It's morning already?
Topic: WC - Daily Practice
Saturday 9:15am
I went to bed just after midnight and my eyes didn't open again until 7:11am. I was lying in bed surrounded by cats and most groggy. Thought the Tour de France was starting at 8:30am and had a major cuss session when it didn't start. Are you kidding me, Canada isn't showing the Tour de France?

It's what got me up and out of the house to buy the Toronto Star for the Television schedule. All is fine. It starts at 9:30am. Well at least I'm up.

My feet are so sore this morning that I've decided that I will have to eat a massive breakfast in order to take my arthritis pill. I never take them because they can cause internal bleeding but they come in handy when I know I have a big day and I want to ensure that I'm totally pain free. So to make sure I don't get caught on the internal bleeding side of the scale, I eat way too much so that the food will absorb it.

I've started off with a quarter of the whole watermelon I just bought while getting the Toronto Star and am about to prepare some Pillsbury crescent rolls, steak and eggs. Yup, your girl can eat!

Switching and flipping around to catch some of the Live Earth concerts. It's hard to catch these things when the weather is so nice and I want to be outside and it's Tour de France season.

I'm off to the Tarragon today since I have a choice between the mainspace and the extra space so if I can't get the show I want to see, I can still see a show. Plus it's too far to me to walk to during the week after work. I highlighted the Fringe program and checked out all the locations so I could plan to go to the further theatres on the weekend when I have all day. And go to the closer theatres during the week so I can catch at least two shows. It's scary how organized I can be.

Anyway my Tour de France (or Tour DES France, as one of the commentators always says, much to my chagrin) is about to start. It's the individual time trial. We've got a year without a Tour champion with all the doping scandals going back over the years. Ivan Basso is out, Jan Ulrich is out. And Floyd Landis... blah blah blah! (Although they say that we'll find out for sure in a few days whether or not he's found innocent) I still love it. Of course I don't have any names to hold on to but we'll see who I fall in love with this year. Remember last year my converter died during the Tour and I ended up following the coverage by reading about it? haha! Not this year dammit, not this year!

Oh and Congratulations for all the 7/7/7 crazies that are getting married today. Congrats to Billy and Aruna and all the best in your magnificent future.

Hmm! Maybe I'll get married on 12/12/12! ha ha! How old will I be then? Does that give me enough time to find the man of dreams? Or the man I can live with? Or the man I still want to talk to and have something to talk about with... that is the big question.
What-ev-er!

I feel great. I got a shitload of stuff to do and the weather is be-you-tee-full!

EY

Fringe Bingeing
Topic: WC - Daily Practice
Friday 10:51pm

I just got in from starting my foray into the Fringe Festival. I decided that I would choose a theatre and catch as many plays as I could stand. I dropped my 90 bucks for my 14 play pass and got prepared.

I watched three plays. The first play Wedding Belles was about four women and their set of issues while preparing to be part of one of the women's sisters wedding party. I still don't get why the wedding was going to be in the woods. Over all the acting was pretty bad. All their voices came across as trying to sound like actors rather than like normal people. The yoga girl gave a really great performance in one scene when she admits to feeling guilty for her boyfriend dying in a plane crash after she got him the flying lessons. She almost brought me to tears between her expression and her acting.
Some of the scenes were juvenile and cliche.

I went back outside to get my ticket for the 2nd play and didn't I run into one of my old bosses from both the Pantages theatre and the North York Performing Arts Centre? He was planning to see the same play as me so we sat together and caught up on all things theatre and personal.

The 2nd play was, A Streetcar named Gerrard. What an offensive piece of shit. Basically it was a politician of all affiliations talking to the masses about the poor just before they demolish a housing project.

I pulled out my steno and started writing notes when he compared studying the poor for his master's thesis to Diane Fosse studying the Gorillas for years. I actually said out loud, "Oh No!"
The poor were depicted first as these sistas talking stupidness one chain smoking and the other one pregnant (they were played by white girls). Then the same white girls imitated the poor men and talked with a black street vernacular. The girls wore t-shirts that said BEER across them so somehow they were a combination of white trash and stereotypical ghetto blacks.

At one point the politician talks about moving the "normal" middle class into to live with the poor to teach them. "They'll learn how to speak English, they'll learn what a condom is."

Then the girls portray the white poor: Andrea, the intellectual (She had a grade 9 education) and Phyllis, the chain smoker and I quote, " Phyllis is 4th of 16 children. Her parents think contraception is praying."
Fuck! It was the longest hour of my life!

The songs came the closest to being clever if they weren't so fucking offensive. I get that the playwright was trying to make a statement with the play but it just ended up being so fucking offensive I'm surprised that I sat through it.

And everytime the Politician would call his wife over to hand him his fucking bullhorn which he said each time, "the white rolled up cardboard acting as a bullhorn," (if he said it one more time I was going to slit my wrists) he'd fondle her or slap her ass.
Okay! Can I just say? HATED IT!

The final play that my ex boss and I saw together was The Africans. It was actually quite good. When you're in the position where you are trying to talk to people who don't speak your language and you don't speak their language. There was more to the play than that but I'll just leave it at that. The main criticism was that it was hard to catch everything that was said because of the actor's placement on the stage. And the ending was a bit of a cop out but overall out of the three plays it was by far enjoyable.

Before the Africans came out on stage, I was actually scared that they'd be either portrayed by white actors pretending to be black or there would be stuffed animals placed as the Africans. ha ha. A streetcar named Gerrard was the cause of my worry. But thankfully they were actual black actors and African, I think!

Okay, enough said... more plays tomorrow.

EY

The Morning Breeze
Topic: WC - Daily Practice
Friday 4:20am 6July07

"The morning breeze has secrets to tell you, don't go back to sleep" Rumi

I woke up at 3:25 this morning. I woke up out of a pretty deep sleep and my eyes were begging me to lie back down and wait for my alarm to go off in an hour. Somehow that Rumi quote flitted through my head and solidified my getting up. The cats looked a little bitter, "Hey? Where you going?"

My thoughts have been haunting me again which translates into me worrying about something. So it's time to get up and reframe my thoughts, look at the facts, look at what I can solve and let all the other garbage that I can't control fall by the wayside. The biggest thing that I can control is how I think about things. I have to be conscious about that.
There was a nice quote that I picked up from Elizabeth Edwards on Oprah the other day, "There's no reason to give up hope unless you have to."

So I'm focusing on that. Which really is the opposite of worrying, isn't it?

My last dream before I woke up was about my mom. She was getting married and driving us to the reception. Don't quite know where her husband was though. I often dream about my mother when my mind is attacking me too much. So that's always a bit of a relief although I wish that I would remember in my dreamworld that she is dead so that I can turn the dream around and talk to her. I'm going to have to get back into a proper dream practice of meditating and dream journaling and the like.

It's funny though that I would dream of her getting married. Ado and I were talking about bridezillas yesterday. Bridezilla was his new word for the day. I told him all the reasons why I could never be a bridezilla. I've never been focused since childhood on some special perfect day. I don't care about a huge spectacle with table linen and doves being let out of a cage and flying away in unison. I said, "I'd be so happy to have met the person that I loved and who loved me back so much that we wanted to marry eachother that that would be enough."

Quite frankly I'd be happy with getting married on the beach or in someone's backyard or eloping. The only thing that I would like to have in my wedding, if there ever were to be one, would be jumping the broom.

Anyway, I'm up and ready to start my day and remember that there's no reason to give up hope unless I have to and get some writing done before I leave for work.

EY

Day Two - sort of
Topic: WC - Daily Practice
Thursday 9:39pm
Well I started the Resolve lozenges yesterday afternoon and found that I was already smoking less than I normally do. The good thing about them is that you have so many lozenges that you are supposed to take in a day (ten) that you have to make the time for the lozenges aside from the smoking. ha ha! I had only four lozenges yesterday.

I'm on my ninth lozenge now and I've smoked about half as much as I would have normally smoked without them. And they don't taste quite as rank today as they did yesterday so that's a huge improvement all the way around. I figure that I can stop smoking by next week , if not sooner, and still have another week's worth of lozenges to continue with to get me over the hump.

I'm not really a person who craves cigarettes, it's just more of the habit and the oral fixation than anything. I like that the lozenges don't have nicotine.

Anyway, that's the scoop on the quitting smoking thing. it really is about time.

EY

Jane Fonda
Topic: Inside the Actor's Studio
Wednesday 5:34pm

Have I said this about a hundred times? I'm slowly going through my tapes and when I get to Inside the Actor's Studio there is always someone who I think, 'I don't have to watch this one. How interesting will so and so be?' Then I catch the beginning and am engrossed in the whole interview.

Of course that just happened with Jane Fonda. But even better, I watched it this morning and it was so good I rewound the tape to watch it again this afternoon and write notes.

You know so many questions are popping up and out of me lately. Between the Pisces kiss and the subsequent revelations and what made me so mad about it all. I can recall hearing someone saying something along the lines regarding depression that she wanted to make her life less about not being depressed and more about living an intentional life. I can't remember who said it and I never wrote it down because some things that are said just resonate so wholly within my being that I know I don't need to write them down. It's like it inhabits my subconscious in a magnetic sort of way and the right ideas start to stick to me. That's where my idea for embracing my singleness came from.

I don't know if I've expressed embracing my singleness well enough. It's not that I don't want to be with anyone or that I've been overly unhappy alone. I basically said to myself, "what if this is the last time, for the rest of my life, that I will be fully alone? How can I make good use of this time and be able to look back with fondness?"

When I was in constant survival mode and I was between jobs I was always so stressed about finding another job that I never enjoyed the time off work. Then when all worked out and I got a new job I'd always wished that I just relaxed enough to enjoy the time. That's what I'm trying to do now with being single and not having a group of friends to hang out with. Enjoy this time. Discover the things that I really like to do whether I have company or not. Live and enjoy my life despite not having a closet full of money.

Smoking to some extent falls in line with that. There's something that I feel is missing that smoking fills. It's something to focus on to take me away from discovering what that void is that needs to be filled. Jane Fonda talks about addiction and the space that is left when you give up an addiction(s).

My early notes from the first viewing were about her discussing, 'entering my truth'. I had to ask, "what is my truth?" A big question that may take me years to discover a full answer to. Maybe starting off with What do I really feel?

Yesterday morning I caught some police drama on A&E and Anthony LaPaglia's brother is in it and he's trying to get his woman to come in but she won't. I asked out loud, "Why did she bother going there then?" and I felt this ache. I had to ask, What is my ache regarding love? I have one, obviously, but how do I get to the meat of it and past the stories of, "I saw the kind of men my mother was with and what men can do to women" I guess the question is, 'How do I live MY life now with all the love I have to give and actually give it?'

My madness toward the man and his kiss is that I am coming to realize that I feel good enough about myself that I know that what he is offering is bullshit and that he would think it's okay to only offer me scraps that you give a dog. And because I can see different points of view, I'm even madder about the fact that he is with a woman who may or may not know that he is giving HER dog scraps. There's nothing wrong with being a dog but be a single dog and give women the opportunity to say yes or no.

Jane Fonda talked about her first marriage to a man who regularly brought other women into their bed with them. I wrote quickly, "not feeling good enough about yourself enought that you would allow a man to bring another woman into bed with the two of you. Feeling that the only way she could keep this man was to accept that she wasn't enough for him."

It's funny, it always brings me back to what I've always said since I was a kid watching my mother, "I'd rather be alone than suffer through that shit for the sake of having a man."
Jane also said, "It's in relationships where a loss of voice manifests."

Ahh! A loss of voice. I write to give myself voice, even if it's only my eyes that see the words...for now anyway. I leave men when I feel that I can't express my true voice, what I need, what I want, what I feel is missing. I've always wanted to have a relationship, it just so happens, that I've needed to be able to hear my voice more than be in a relationship.

With all my insecurities and feelings that I am so fucked up (I'm not denying that I'm not fucked up) I am discovering that I am more than enough. I do not need to be with someone who convinces me that I'm not enough for his own gains. And isn't there a piece of fiction following a man and a woman through that all? Where the man really sees what he has done to his woman because he could, because she let him, because she didn't think she was enough to keep him.

It takes me back to that question I blogged several weeks ago, "Can I trust you with my heart?" It's not that I can't commit. I can't commit to feeling not good enough and so I don't.

More quotes from Jane Fonda's interview, whose book I want to read, by the way:

"He would bring other women into our bed and it never occurred to me that I could say no. I assumed that it was that I wasn't enough and I didn't want him to leave me and being with him is what validated me. "

"I've come from a place where I would silence my voice, shut down my heart, betray my body because if he left me I would be nothing and fall down into a dark hole."

"I couldn't say to my husband. 'I don't want to anymore.' I couldn't say who I really was because I was scared of being alone."

"the need to please, the disease to please, the need to be perfect, is so pervasive in our society for women... usher perfection out the door and strive for completion."

"I don't want to die without giving voice to my wholeness with the man I love."

"What is more important to me is my authenticity. Being intentional about how I live."

"I don't want to have regrets at the end of my life. What will I have to do now so that I won't have regrets and then it's about being intentional about how you live, the way you live. It's painful but it's the right thing to do."

She was amazing and can I just say that when ever the camera panned the audience the women were wiping away tears.

And she said it, she is a privileged white woman and she still felt that she wasn't good enough. That's pretty powerful when you really think about that.

EY