One of my interests is art. I started doing crafts when I was very young -- everyone in my family is crafty in one form or another. In the last couple of years, I started doing "altered art" which is basically taking anything you find and making it into art. I've taken old books and transformed them into a different book by adding paint, stamps, photos, buttons, all kinds of tidbits. I've covered a wooden box with nails and screws and other hardware and painted the word "MANLY" on it. I've taken old family photos and adding sewing and buttons or old WWII ration coupons or just whatever somehow reflected that person. It's very enjoyable and I like doing it.

Anyway, my latest project has been more painting than altered art. I painted the whole background, then added just a pair of chipboard wings and a pair of wings cut from newspaper and words cut from paper. So, here's the picture:



This painting I wanted to convey the idea that we already have what we need inside of us, we just need to take the risks and go forward with confidence. Sort of like the Wizard of Oz saying "you had it inside you all along".

I've said it myself and heard most everyone I know say those words: "I could never..." I could never speak in front of a group, yet I did. I could never put a worm on a hook, yet I did. (fear of looking like a wimp in front of my young nephews was a great incentive.) I could never paint, yet I do.

As a writer, I've had a lot of people tell me they "could never write a story" or even a paragraph, sometimes. But they can, of course, if they can read and write, they can write a paragraph or a letter or a diary or a blog or a book. It might not end up being Pulitzer-prize winning prose, but it's writing.

I think that's the real problem with most of us. We say we can "never do that" because we don't think we'll be perfect at it. We may want to try to get up and sing at a karaoke night, but we could "never do it". Anyone can get up and sing at karaoke, that's the whole point of karaoke. You might sound terrible, but by golly, you can get up there and pretend you're Celine Dion or Elvis Presley for a few minutes.

If the fear of not being the best at something is keeping us from even trying, that is a sad thing. By the way, nowadays, I can jab a fish hook into a wiggly old worm without even squealing in horror one time. But I just knew I couldn't do it. Until I looked at those three little boys staring up at me with big eyes and a bit of challenge in their faces. Um, yeah, sure, I could put that worm on the hook. gulp. I actually had to squeal a bit the first time and the worm kept wiggling out of position and even falling off the hook on the way to the water.

But the worm got on the hook and the boys were fishing happily while I was scrubbing my hands clean. The next fishing trip, I just did it without squealing or scrubbing my hands raw with soap afterwards. And eventually the worms stayed on the hooks really well and it only took me one try to get them on the hook.

And I always said "I could never paint". Yet right up above of these words, there it is, a painting, done by me. So I guess I CAN paint. It's not perfect, it's not following any particular art style nor do I have any training. It's just me pushing paint around on the canvas and trying to express my feelings.

Before you say "I could never", just think again. Count to ten and think it over. Really you can't do it or are you just afraid of looking foolish? Or have you done it long ago and it didn't turn out well? Well, hell, this is NOW and if you think you want to give whatever it is a try, go for it. At the very least, you'll have a painting or a letter or a memory of singing your heart out. That's not a bad exchange.

Never Say Never

I swore I would NEVER do it. I thought it was ridiculous, pointless, just a waste of money. And then one day my brain started whispering in my ear: "do it, do it. It's easy, everyone else is doing it, what have you got to lose?"

And, like the big old peer-pressure victim that I am, I joined one of those cheesy weight-loss programs. You know, Marie Osmond with big hair assuring you the food is delicious and the pounds will just melt off? Yeah. I fell for that.

I've been overweight for years and years and I thought I had come to peace with it. I wore clothes that, I felt, worked pretty well with my size. I went swimming in the summer with my nephews and nieces and, no, I didn't wear a bikini, I wore a big ol' cover-up-everything suit. But hey, I still got in the pool. I met lots of new people all the time on my job. I didn't let my mind mess with me about the weight. I just said "hey, take it or leave it. This is what I look like."

Sometimes I went dancing with my husband. We went on vacations. Just whatever we wanted to do, we did it.

Then I turned 40. I gained another block of weight (I think it is all in my ass area -- all 50 pounds). I started having trouble with my knees and back. Then I turned 48. Gasp! I realized I was middle-aged. So I decided to join an exercise program, to keep my knees and back limber and to maybe knock off a few pounds at the same time (at least that 50 pound block of butt fat).

I liked it. I was a little self-conscious at first, putting my legs up in the air and pushing them in and out, squeezing my knees all the way to my chest. Not really all the way to my chest, because I have an angry little bundle of belly fat whose whole purpose seems to be keeping my knees away from my chest. I perservered, though, and I started feeling better. My knees felt better, and my back felt better. But I was still eating whatever I wanted to and so I only lost four pounds. Okay, I had firmly told myself losing weight was the main issue, and now I was unhappy that I wasn't losing weight. Hmm.

Sometimes, I can be a little dense. I think I have a clear vision of how I feel about an issue, like weight, and I stop thinking about it. I just tell myself and everyone who asks me, hey, I have decided this, I don't care about my weight. Even when people have pointed out that sometimes extra weight brings health problems. Because I didn't have those kinds of health problems.

Oh, but, wait. I let something slide by when I told you about the exercise program. I had to wait for two weeks to actually start exercising, because a quick blood pressure check showed a crazy high reading. I immediately left the gym and went to my doctor. Yep, now I have high blood pressure. Oh, fuck. Time for a major attitidue adjustment.

Now I had to realize that my weight really isn't okay. It's not just a matter of other people judging me based on my weight. My weight was actually affecting my health. And I couldn't prove it was anything other than my weight. I had to start taking blood pressure medication. And I got to thinking.

I thought about it nearly all the time. I had been wrong for a long, long time. That's hard to admit. And now I had to do something to fix it. I knew what I needed, I needed to stop eating junk food, eat a healthy diet and lose some weight. The exercise wasn't taking off weight very quickly and I knew I was still eating the wrong kinds of food. So I knew there had to be a next step. I needed to go on a diet.
I hate diets. I hate when people tell me about their diets. I hate the "you'll like yourself so much better when you are thin" mentality. The "your husband will finally be attracted to you if you lose weight." Sure, forget all that love and commitment stuff, just eat carrots and keeps your abs looking amazing and your husband will REALLY love you. Not like he loved you when you were fat, but a new, better skinny love.

Well, crap. I had to do something. I just closed my eyes, screwed up my courage and decided "I have to do a diet plan because I will never be able to do this on my own." So I talked it over with my husband and my mother, then got the OK from my doctor. I chose NutriSystem. I mean, who doesn't want to look like Marie Osmond? Are you kidding, that tall hair and those pearly whites? Sign me up.

That is not a real difficult process, to join NutriSystem. I did it all online and my food arrived the next week. A whole big box of food. It's all shelf-safe food, none of it needs refrigeration or freezing. So I got this big old box and I dug through and found lots of things that didn't really look too bad. So I put together a menu for the week and bought a bunch of vegetables and fruit to go along with it.

Trust me, I am not a vegetable and fruit person. You do not get to be my size eating snow peas and mangos. I eat french fries, hamburgers, I practically live on pizza, I love ice cream. Oddly enough, Nutrisystem hadn't included any ice cream in the package. And the pizzas are all tiny. Like the size of a saucer, tiny. Very tasty, but TINY. The theory is that you fill up on vegetables and fruit, those things I just told you I don't really care for.

It's been one week and I've lost 5 pounds. Mostly eating things I haven't really loved. Maybe I just don't have Marie Osmonds' perkiness, but this ain't delicious food, here. It's edible. Some of it's okay. The oatmeal cookies are really good. The cheese tortellini doesn't taste like diet food at all. But then there are the other things -- a LOT of "bars". Bars for lunch, bars for dinner. I can't eat a bar and feel satisfied.

But I can eat some of the things, next month I'll just make sure they don't send me some of the freakier food and that I get plenty of pizzas, tiny though they may be, and lots of granola cereal, which is the best breakfast option for me. And I drink a lot of water. So I'm peeing all the damned time. Hey, more exercise!

I'm just trying to be patient, keep exercising, keep eating the "good" food and hope for the best. But I don't have a goal of losing all my weight, not even half of it. I just want to try for that 50 pounds of butt fat. And to get my blood pressure back in line and my knees and back feeling better. I don't want to be old before I'm old.

So I gotta go heat up some black bean soup, consume far too many vegetables and maybe a nice slice of cantoulope. Baby steps. Just little baby steps.

Books and stupidity

One of my goals this year is to read four books a week. I am also trying to exercise three times a week. It is more likely that I will read four books a week.

I'm pretty sure I can do this, since I've been a dedicated reader since I first learned to string words into a sentence. Being a reader helped me become a writer, and I'm positive that good reading skills and a love of reading helped make me a good student in school.

One of my theories in life is that reading helps make you smart and it helps keep you smart. I have a deathly fear of losing my eyesight and being unable to read. I am convinced that if I can't read books, I will gradually grow dumber and dumber until I start voting Republican and sending fan mail to George W. Bush.

If only more people would read, I think, we'd all be smarter. Imagine: more smart people = fewer people wearing butt-crack exposing pants, watching reality TV shows and trying out for "American Idol."

One thing I hate to hear is "No one reads anymore." I've heard it a million times and it's just such a lie! Maybe not an intentional lie, more like an urban myth. A society where no one reads, next on Geraldo. Book selling is still a huge business. And since money rules everything in our capitalist nation, people are reading and buying books or Barnes and Noble would close its doors and open up Stores for the Very Dumb throughout the country.

Okay, some of those books are pure crap. My friends, we live in a crap-filled world. TV is mostly crap, but still, I am not selling my TV anytime soon. And I will keep reading books, at the risk of reading some crap, until my eyes quit working or my heart stops beating. Whichever comes first.

And in the era of texting, emails and voice messaging, I can see where a person might think "no one" is reading. But I know tons of people who read. They may not read what I read, they may read much more high falutin' literature than I do, or they may read People magazine and consider that sufficient. So what, they're reading. Oh, and for the technology-obsessed out there, Kindle is a nifty little device where you can download entire books onto a small, hand-held apparatus and read the book anywhere. I still like the feel of pages under my fingertips and the smell of ink when I'm reading, but a lot of people swear by Kindles. But hey, I still write actual pen-and-paper letters to people and actually mail them, with a stamp and everything. So I'm not seeing a Kindle in my future anytime soon.

Every time I read a book (well, unless it's a piece of crap book), I get to go somewhere else, be someone else, learn more about the world, even if it's a made-up world. I've even read a book about one of my ancestors, John Berry Hill, who was a prospector and went to California during the Gold Rush. Fascinating reading, especially when you know it's your own family member.

I just read two books by Stiegg Larsson, a Swedish writer who was also a social activist against racism and right-wing extremism in his home country. The books are set in Sweden, a country I previously knew very little about. Now, I may not know it all and I wasn't there in person, but I feel like my mind has stretched just a little bit more to include the people of Sweden and how they live. Larsson died in 2004 of a heart attack, before his three novels were published. Published posthumously, they were bestsellers. Aspiring novelists, pay attention here! Write that book! You know you want to, so just do it and see what happens. None of us lives forever.

For booklovers like me, keep reading. Pick up a Harlequin romance, check out "War and Peace" from the library or go through your own bookshelves and re-read one of your childhood favorites, like "The Wind in the Willows".

Just read. I promise you it will make you smarter. Anyway, you will feel smarter.

Ordinary Days

Today is an ordinary day, the day when I decide to start a blog. Which is just as well, because special occasions are really just ordinary days when we decide to be the stars of our own little soap operas. We dress up, we put on a happy face, we exude warmth, even if we feel like wearing our pajamas, snarling at any other life forms, and poking them in the eye if they try to talk to us.

Weddings are a good example of how we produce little soap operas to celebrate "big days" in our lives. The bride has to wear the most uncomfortable dress she will ever wear in her lifetime. The groom will never let on that he'd rather eat ground glass than hug every guest. The whole damned dysfunctional family will line up for photographs which show them as loving, beautiful people. More money will be spent than anyone can afford.

So we pretend to be beautiful, stylish, loving, wealthy people for one day. Trust me, you will never again in your marriage feel all four of those things in one day. Reality always gives us a pimple on our nose, more bills than we can pay, and niggling little differences that keep our relationships slightly out of balance no matter how much love we feel.

Even funerals become productions. Through our grief, we want to send our loved one off to the grave with panache. Armloads of beautiful flowers they can't smell, clothes they wouldn't have been caught dead in ... oops, well, you know what I mean. And sometimes, we have a little party after the funeral, where all the "guests" eat, drink and try not to be overly merry. And, again, we pretend we're rich by spending a ludicrous amount of money on a casket, a plot of ground in the cemetery and a gravestone nobody will ever visit.

But ordinary days string together to make a life. They are not all good, not all bad, and rarely do they require a white dress with veil. We are ourselves on ordinary days. We smile, we laugh, we like to look nice, those are not bad things. But we also cry, yell, ignore one another, wear questionable clothing, hang up on telemarketers and eat cold pizza for breakfast. And we choose to spend our time with those we enjoy being around, we spend our money on things we need like food and books, and we wear clothes straight out of our own closets.

Evidently, most people enjoy those special days, because weddings are still being thrown and we still gather 'round to see our loved ones off to the next world. But luckily those days are rare and ordinary days far outnumber special days. We need ordinary days to find out who we really are and where we're really going. Ordinary days are also the days when we wash our clothes, put gas in the car and earn a living.

So today is just another ordinary day when I decided to start a blog and who knows, probably no one will even notice. If you have noticed, and you're reading my blog, thank you. If you don't like it, go away. I say that lovingly -- don't read things you don't enjoy, that's just a waste of time. If you like this blog, I'll try to provide more of the same. And I hope you'll be back to share an ordinary day with me.