I talk out loud to myself and answer my own questions. I genuinely like everyone I meet and regularly give people the benefit of the doubt. I believe everyone has something to offer in this world -each one with value, each one deserving of fairness and consideration. I think children should enjoy making messes and learn from the experience. I expect more of myself than I expect of anyone else, not because I'm better in any way but because I know that I am not and, so, I must always work harder to prove myself worthy. I give my all to whatever I am doing at any given moment because someone, somewhere, may be depending on me and -more than anything else- I never want to let anyone down. "I never want to let anyone down." An odd thing to want, isn't it? It's going to happen anyway, I know. I hate that part. I want to be more than I am. I want to be more like my best friend; he's the whole enchilada. I see in him all things wise and wonderful (apologies to James Herriot for the thievery), and I wish-wish-wish to grow up to resemble his qualities, even in the smallest quantity. I want to be bold and brave. I want to be wise and calm.
Yes, it's all one paragraph. Yes, there's more. Yes, that's the point.
05 February 2009
Uh One-and...Two-and... OneTwoThreeFour
I have two left feet.
Or two right feet, depending on where in the room you're standing and how closely you're counting the beat. Either way, I don't have dancing feet and that's a bit of a problem as the Wedding Dance approach-eth.
Now, I don't want to get all "bridezilla" on you, but I have to say that I've been looking forward to this happy occasion for a while now and I have a vested interest in everything going smoothly. I do realize that a wedding is simply the public affirmation of a private commitment and, as long as the groom shows up and the minister (or, in our case, Justice of the Peace) makes it legal, all is good. Still, there's nothing to gain by being haphazard about the affair and leaving the details to fate.
So, my fiance and I started taking dance lessons in an attempt to make that First Dance look more interesting than your typical 3-minute long swaying bear hug. Second only to the vows, this is the next most-watched moment of the day, and I think it would be nice if it didn't inspire collective yawns and furtive glances at the clock.
After giving it much thought and nearly wearing out our welcome on iTunes, we finally chose a song that adequately expresses our feelings for each other and yet isn't a groan-inducing mush-fest. We then found a dance instructor who teaches out of his home studio in the evenings and who didn't seem to mind that we looked like a pair of duckbilled platypuses (platypi?) when we stumbled and staggered and lost count. (That counting business, by the way, is not as easy as it sounds. Yes, I know we only have to count to eight, but there's a technique to it and, frankly, I'm not picking it up as fast as my dancing partner.)
Tuesday night was lesson number three of five and all was going well (uh one-and... two-and...) until the instructor threw in an Open-Break-Underarm-Spin-With-A-Position-Change-Into-A-Side-Cross-Slide-Stop.
Huh?
Really, now. Does it need that many words? Can't we call it what it really is? Its the "Make-the-bride-wish-she-was-hugging-a-bear" move. Or, more accurately, the "What-the-Hell??" move.
We'd already mastered the basic two-step move (quick-quick s-l-o-w... quick-quick s-l-o-w...) last week, and we had even progressed to the more challenging "point-draw-point-draw s-l-i-d-e" move soon after we began the lesson that night. Not too shabby for a girl who can't move to any beat without looking like Jan Brady at the Junior Prom.
Clearly, my off-night practice had been helping, and I'll admit I might have been showing off a wee bit. It was at this point the mood of the lesson changed abruptly.
Perhaps the instructor thought I was getting a little cocky. After all, I did finish the "pattycake" move with a touch of jazz hands. Perhaps he felt I was getting a little big for my britches when I stopped counting out loud, and he decided I needed a little 'Dancing with the Stars' reality check.
Well... check, I did. When the instructor demonstrated the Open-Break-Underarm-Spin-With-A-Position-Change-Into-A-Side-Cross-Slide-Stop (hereafter known as the "WTH??"), he first used his imaginary (and light as a feather, apparently) dance partner, "Shirley"... As in, "SURELY, you can follow THIS step combination Miss Fancy-Pants?"
After a few demonstrations, when he was certain that my confusion was sealed, he took my hand and told my fiance to step aside. What followed was most assuredly YouTube gold. He deftly broke open my underarm spin, positioning me into a cross referenced sideways stop with a pattycake finsh...
Read that: he tossed me like a salad and left me begging for Tylenol.
Me and my two left feet were adequately humbled and I quickly took the jazz hands down a notch. Lesson learned: Ginger Rogers, I am not.
Still, I'm not willing to let a little reality check get me down. I want that First Dance moment to be beautiful and memorable -and not because my husband dragged my high-heel sportin,' fancy gown-wearin,' bridal butt around the dancefloor for the duration of a sappy love song. I want it to be remembered for the grace of two lovers, lost in lyrical emotion on the day of their joining in matrimony, moving in time to a romantic heartbeat...
So, me and my two left feet will keep working until we get it right.
Well, left and right, hopefully.
Or two right feet, depending on where in the room you're standing and how closely you're counting the beat. Either way, I don't have dancing feet and that's a bit of a problem as the Wedding Dance approach-eth.
Now, I don't want to get all "bridezilla" on you, but I have to say that I've been looking forward to this happy occasion for a while now and I have a vested interest in everything going smoothly. I do realize that a wedding is simply the public affirmation of a private commitment and, as long as the groom shows up and the minister (or, in our case, Justice of the Peace) makes it legal, all is good. Still, there's nothing to gain by being haphazard about the affair and leaving the details to fate.
So, my fiance and I started taking dance lessons in an attempt to make that First Dance look more interesting than your typical 3-minute long swaying bear hug. Second only to the vows, this is the next most-watched moment of the day, and I think it would be nice if it didn't inspire collective yawns and furtive glances at the clock.
After giving it much thought and nearly wearing out our welcome on iTunes, we finally chose a song that adequately expresses our feelings for each other and yet isn't a groan-inducing mush-fest. We then found a dance instructor who teaches out of his home studio in the evenings and who didn't seem to mind that we looked like a pair of duckbilled platypuses (platypi?) when we stumbled and staggered and lost count. (That counting business, by the way, is not as easy as it sounds. Yes, I know we only have to count to eight, but there's a technique to it and, frankly, I'm not picking it up as fast as my dancing partner.)
Tuesday night was lesson number three of five and all was going well (uh one-and... two-and...) until the instructor threw in an Open-Break-Underarm-Spin-With-A-Position-Change-Into-A-Side-Cross-Slide-Stop.
Huh?
Really, now. Does it need that many words? Can't we call it what it really is? Its the "Make-the-bride-wish-she-was-hugging-a-bear" move. Or, more accurately, the "What-the-Hell??" move.
We'd already mastered the basic two-step move (quick-quick s-l-o-w... quick-quick s-l-o-w...) last week, and we had even progressed to the more challenging "point-draw-point-draw s-l-i-d-e" move soon after we began the lesson that night. Not too shabby for a girl who can't move to any beat without looking like Jan Brady at the Junior Prom.
Clearly, my off-night practice had been helping, and I'll admit I might have been showing off a wee bit. It was at this point the mood of the lesson changed abruptly.
Perhaps the instructor thought I was getting a little cocky. After all, I did finish the "pattycake" move with a touch of jazz hands. Perhaps he felt I was getting a little big for my britches when I stopped counting out loud, and he decided I needed a little 'Dancing with the Stars' reality check.
Well... check, I did. When the instructor demonstrated the Open-Break-Underarm-Spin-With-A-Position-Change-Into-A-Side-Cross-Slide-Stop (hereafter known as the "WTH??"), he first used his imaginary (and light as a feather, apparently) dance partner, "Shirley"... As in, "SURELY, you can follow THIS step combination Miss Fancy-Pants?"
After a few demonstrations, when he was certain that my confusion was sealed, he took my hand and told my fiance to step aside. What followed was most assuredly YouTube gold. He deftly broke open my underarm spin, positioning me into a cross referenced sideways stop with a pattycake finsh...
Read that: he tossed me like a salad and left me begging for Tylenol.
Me and my two left feet were adequately humbled and I quickly took the jazz hands down a notch. Lesson learned: Ginger Rogers, I am not.
Still, I'm not willing to let a little reality check get me down. I want that First Dance moment to be beautiful and memorable -and not because my husband dragged my high-heel sportin,' fancy gown-wearin,' bridal butt around the dancefloor for the duration of a sappy love song. I want it to be remembered for the grace of two lovers, lost in lyrical emotion on the day of their joining in matrimony, moving in time to a romantic heartbeat...
So, me and my two left feet will keep working until we get it right.
Well, left and right, hopefully.
02 February 2009
New Journal, Page 1
Okay, I'll admit I've been slacking off. I'm a Government Journalism major and (recently at least) I've been heavy on the "government" and light on the "journalism." How am I ever going to improve my writing skills if I don't actually write something?
I will be the first to admit that, as much as I love writing, most of my 'work' appears in my personal journal which sits on my nightstand, and which pages are filled with the ramblings of a girl who is trying to teach herself NOT to talk to herself out loud anymore.
I've been writing in a personal journal since I was about 12 years old. Maybe longer than that, even. I still have most of those books in a box in my garage, sharing space with yellowed love letters from crushes of my youth, and souvenirs of good times and bad since I was old enough to walk.
Some of those journal-books tell of teenage angst: who did or didn't ask me out; what my bipolar mother did to me THIS time; what I imagined the popular kids were doing at any given time (which was usually pretty fantastical since I was myself both unpopular and incredibly imaginative).
Some of those books tell of my marriage to a man I thought I knew; my pregnancies and the births of my children; the breakup of that marriage and the incredibly painful divorce and custody challenges that brought me to my knees and taught me how to stand on my own two feet again.
Somewhere in that box in my garage is the journal with the entry that begins, "He finally found me -and I didn't even know he was looking." The beginning of an extraordinary relationship with a man whose soul is the other half of my own and whose emotions I could feel from a distance, wherever I was. And now, my journal is a running "to do" list for the wedding, sprinkled with tidbits of my academic stress and insights into the changes my children are going through as they enter the teen years that I myself remember all too well.
A friend recently suggested that the story of the events of my life might be "epic," but I resist that suggestion. My story is just a string of stumbles and falls, choices and mistakes --things that happened to me and things that happened because of me. That's not epic. That's just life. There isn't anything earth-shattering in there, just a lot of tedious -and sometimes random and inexplicable- thoughts given to ink and paper.
My fiance asked me if, after I pass away, would I want my journals to be read by anyone? I hesitated to answer that. Those journals are very personal to me. In a large way, they ARE me. I wrote freely, as if I was alone... talking to myself. I didn't censor or edit a single word on a single page. In real life, (like everyone else on the planet) I DO censor myself. I DO edit my words, or at least I choose them very carefully when situations call for it. If anyone read my journals, it would be like letting them read my mind. No, my very SOUL.
I imagine anyone reading those journals would think I was plum crazy. An emotional whirlwind. A "tempest in a teapot," as my father used to call me. All this urgent energy pushing the envelope of a young girl's psyche and creating a frenetic interpretive dance of words, changing mood and tempo from moment to moment. There is little indication of the sane, stable, focused woman I am on the outside. Could anyone who knows and loves me still see me (or remember me, if I'm dead and gone) in the same way they did before they opened the covers of my journals?
I don't know that I'm willing to take that risk. Not even if I'm dead.
It's not so much that I believe in an afterlife where those loved ones will call me to the carpet for being the nut-job they recently discovered me to be (assuming they don't cross to another heavenly cloud when they see me coming...). But, then again, I'm creative enough to IMAGINE such an afterlife and, really, I don't want to spend eternity eating alone at the Unpopular Table in the Cafeteria of Heaven.
No, I think I'll hang on to the facade of normalcy that I've created on the outside and spare the world the fragile, uncertain, insecure Melissa that I keep inside... even if it means that my life's "epic" journalistic endeavors -as memorialized on the many pages of cloth covered, spiral bound journal-books- go with me to the grave.
I will be the first to admit that, as much as I love writing, most of my 'work' appears in my personal journal which sits on my nightstand, and which pages are filled with the ramblings of a girl who is trying to teach herself NOT to talk to herself out loud anymore.
I've been writing in a personal journal since I was about 12 years old. Maybe longer than that, even. I still have most of those books in a box in my garage, sharing space with yellowed love letters from crushes of my youth, and souvenirs of good times and bad since I was old enough to walk.
Some of those journal-books tell of teenage angst: who did or didn't ask me out; what my bipolar mother did to me THIS time; what I imagined the popular kids were doing at any given time (which was usually pretty fantastical since I was myself both unpopular and incredibly imaginative).
Some of those books tell of my marriage to a man I thought I knew; my pregnancies and the births of my children; the breakup of that marriage and the incredibly painful divorce and custody challenges that brought me to my knees and taught me how to stand on my own two feet again.
Somewhere in that box in my garage is the journal with the entry that begins, "He finally found me -and I didn't even know he was looking." The beginning of an extraordinary relationship with a man whose soul is the other half of my own and whose emotions I could feel from a distance, wherever I was. And now, my journal is a running "to do" list for the wedding, sprinkled with tidbits of my academic stress and insights into the changes my children are going through as they enter the teen years that I myself remember all too well.
A friend recently suggested that the story of the events of my life might be "epic," but I resist that suggestion. My story is just a string of stumbles and falls, choices and mistakes --things that happened to me and things that happened because of me. That's not epic. That's just life. There isn't anything earth-shattering in there, just a lot of tedious -and sometimes random and inexplicable- thoughts given to ink and paper.
My fiance asked me if, after I pass away, would I want my journals to be read by anyone? I hesitated to answer that. Those journals are very personal to me. In a large way, they ARE me. I wrote freely, as if I was alone... talking to myself. I didn't censor or edit a single word on a single page. In real life, (like everyone else on the planet) I DO censor myself. I DO edit my words, or at least I choose them very carefully when situations call for it. If anyone read my journals, it would be like letting them read my mind. No, my very SOUL.
I imagine anyone reading those journals would think I was plum crazy. An emotional whirlwind. A "tempest in a teapot," as my father used to call me. All this urgent energy pushing the envelope of a young girl's psyche and creating a frenetic interpretive dance of words, changing mood and tempo from moment to moment. There is little indication of the sane, stable, focused woman I am on the outside. Could anyone who knows and loves me still see me (or remember me, if I'm dead and gone) in the same way they did before they opened the covers of my journals?
I don't know that I'm willing to take that risk. Not even if I'm dead.
It's not so much that I believe in an afterlife where those loved ones will call me to the carpet for being the nut-job they recently discovered me to be (assuming they don't cross to another heavenly cloud when they see me coming...). But, then again, I'm creative enough to IMAGINE such an afterlife and, really, I don't want to spend eternity eating alone at the Unpopular Table in the Cafeteria of Heaven.
No, I think I'll hang on to the facade of normalcy that I've created on the outside and spare the world the fragile, uncertain, insecure Melissa that I keep inside... even if it means that my life's "epic" journalistic endeavors -as memorialized on the many pages of cloth covered, spiral bound journal-books- go with me to the grave.
16 October 2007
Privacy Rights and Secret Police
Today, CNN.com ran a news story stating that Yahoo has been accused of misleading Congress about information it shared with Chinese authorities regarding a journalist in that country which led to the journalist's subsequent arrest and 10-year prison sentence. The story brings up interesting questions about privacy rights and media privilege at home and abroad.
Yahoo is a huge, multi-billion dollar, world-wide operation. Are they any less responsible to care for the privacy rights of a single individual in far-away China than your local Bank of America teller is to care for yours? Will they be held responsible for misleading Congress, if that is in fact what they did?
More than that, what next for the Chinese journalist now in prison thanks to Yahoo's Information Highway Express-Lane to the authorities?
Few countries enjoy the many freedoms that we do in the United States; however, our freedoms (such as they are) should never be taken for granted, especially in an age where our own government reacts to potential threat with the swift curtailing and elimination of those freedoms (a la the Patriot Act). The right to privacy is one of those freedoms that we are loathe to give up, yet in many countries citizens can't even hope to have it in the first place.
This will be an interesting story to follow, I believe.
Yahoo is a huge, multi-billion dollar, world-wide operation. Are they any less responsible to care for the privacy rights of a single individual in far-away China than your local Bank of America teller is to care for yours? Will they be held responsible for misleading Congress, if that is in fact what they did?
More than that, what next for the Chinese journalist now in prison thanks to Yahoo's Information Highway Express-Lane to the authorities?
Few countries enjoy the many freedoms that we do in the United States; however, our freedoms (such as they are) should never be taken for granted, especially in an age where our own government reacts to potential threat with the swift curtailing and elimination of those freedoms (a la the Patriot Act). The right to privacy is one of those freedoms that we are loathe to give up, yet in many countries citizens can't even hope to have it in the first place.
This will be an interesting story to follow, I believe.
07 June 2007
Paris is Out of Jail? Color Me Surprised.
Please, please, PLEASE name one single, positive thing that Paris Hilton has done -by herself, of her own accord, stemming from a real, original thought from her own brain- that has benefited any man, woman or child in the U.S., or California, or even LA County. Please - name just one.
What's that? You can't come up with anything? Not even ONE act of generosity or benevolence or unselfishness? Hm. No Academy Award or Tony Award or Emmy Award for talent? No visits to (or from) the Pope, the Dali Lama, or President of a country...ANY country? Hm. No scholarships or academic awards? No industry accolades for her business acumen or outstanding achievement at her place of employment? Hm. Not even a letter of congratulations from the mayor of her hometown for increasing the number of tourists tramping through the city, enhancing local retail sales? No?
Well then... why-oh-WHY should I give anything more than a nano-second of attention to her tragic 'medical condition' and subsequent release from her recent confinement in LA county jail? More than that, why-oh-WHY is CNN giving her more than a nano-second of attention?
Wait! I know! It's because Anna Nicole Smith died and now, finally, public attention to that useless and unimportant story has waned... now CNN and every other media outlet needs something equally useless and unimportant to fill the void.
Ah-ha. Got it.
Carry on.
What's that? You can't come up with anything? Not even ONE act of generosity or benevolence or unselfishness? Hm. No Academy Award or Tony Award or Emmy Award for talent? No visits to (or from) the Pope, the Dali Lama, or President of a country...ANY country? Hm. No scholarships or academic awards? No industry accolades for her business acumen or outstanding achievement at her place of employment? Hm. Not even a letter of congratulations from the mayor of her hometown for increasing the number of tourists tramping through the city, enhancing local retail sales? No?
Well then... why-oh-WHY should I give anything more than a nano-second of attention to her tragic 'medical condition' and subsequent release from her recent confinement in LA county jail? More than that, why-oh-WHY is CNN giving her more than a nano-second of attention?
Wait! I know! It's because Anna Nicole Smith died and now, finally, public attention to that useless and unimportant story has waned... now CNN and every other media outlet needs something equally useless and unimportant to fill the void.
Ah-ha. Got it.
Carry on.
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