The Brilliance of Resilience

I got my parents out of the house on budget-priced Tuesday to see the newest adaptation of, "Murder on the Orient Express." My mother loves Johnny Depp. My father doesn't like to be left behind. I love Hercule Poirot. How I felt about the film is kind of irrelevant to what I was thinking about after it was over. There's a scene in the very beginning (and I really wish that I could find the exact quote) where Branagh's Poirot talks about how maddening it is to instantly see every detail about every situation and know what is right and what is wrong. It is a foreshadow to his eventual walk from the train and from a group of broken people complicit in a murder. Although David Suchet's portrayal of Poirot's moral choice in the Masterpiece Theater version is, in my opinion, so much more devastating - I understand Branagh's rewrite of a more blatant emotional ending for (to be honest) less emotionally sophisticated audience. Poirot's moral conviction

When I was a pre-teen I watched the 1954 Marlon Brando film, "Desiree," and didn't realize that I did. That happened to me often while watching a Saturday afternoon film. I didn't realize I was watching, "The Godfather," for the first time until I was at least an hour into it and wondered why I couldn't keep my eyes off of the screen.  I was hardly interested in the weirdly overly-hyped but unrealized love affair of Napoleon Bonaparte and Desiree (what a little turd, amirite?), but was taken totally with Michael Rennie's portrayal of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (known historically as Charles XIV John of Sweden). This film isn't great (the costumes are wonderful to see when you're living on a farm in rural Pennsylvania, though), but I found myself thinking of this character days after the film ended. I think I felt that there was this sense of injustice regarding the lack of acknowledgement of the nature of this character and the

I went to a meeting a few weeks back where I met a myriad of people that I had only previously worked with via phone. And when they would see me, there was this brief pause at my face, my appearance...until finally one of the said, "You look so young to know so many things." WORD . I get accused of serial youth at least once a week - with estimates pegging me often a decade younger than I am - the teenage girl painting my nails, the co-mixees at the stuffy mixers, the men I flag down in parking lots to take photos of their vintage cars...just whomever, I guess. It has made me fascinated by the idea and perception of youth. I usually give a flippant response about looking young because I do not have children but that cannot be it. Women of all ages have children, right? I want to grill these givers of compliments and understand their motives and reasoning. I want to look a gift horse in the mouth. But then, are they compliments? Or, do I give the air of naivety or immaturi

When I was a teenager my friends were in love with: Aaron Lewis from Staind, Fred Durst, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, a slew of WWE (nee WWF) wrestlers and professional athletes (there's always that one friend, right?) and members of various boy bands. Among others of his ilk, I was in love with Gregg Allman. Yeah, I have no idea either. I really didn't adopt jam band culture in totality (I was never really into Grateful Dead, for example), but there was something about Gregg Allman that I liked that I can't identify. God rest his blonde ponytail. I never buy rock n' roll records, but I might now that I have my own space to jam into. Brothers and Sisters , anyone?  One of my favorites of The Allman Brothers Band was on their 1994 album Where It All Begins (total disclosure: Dickey Betts wrote it, not Gregg Allman), surprisingly enough. As a kid listening to records from the seventies for the first time, I had no concept of what the singles were, so I just list

I kind of decided to move out on a whim. That's not wholly true. I had been thinking about it since I moved in, but I actually put all of the pieces in place and did it earlier this month really quickly...and oh man. I'm deep in the proverbial throes of the change cycle - the part where it is so uneasy that it's hard to know to the right decision even exists...let alone if I've made it or not. I wrote this last week when this was true: This is the second full week of living there full-time. I came home last night and made dinner and realized that I had an Iraqi bootleg copy of the entire series of The Golden Girls on DVD. Unfortunately, it doesn't mean that the show is dubbed in Arabic (how flipping amazing would that be, I've lamented) but that the recording quality isn't great. So, this is the third full week that I have lived alone. And after working my way through the entire series of, "Two Fat Ladies," I am still deep-diving into my

I am wondering why really awesome serendipitous things don't happen more often. Things like finding a winning lottery ticket discarded in the street or actually finding the celebrities that were rumored to be in Ketchikan when I was there in 2009, instead of stalking the docks in hopes of seeing a greasy Johnny Depp sunning himself in the unseasonably warm Alaskan sun. The next piece of Beck's book  is talking about intuition. People that she met that just seemed to trust their gut feelings, running with them and finding immense success in those hunches. About how to hone your intuition and test your psychic abilities. Many critical reviews of this book found this part to be out of place in a book that talks about practical ways of finding a destiny, but the idea is to trust the body, mind and spirit. When something doesn't "smell" right, a body cries out in its own way, the mind will give hints and intuition, however small, probably knows it. Basically, giving

I was telling a friend that Martha Beck's, "Finding Your Own North Star," has been the most pragmatic self-help book that I have ever worked with (or in or through or against...however you'd like to phrase it). Beck even writes about the anxiety that she felt about writing a book in the way that North Star is written - lacking in psychological terms, using funny (and sometimes slightly racy) analogies and using a myriad of examples from her clients'/patients' experiences. The supplemental material is also useful for those that are just starting their journey into understand why they do what they do or those that are seasoned in seeing the meaning in every move they make. It is often grueling to be the one in the room that has done the most emotional/psychological work - because it means that when you think of intangible things in this really methodical way, somehow, you're instantly pegged the Buzz Killington - too cerebral (and yet too unpredictable, some

I listened to an interesting Rich Roll podcast that featured the CEO of Whole Foods - John Mackey. He seems like a pretty cool dude that gets it (Mackey, I mean. The verdict is out on Rich Roll) - you can tout your philosophies, but in order to be both heard and successful, you must make some reasonable concessions. In a  Quartz Article  Mackey says, "You have to meet the market where you find it." In the podcast he speaks about the polarization of the purists and the pragmatists - and yet our need for both to keep a vision and to sustain it. Eh. That last part though. This morning, I got two daily quick messages from two pseudo-gurus. One said, "dare to be idealistic!" The other said, "it is not enough to dream, pray, think about it and wish." .... Right? When I think about the millions of people (especially women) that are trying to survive with very little to hold together their physical lives, I recognize my own privilege in working thr

Just now something happened that flipped the switch of the day. As in, just this second. The blogger window was already open to talk about how conflicted I feel lately. It's as if every turn fuels the never-balanced and never-ending scale of pros and cons - the internal dialog of what is important and what is worthy of my drive and passion. It can propel you into oblivion with the constant running of how it could be better or how you need to improve upon what isn't enough in life - the money, the geography, the accolades, the benefits... Then I heard that W died this weekend. W died after retirement. Not enough retirement. W was feisty, strong-willed, argumentative at times, passionate, determined, and old-fashioned. She fought and won. She fought and lost. She got on my fucking nerves from time-to-time and made my job really hard. W was a nice person that I didn't like to work with sometimes. W deserved more time. When W died I was a still in limbo about a po

Last Monday I had the six or seventh car accident that I did not cause (there have been so many that I have lost track). This is the third accident with the car that I purchased in 2015. I have had to prove my piece of the accident more than I feel that I should have, but I think that the work and transparency is paying off. When I flung open the door and faced a girl ten years younger than me that was being impatient at the stop sign, backed up to go around and didn't see me, I faced myself. "...'cause I was once like you, so arrogant and brave. Impetuous and rude." I joked with Mike when I got this car that I should call it Kismet, but I never actually named it as I had with all of my other vehicles. Maybe I cursed it with the name Kismet or maybe I am cursed with Kismet. I often joke with people that I am paying a Karmic penance for being a real asshole in a previous life. The reality is, I am probably paying a bit of a Karmic penance for being a real asshole

I didn't know that I was finally divorced on February 24. I did know that I was in New York City for the first time and I was super excited to overload all of my senses simultaneously (I do not know if I was prepared for the overload of my sense of smell in every conceivable way, just saying). My weight loss "plan" has included a lot of urban hiking in many cities and I am very lucky to be in a situation where I can take a day to drive to a new city or town, dump the car and figure out the rest on foot (and lose weight in the process). New York seemed to be the culmination of that kind of tourism, so stepping off the train and onto West 34th Street was much like how first-time New York experiences are depicted. I sent many photos to my Mother and she asked me at one point, "Is it really like it looks in these photos?" I could confirm that wholeheartedly. Many things that I saw were those things that have been shown to me in film, television and I hav

As a gesture of interest in people bringing their, "whole selves," to work, my company has revamped their employee spotlight articles and replaced them with questions that are much less interview-ish and much more conversational. The articles always highlight a single word that encompasses themselves and the work that they do, and it always leads with, "My work is a story of..." Because I have spent the last two years being really self-centered, I thought immediately what my word would be and if I wanted to volunteer to talk about my work and my personal life through the lens of seemingly informal atmosphere. I definitely do want to do that (see above: self-centered), but not on that platform. When someone struggles with the things that I have struggled against since forever, people in a professional "career," setting often use those stories, those emotions and those experiences as fodder for labeling in whatever terms would suit propelling their own car

I used to really love Christmas. I collected a ridiculous amount of Christmas decorations, especially the vintage plastic, kitschy stuff, and I hung it up and had, "Christmas in July," parties and loved giving gifts and making ham or whatever. And it seemed like the world was bright. Then, I had the worst Christmas I've ever had when my exhusband and I began the slow descent into the end of our marriage the November before the Christmas season of 2014. That Christmas Day my mother had too many Christmas-themed drinks and was so hungover she couldn't get out of bed. We took our laundry to my parents house and spent the day in opposite chairs watching things like, "The Price is Right," at an ear-splitting decibel level with my deaf father, eating a shitty meal and opening gift cards to each other and from each other. When there are no kids to celebrate, Christmas becomes oddly unimportant and when you have the beginning of no marriage, it seems even