This year I began a very significant relationship, performed Karaoke in Australia, gave notice at my job with nothing more than blind stupid faith centered around logic like, "we live in a dynamic economy," painted my kitchen neon apricot, spent exactly $540.17 ON COFFEE (what the #%@?)!, showed up for one relatively successful therapy session with father, spent $1,685 on therapy (low caps represent my feeling of sanity and appropriateness around this expense...oh, and did I mention that I have an awesome therapist?), spent $1,132.23 ON CELL PHONE (what the #%@, again?)!, differentiated from my madre and family (yet, again) by not going home for the holidays, ran out of my office approximately 50 times in a tearful state whilte clutching cell phone (which accounts in part for absurd cell phone expense), purchased a guitar (that I have picked up four times in the past eight months to either dust or move so I can mop...still, it's pretty to look at), taught writing to some really kick-ass women in South Central LA, AND blogged about my fear, anxiety, and grief for the world to know (and hopefully empathize with)!

I have a good feeling about 2005.

Happy New Year!

Someone once said that alcoholism is a three-fold disease: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years...and I think it's safe to say that there is a damn good reason for that. Mustling through the holiday insanity sans any anesthesia is like (INSERT CLEVER METAPHOR HERE). It's like walking through a hailing snowstorm with x-ray vision (INSERT SELF-DEPRECATING REMARK ABOUT BAD METAPHOR HERE). So, after experiencing several bouts of loneliness, depression and paralyzing fear about the present, past and future, I am considering becoming a "wine connoisseur" for future holidays. I'm going to have to read up on wines before I know the appropriate lingo to say to get safely sloshed.

Negativity aside, I did have a wonderful Christmas eve and day with my boyriend. It was just everything leading up to it and coming after it that sort of through me...maybe it was the egg nog latte hangover...

Nonetheless, just for today, I'm grateful that Christmas came and went...

My boyfriend and I went to the Einstien exhibit today at a museum. We were sort hit over the head with the truth that the "greatest" thinker of the 20th century was a raging sex and love addict (i.e. womanizer for non-12-step-speak). The museum had all the letters he had written to his mistresses on display, as if the curators were trying to advertise the fact that we need to all take the crazy-haired dude down a couple of notches. Well, it worked. I arrived all ready to go into people-worship mode for the man who said that "imagination is more important than knowledge. But I left feeling that Einstein was, yet, another overrated white man with some charm, good ideas and a lotta confidence.

Why he gotta go and be like that?

I'm still waiting for someone that I can, like, really worship, you know? Like, Jesus, only without the cult following. It's hard to live in the land of celebrity culture and rugged individual when everyone with an iota of genius turns out to have the character of a reality television scapegoat. I know, I know....my parents were just human beings and I need to practice the art of forgiveness...but I'm kind of done with the people worship (does this mean I'm old?).

Just for today, I don't need anyone to look up to ('cept myself).

Venturing from the The Apartment of Sand and Isolation, I sometimes babysit at the House of Food and Love in hopes that by doing the work I did when I was 14 I will miraculously cease to age. While I may physically be 32 years in the physical universe, give me a nice home with lots of good food and fun kids running around and I am indeed ageless. And as an ageless person, I find it totally appropriate to eat lots of cookies, read People magazine (LOVE THAT PUBLICATION...what's so wrong about vapid gossip?) and watch movies that get replayed on cable more frequently than the sun spins around the earth (what's so wrong with watching Alien 3 for the 18th time?...trust me, there will be other lifetimes!).

Everything is fun at the House of Food and Love. I highly recommend such a gig for childless women in their 30's who are unhappy with society's requirements for age appropriateness (I happen to LIKE Forever 21).

Just for today, I can babysit at the House of Food and Love.

I think Mr. Texas Holdem is in need of some attention, folks. I think it's safe to say that someone is not getting his needs met. As a society I think it's important that we turn to this human being and give him (or her) the love that he (or her) deserves.

I gave notice at my job last week.

While drinking the rum eggnog at the Christmas party I got a chance to see how the inmates really feel about working in an environment whose steady politeness and good benefits turns people into walking corpses.

My friend Tim refers to that day as "the day all fun ended." And then there was Mike and Tom who said that they had been there too long to retire. Tom went on to say that after five or six years he thought "what am I doing here?" But now, SEVENTEEN YEARS LATER he's (presumably) comfortable with seeing life as one steady lifeless journey towards retirement.

I wanted to run around the h'ourdeurves table shouting "Step away from the spiked eggnog and Kaluah coffee for one moment and realize that you don't have to go to another depressing office party if you really don't want to for one more day of your life! Just let go of your fear!"

But I realized that they would all look at me like I'm crazy. And probably I am. Because I'm leaving a job with "GOOD BENEFITS" and I don't have another one. But the truth is....

....just for today, I feel free!

4 avocados (amazingly enough)
3 limes
1/2 onion (finely chopped)
2 cloves garlic (finely chopped)
two tomatoes (finely chopped)
salt
pepper
lotta love (that's the kicker)

My relationship is in the toilet, I will soon be unemployed, and I broke my sugar abstinence at the office X-mas party with a giant piece of pecan pie that I inhaled like a smoker in a French bar.

On a positive note, my guacamole was a big hit (and no, nobody got trashed and fell into the punch bowl this year...so boring). The guacamole dish was wiped clean.

Just for today, I have an awesome guacamole recipe (fresh lime juice is what gives it a kick).

There is a great chasm of hopelessness that I am trying NOT to dive into because it's self-indulgent (so I'm told) to feel self-pity when there is (so I'm told) so much to be grateful for. It's an insult to God who (I am told) exists. But that's the Christian world where the acceptance of diversity of emotion and experience is a threatening concept and I try to live in the land of truth, also known as "I feel...when you..." statements.

But my boyfriend and I are so haggard from rip roaring through the bloody gates of relationship hell that at about right now it feels like maybe the chains of religion might actually be a substantial way to hold it all together. I'm also really feeling like maybe I got shafted big time in the lottery for the tickets for the chutes that led to the birth canal in 1972. Cuz I don't know grey from black, or green from purple, I'm like emotionally color blind and anything anyone says or does makes me feel like I've been left in daycare too long.

Everything just feels hopeless. It sucks to have childhood trauma hounding you the rest of your life. I'd rather be simple, uninspired, and uncreative.

Just for today, everything feels quite sucky.

The other night my boyfriend and I got in a giant fight. It's all settled down (so settled, in fact, that he had totally forgotten about it today until I reminded him).

Basically, what happened, in an nut, is that I did something that triggered his triggers (without knowing it), and then he triggered mine, which created a trigger session, which led to simultaneous shame spirals and mutual shaming, which resulted in more triggering... And then I got so angry I couldn't see straight, but he kept wanting to talk, and so I did the unthinkable and I EXPRESSED MY ANGER!! I used the F word and everything. And, you know what? It felt really great. And, you know what else? He got the message. And you know what else? I think I'm going to start getting angry more often in life. It's a lot more fun than imploding and it makes my skin look better.

Just for today, I can get angry.

Boy, I sure picked a great time to stop eating all the fun food. I totally forgot the sedative effect of cookies and eggnog lattes (not to mention the more popular inebriants at Holiday gatherings, like wine and crack) have on this time of year when corporate American insists that we must experience joy (in the form of shopping) or suffer the decline of our retirement porfolios.

I've been feeling like crap for 32 years and never thought for a minute that the consumption of red vines, coke, frapuccinos, egg nog lattes, See's Rum Raisin and Divinity chocolates (sigh), and Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey had anything to do with it. I guess it's the price I paid for not being an alcoholic.

To my own credit, part of this consumption had to do with my refusal to be an irritating healthy person who makes everyone else at the table feel like an undisciplined hedge-hog (because that's not unity), but I've been sick so many times in the last five years and have had so many chronic conditions (i.e. type in "sinus infection" and "UTI" in the search and you'll see what I mean), that I'd rather be an irritant to others...hell, it's about time I've started irritating people! What kind of dull person walks this earth without creating any enemies or fellow irritants.

Anyhoo, the point is I've joined the health camp and I feel great as I drool over the desert table at the office x-mas bash (more on that next week).

Just for today, I can be an irritating healthy person.

My acting teacher tends to drool over the students who have crying fits that turn into hyperventilating seizures and screaming matches in their scenes. It's not that it's not interesting to watch, it's just that the only time in my life I've seen people act like that is in movies about insane asylums and...in acting class. My family was more about the repressed emotion. To dramatize it I would have two actors on stage giving each other the silent treatment (a very "filled" pause with LOTS of "compression") for seven to ten years. It may not be good theater (more performance art), but it would be real...

Just for today, I can keep acting real.

I can no longer hide behind the unlived life of the dial-up user.

My last excuse for staring out into space in a sugar coma has vanished like the dust of yore (is that even word?...who cares).

I now must venture forth into the world or be on the Internet
There is no in between.
I must surf, or surf not
There is no try.

I must suffer the Starbuck's eggnog latte hangover, or stay sane
healthy, boring.

I must fill my life with trips to the mall, dry cleaner, and eye brow lady
Or I must feel the pain

Such is life.

Oh, cable modem.

How you change those you touch.

1) No matter how embarrassing and downright stupid my journaling from my teen years is, I am loathe to burn them because some day I might have a pressing need to find out what I thought I felt for (INSERT NAME) when I was 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17.... I don't actually think I wrote a whole lot that was genuinely connected to my reality of that time, but it still might interest me (clutter no more?).

2) Basic Cable = Television Reception [Why don't THEY (not publicizing my cable provider cuz I'm not an advertising whore) just come out and say it? You have to pay us to watch Judge Judy, the Rockford Files dubbed in Spanish, and local city council meetings (which is not to say that the above listings are NOT entertainment...)].

3) Coffee is not my enemy. Sugar is. (Someone told me sugar ages the body and that was it for me. Because the fact that it's void of nutrients and lowers the immune system weren't good enough reasons to stop digging into the candy bins for Runts and Sweedish Fish like a drug addict.) That said, however, I feel a ton better without sugar than my body THAN I EVER DID WTIHOUT COFFEE! So, take to the Republican Congressional committee of award certifiers Dr. Hak (who's still a nice guy/antibiotic drug dealer)!

4) Cable modem rocks!

My boyfriend is so nice. Sometimes I'm a little distrusting of his niceness because I've been wired to sniff out motives like a hound. And "nice for the sake of niceness" is a motive far under my radar. My therapist told me today that I think everyone is full of shit and I said, "you're right" (and she would know because I've put her through the ringer...).

But I'm starting to think that maybe my boyfriend isn't full of shit. Maybe...perhaps...driving six hours on Thanksgiving day to experience car loads of relatives [some of whom were highly intoxicated (mom?)] is a long way to go just to get laid [which we couldn't even do because someone (mom?) asked us to sleep in separate beds].

So, what is the motive? I think my boyfriend is just nice because he...loves me?

Just for today, I can accept my boyfriend's love.