Live your best life

I love my Oprah magazine. There is this instant inspiration peice in every month's magazine. I often find comfort of a connection in them. Here is the November one:

Hold on to what is good even if it is a handful of earth.

Hold on to what you believe even if it is a tree which stands by itself.

Hold on to what you must do even if it is a long way from here...

Hold on to my hand even when I have gone away from you.

Beautiful on the inside?

Perhaps it's the full moon or just a off time for me but everyone around me seems to be getting to live the life I want. At work my co-worker is getting the opportunities I have been waiting for, hoping for and yet I sit on the side lines - invisible. No matter what I do or how much I say I'm here, I'm here...they just keep looking past me. In my personal life, everyone seems to be moving towards something or someone and here I sit.....waiting for something to come and it's like the parade keeps passing me by. I'm here, I'm here. Am I so invisible now that I can't even see myself? What is going on? And sweet martha above, if one more person asks me if the pretty girl is seeing anyone one more time I am going to lose it! What the hell?

What is beauty? Is it in the way a person looks? The God given flawless skin they were born with? The luck of the gentic pool they come from? True beauty is from the inside out. I've heard that a million times, but who really beleives it?

Carson Kressley and Tim Gunn both host shows that try to teach women that their true beauty lies within them. Interesting isn't it that these show are hosted by gay men for women? What do they know about the women folk that the women folk don't know about themselves? By society standards, beauty seems to be on the outside. What magazine or beauty contest idolizes a not so physically attractive person as a magazine cover girl or spokes model? Although I applaude the attempt to help women realize that true beauty lies within....who is going to teach that the general masses? If women become empowered enough to feel beautiful will that help change minds or sterotypes?

How many times have you seen someone walking around strutting their stuff and you can tell they are totally feeling like a rock star, even though in reality they probably aren't(by society's standards...not mine.) I say if you feel pretty - strut your bad self. I see it everyday at work...I understand that a nice pair of shoes can make you feel pretty but are there somethings that people shouldn't wear? Who gets to decide that? What is the definition of beauty?

I like to beleive their is a match for everyone out there in this big old universe....someone that completes you and makes you feel beautiful and special and perfect just the way you are - I need to beleive that, if I really truly think about it....I have to wonder if that really exists. Is there a ying for every yang?

All these thoughts are running through my head on the day before I perform my first marriage as an officiant. Maybe there is a tie in...no?

Who could ever learn to love the beast?

Unexpressed thoughts?

Yesterday I heard this statement:

It's okay to have an unexpressed thought

It was a comment made about Jessie Ventura, which fits perfectly, but there is a nugget of truth in that statement and fine advice for some of us. Yes I am including myself in this mix. Sometimes I find it really hard to hold my thoughts inside and sometimes it gets me in trouble. Maybe it's not so much the thought as possibly the tone or facial/body language that accompanies it? Maybe. Yet there are times I don't say what I really want to...I hold back. Is it out of fear of rejection? Maybe. What an interesting point to note. I don't have worries about saying what I am thinking or feeling if there is no risk to me, but if there is the chance I may be rejected or hurt I hold back, I keep it to myself.

Some people are so honest when they talk to you....maybe honest isn't the right word, so open and forthright. They say things that I am not expecting to hear right out loud. Part of me is shocked and yet part of me wants to be more like that. To ask for what I want, to get what I want and to enjoy things without feeling guilty or like it's wrong....how can something so wrong feel so right?

I was having a conversation with a friend the other day and he just blurted out some things that were along the lines of thoughts I have personally had but never dared to say out loud and yet there it was out loud and in public. I didn't really know how to process that information. It is okay to have unexpressed thoughts.

It's a full moon right now and I don't know what it is about a full moon that changes people's personalities. Obviously there is no water on the moon so how does something that has virtually no water effect us who are mostly water? The moons placement is the most important factor in shaping our innermost emotional needs/desires. It also indicates how we react and deal emotionally to stress and tension in our life, the fight or flight syndrome. The moon is symbolic of the Mother figure and the type of relationship we have with her - from a karmic point of point really. Some astrologers believe the moon or the way people react during a phase of the moon is an indication of the type of past lives we lived and thus leading to the lessons you have learned or not learned.

What if we haven't learned them? Are we destined to keep making the same mistakes over and over no matter what life we are in? Does the full moon make people say things out loud they normally don't say?

I thought only martini's did that.

Who are you?

Maybe the better question is "Who are you today?"

After fixing the presentation, breaking a nail, ordering lunch, setting meetings, getting documents collated, preparing food for 2 hours for Feed My Starving Children and fixing loose ends...who do you end up being at the end of all of this?

Who do you want to be?

Does a job really define you? Should a job define you?

I used to think you were successful if you carried a breifcase to work. I remember how excited I was when I started working in Corporate America. I thought - wow - I made it. How awesome I thought I was. Be careful what you wish for. I promptly got myself a breifcase and the only thing I ever had to carry in it was my lunch. Sigh.

What if your heart is not in it....is it enough for your head to be?

What is truth?

Truth - something you make other people, or yourself, believe. The truth is something we often hide from others and ourself. I think our forefathers had something...we hold these truths to be self evident....or something like that. If we say something enough times it becomes our own truth. The methodology of the truth then becomes repetition. I am pretty, I am stupid, I am fearless. If we say it enough it becomes true, it becomes who we are and what we are. I was told once that we create pictures, snapshots in our head of the person or life we want and there is a big disconnect between what those pictures show us in our head and what our reality is. You have to learn to change the snapshots in your head to match reality outside your head.

That's so much easier said than done.

How do you change one's own truth? How do you learn to face the reality of what IS vs the reality of what you want or need it to be. I have been traveling down life's path towards an end result but the closer I get to the "end of this path" I am beginning to question if this is the right path. I know, all the books tell you that's normal, that's part of the process. That if we don't continue questioning ourselves on who or what we are we don't grow. Isn't there a time to accept and be content with who and what we are, with the life we have made for ourselves. Why do we always seem to want more....to want what we don't have.

Does the picture in my head match the reality? Do we ever stop questioning ourselves or do we even want to?

How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?

Don't invest in anger

In these turbulent times, investing in anything doesn't really seem like a good idea but investing in anger is really not a good idea.

I worked at the ET this weekend and you get to over hear snippets of conversation as people walk by the office..either talking to someone else or on their cell phones. I think that's why I like texing so much...it's a PRIVATE conversation...I can be out in the world but yet I can say what I want....it takes me much longer to say it...but I can say it and not share with everyone. Anyway, I hear snippets of conversation and apparently the market or the phases of the moon or the unusually warm October weather has made folks kinda angry. Lots of angered conversations were spit out as they passed the office. I actually started making a little tick sheet at one point because I thought maybe I was on a game show and I was going to have to answer the question - How many angry conversations did you overhear in a 4 hr period?

Man the world is an angry place. People are mad they at the weirdest things too. I was at the grocery store yesterday and this man was raging at the old man cooking up bacon (mmmm, sample day at the Cub) because the Cub was out of the pork chops that were on special. Like this old man cooking bacon samples for $4 an hour just to get out of his house has anything to do with the sold out pork chops. Angry. Why so angry over pork? I guess it was a good coupon, buy one get one free, but honestly...get some bacon.

Work has been....turbulent. That's the best way to describe it. Between the market, sales being down and everyone being overwork (um and I'll add underpaid) it's been hectic. My friend is convinced the market is going down in a blaze of glory today.....and frankly...I can't say I would be all that surprised. I could get all amped up and freaked out that the market is a mess, that my 401 is tanking, that the economy is going to hell in a hand basket but honestly.....what good would that do? Personally, I'm doing OK. I can afford my life. I can buy gas for my car, which incidentally is going down in price??, I can afford groceries (not the buy one get one free meat though) and I have some pretty nice friends to hang out and do stuff with so where's the downside? Maybe someone slipped something in my coffee but I don't feel as annoyed or scared or freaked out by all the madness surrounding me. I've become comfortable with my own madness. Oh, that's a good title for another blog.

Lazy Sunday

Today is the type of day I would normally relish laying around doing nothing with. I am feeling really lazy today but it's my weekend to work so I drug myself out of bed at 7am, took a shower and began my day. I always feel productive when I get alot of stuff done but today I don't feel productive.

I had dinner and went to a movie with friends last night and got home about 11:30pm which isn't all that late for me but for some reason I feel realllllly tired and lazy today. Probably because nothing is really happening at work, showed one apartment but overall no drama, nothing except sitting in this oven of an office. Saw Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist. I enjoyed it more that I really thought I would. It looked amusing enough but I really liked the slow pace of the movie where nothing really major happened. What I was confused about was this row of hoodlums that attended the movie. They were these young, urban, hip hop dudes who looked like this would be the last place on a Saturday night they would be. They had their own agenda for the enitre movie and their own conversation going on the whole time. Normally it would have made me sort of insane but it kind of amused me. People are funny. Everytime you think you really know someone or think you do it changes in a heartbeat.

Here's hoping this lazy day is surprise free. Oh and FYI I now have 85 friends on Facebook. I'm only 15 away from my goal. Can't wait to meet it and make a new one!