted by wanting to make out with the girls, not learn about their breakfast shakes.
They do it in magazines, ads, movies. Diet tips. Things to do with lemons and cucumbers (or were those for home spa facials?). They were for girls who know the names of nail polish colors, carry an assortment of cute purses and have long hair in ponytails and boyfriends. Not girls like me.
All my favorite, most close friends have had weight issues throughout life but they’ve been very private battles for some reason (right now I am wondering why, actually, because it seems like a very public issue). My mom and sister would periodically embrace some wholesale program like Nutrisystem, but my little knowledge of each amounted to what program-approved snack bars they thought were gross and would be left in the cabinets for me to sneak afterschool.
I have just not ever had the experience of eating particular things for any other reason than that it seemed good at the moment. I have always had a fast metabolism, boosted by years of ballet class, cheffing and event managing on my feet for 10 hours at a time, and am oddly driven to do weird things like wax the floors or rearrange the living room furniture at 3am, ALL the time. My zeal for life quality leads me in the direction of wine, prawns, butter, cream, sugar, chocolate, garlic, more butter, liver, oysters. I adore food. After eating it I was typically dancing around the living room or doing some show or running around carrying my 70lb electric piano or carting one of the kids on my hip while signing mortgage documents or something, and it’s never really been a passion of mine to be thin and suffice it to say it just didn’t affect me and it just didn’t matter.
But this is the 60 days of self-examination and improvement, and no stone can lie idle. I am TORTUOUSLY out of shape, and that is a sad state for a mom who DID NOT EVEN GESTATE the baby, but still managed to gain 30lbs. I got cocky midway into the third trimester, and once the little sucker was born I was stuck on the couch with no hope for anything but survival for many dark months.
So here I am, building my own wagon to hop aboard, trying to figure out how people actively pay attention to their eating habits. Suddenly I am on a journey through a strange land inhabited for years by most people I know but before now completely invisible to me, and I’m asking them for the most basic directions. They have houses built here that I didn’t even know about. Driveways, landscaping. They have established their particular neighborhoods, being able to discuss the merits of Weight Watchers v South Beach, or the optimal treadmill brand. I am Alice in Wonderland with my little calorie counting app, wandering through in a daze, asserting stupid impossibilities like that the elliptical machine calorie counter is totally accurate and I really did burn 460 calories in 30 minutes (note, best friend says no, which is tragic because I was about to declare this war over early). The sky here is a color I have not seen. People know very specific information, like that an egg is a good bang-for-buck and that bacon on top of a hamburger is a dance with the devil.
It’s not as though I’ve been oblivious to nutrition, but this is a very specific endeavor- to actually assess the amount of energy I take in, and put out.
Tonight I took the kids to the burger place to assert my independence over french fries. I would eat them, and something lovely alongside, and still come out under 600 calories or the above mentioned best friend would be able to call me Hank for a full week. I have succeeded, but am feeling trepidatious about optimism in this world where everyone but me knows North from South and there are no street signs.
Above is my very sensible salad with dressing on the side. I did not order like Meg Ryan though I wish now I had. That’s probably a tired joke to people in diet land.