Tigers Above, Tigers Below

Lately I’ve been reflecting on mortality -- about death and getting old -- you know, your basic mixed bag of depressing thoughts.  It’s a heavy subject, not something I particularly enjoy thinking about, but for whatever reason it’s been a major theme in my mind for the past several weeks. 

What makes mortality seem particularly close is when life begins to feel monotonous – as if every day is the same. When that happens, I feel like I’m not living life to the fullest, and that makes me a little sad.  Though stability is a basic need in my life (I relish in some amount of consistency and routine), I am a big proponent in continually seeking stimulation and growth.  And while such growth can be achieved by having new experiences, I sometimes wonder, which are the right ones to go after?

But every day is not an adventure, and it can’t be an adventure. Too much chaos, commitments, obligations, etc. wear me out anyway.  I'm an introvert -- I need my quiet time.  While reflecting on appreciating the simple pleasures in life and making small changes to mix up your routine, focusing on being in the present is vital. This is what Buddhist philosophy is teaching me.  We do not live in the past or in the future. As a perpetual worrier, living in the present is not instinctual, though. I am always worrying about the future; any possible scenario of something that can go wrong, I have probably already thought about it, and schemed up a solution for it. And this can be a stressful way to live.

While it’s important and necessary to plan for the future, beyond saving for retirement and taking care of yourself physically and mentally, there is no actual benefit to worrying about the future when you cannot map it out by the nanosecond anyway. There’s a saying that goes something like, you plan and then life happens. I agree with this adage, especially as I like to plan and then I also like to rebel.

I suppose the good that's come out of all this worry about mortality is that it’s forced me to take a long hard look at what makes me happy as well as what makes me unhappy -- things that we don't generally evaluate very often. So often we’re in autopilot mode, such that we don’t really stop to think about whether this is what we want to be doing, what we should be doing, and whether these things provide us satisfaction or dissatisfaction.  (A few months ago I gave up my weekly personal to-do list for this very reason and I was amazed to see that I was actually more productive without it.) 

What I've realized is that when you cut out something that doesn’t give you happiness or satisfaction, you have much more time and energy to do other things that are relaxing and enjoyable and provide long-term gratification versus short-term gratification.  They also force you to be in the present.  For me, these things are doing yoga and meditating, listening to and cataloguing music, reading and writing. They are relaxing activities that make me feel like I'm, on even a very small level, growing, evolving, and not watching life passing me by.  But it's only since I've reflected on what it is that both relaxes me and gives me happiness, I've learned that these are the kinds of activities I enjoy doing when I’m simply too tired to do anything else.  When I'm not so tired, well, that's a different story.  I do like a little adventure in my life!

But satisfaction and happiness and living life to the fullest is about finding appreciation in the simple things too -- having dinner with a good friend, enjoying a crisp evening breeze after a hot summer day, listening to your favorite song on the radio, or smelling the peonies in your front yard. 

The other evening I read a parable from The Pocket Pema Chodron about there always being "tigers above, tigers below", which happened to be the perfect prescription for my current angst.  I'll end this post with an excerpt from the passage:

              Tigers above, tigers below.  This is actually the predicament that we are always in,

              in terms of our birth and death.  Each moment is what it is.  It might be the only

              moment of our life, it might be the only strawberry we'll ever eat.  We could get

              depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness

              of every single moment of our life. 

Image Credit: Pinterest

On Honesty

"Your best work is your expression of yourself. Now, you may not be the greatest at it, but when you do it, you're the only expert." - Frank Gehry

The one place where I’ve always felt completely open and uninhibited, with the exception of those who know me well, has been with my writing.  When I write I have no worries about feelings of inhibition, concerns about being misunderstood, or fear over the potential for rejection.  Writing is just my words and me.  I’ve kept some blog or another for the past few years as a space for my thoughts and opinions, and consequently to share with a few readers, be it friends, family, or the occasional foreign visitor, and all the while it has been a great exercise in the ultimate practice of honesty.

My mom happens to be a regular reader of my blog, which I think is great, even if the subject matter doesn't always appeal to her.  She readily expresses her opinion (whether positive or negative) about my chosen topics -- from spray tanning (negative), pink Legoes (positive), or the new HBO show, Girls (negative).  “You know I think you’re a great writer, Sarah,” she says cautiously, adding, "but sometimes I don’t always like your subject matter.” 

“That’s okay,” I tell her.  “You don’t have to.”  I am not offended by this, nor am I surprised.  Knowing that she even takes the time to read my blog is a compliment -- it would be overkill and unexpected, even, to think that she would agree with everything I say.  “Just be careful,” she continues, as if writing a blog that very seldom people read is going to set me up for being kidnapped or raped, but I take her expressed concern as a term of endearment anyway. 

“I appreciate your honesty,” I say.  And I do.  My mom’s perspective is, well, that of a 50-something-year-old Mom – much different than mine, but nonetheless I appreciate her point of view, even if it's slightly old fashioned, the focus of which is on the following issues: my keeping up appearances, being a “lady”, and maintaining a sense of morality.  These are not bad things, and while her opinions make me reflect more about them, they sometimes have the unfortunate side effect of inhibiting me a little bit -- not the best thing when you're trying to attain the ultimate sense of freedom through your creative pursuits -- though it's usually temporary. 

“You are not trash,” she says, referring to my various posts, some of which sometimes contain inappropriately explicit content, according to her. 

I pause, and smile, “Well, maybe I am trashy,” I say. 

“You are not trashy.” 

“Maybe I’m a little trashy,” I respond, testing her. 

I give my mom props for raising the woman I’ve become – she instilled in me the ability to become a pretty strong and dynamic person; she showed me the value of good manners and of being a lady (to which I sometimes succeed at); she taught me all the housewife basics (I am no housewife, but if I were I think I'd be a damned good one); and, she reinforced the importance of gumption and follow-through.  By way of leading by example, and perhaps most important, she also taught me to have a voice, an opinion, a perspective.  I cannot remember ever not having an opinion about something, whether I shared it or kept it to myself.

The truth of the matter – which I tried to explain to my mom in this conversation and which she understood being the reflective person she is – is the importance of having a little place in the world where we can feel free to be ourselves, away from what society expects from us, from what our parents expect from us, from what even we expect from ourselves, because often, when we let down our guard, when we give way to inhibitions, we surprise ourselves, giving way to greater depth than we ever thought possible, and that is a pretty special thing -- inappropriate or not. 

For me, that space happens to be my blog, which is mostly anonymous, except for friends and family who know I keep one.  For others who happen to stumble upon it, well, they only know me as Sarah, that “wallflower with a lot of opinions and a bit of sass.”

I believe that practicing honesty by shedding inhibitions is a big step to sharing yourself with the world, even if that “world” happens to be only a few handfuls of people.  It’s a short life to live if we’re always consumed with appearances and how people are perceiving us  -- something we all struggle with in one way or another because we’re all just trying to be understood.   Ultimately, the gratification we get from a life fully lived is achieved by being as honest with ourselves as we can be and then attaining the self-acceptance that we're all striving for.   And you know what?  Life is too short to be ladylike all the time.  Right, Mom?

Photo Credit: Pinterest

On Adele: The Sweden of Pop

Adele is that kind of artist that everyone likes. Be you a music aficianado or not, you like her, let’s be honest. She is the safe bet, the Sweden of music. She’s like gay marriage. Everyone’s for it, so why even mention it? It’s a moot point that everyone supports it (except for the one important caveat that it’s not technically legal yet, but you get my drift, right?).

If you put some Adele on at a party (no matter what kind of party it is), no one will bust your balls. Everyone will say how much they “love Adele”, ironically, as if it’s the greatest revelation in the world, and everyone will agree. (Or, you can be like me, and put on Elton John’s "Madman Across The Water" at your 6th grade Halloween party, and everyone will sneer, and you can keep playing it anyway because it’s your effing party and you can play what you want.)  She is the epitome of a neutral party, which isn’t a bad thing.  It's simply that it's not all that interesting to make the proclamation that you are her biggest fan, because everyone is.

I bet you can name at least five of your Facebook friends who shared or posted about how much they “loved” Adele particularly the overplayed "Rolling in the Deep," in the past year. It was almost like seeing someone sharing their Words with Friends results except that it was even more insignificant, because it was not identifying any interesting or relevant information about themselves, because, news flash: EVERYONE IS POSTING THE SAME THING.

I’m all for fanship and music appreciation – don’t get me wrong. If there is one thing I’m passionate about, it’s music, and there is nothing wrong with sharing that excitement for an artist or song you love. So please don’t take this as bitchiness, even if it is. (But, come on, we all know I’m a bit of a sassy bitch.)  The same goes for hot-button issues that everyone believes in. Maybe it’s just me, but pretty much everyone I know is “for gay marriage,” voted for Obama, is a vegetarian, and, well, apparently everyone loves Adele – or is scared to admit otherwise.

It’s something about the bandwagon nature of the human race that I can only sometimes relate to. People like that thing or say they like that thing because someone else does, and therefore it immediately makes them become interested in that thing they may not have ever discovered otherwise. This is perfectly fine and acceptable and completely human, but when they advertise the discovery with complete utter disregard for its already widespread fanship as if it’s a unique characteristic about themselves, it drives me nuts.

On the flip side, I have this unfortunate trait wherein when mass groups of people like something – especially people who know nothing about what they’re participating in – I am immediately turned off by it. THIS IS NOT SOMETHING I’M PROUD OF, BY THE WAY, just something I can't same to shake about myself.

This is not true for dance pop – the Britneys, the Carly Rae Jepsens, and Selena Gomezes. I love that shit, because it’s fun and unpretentious and made for disposability. It’s music, but only kind of, you know? There are also other exceptions to this trait, generally when it comes to fashion, because fashion is everchanging and really isn’t something to be taken very seriously anyway.  It's just for fun.

So, last week (I promise there's a point to this) I was in a consignment shop in Portland, and as I’m sifting through the denim rack my instinctive trait for disliking what the masses like was challenged. I hear a song that instantly catches my ear, you know, the kind of groove that you’re instantly pulled into and want to hear over and over again. I only listen to 45 seconds of the song before I have to leave the store, and I had already fallen in love with it, with the beat, the cadence, the instrumentation, the lyrics. It was a song I had never heard before, but I knew that voice: It was Adele.

My initial reaction was annoyance for liking a song by that girl who’s overliked by everyone and therefore kind of overrated, and then my second reaction was embarrassment for attempting to make a conscious effort not to like a song by that artist who is liked by everyone and their mother. It is one thing to not like something that everyone covets because it is no longer special – that’s a trait that I am either fortunately/unfortunately (depending on how you look at it) always going to have – but quite another to make a conscious effort not to like something simply because everyone likes it. I remember being a closet Britney Spears fan for years until I realized, I effing like Britney Spears – who cares if she's the Princess of Pop? So, even though Adele is the Sweden of Pop -- the safe bet that everyone likes -- I’m not going to dislike her just to be a cultural rebel. I’ll blame it on that beautiful song, “He Won’t Go,” for changing my inner rebel to a bandwagon fan.

Old Man Camp

I am not planning on having children any time soon, if at all, but if I could I would like to adopt a small camp of old men as my children.  Usually when I see an older man who happens to strike me of the kind who might fit in my camp, my outward reaction goes something like this:  “Ohmygod, he is so adorable.  I want to adopt him.”  Meanwhile, my internal reaction is that my heart melts, my tummy aches a little, and the world slows to a snail’s pace.  (If you saw the old man in the movie Up, and have any kind of heart at all, you know what I’m talking about.) 

And if I didn’t have a fear of rejection and/or otherwise didn’t think the execution of it might not go quite as I envision it in my head -- this would include my camp of old men playing checkers and watching WPRK in Cincinatti reruns, entertaining me with funny stories of the good old days, and going out to breakfast at 7 a.m. (because that’s what old people do) -- I might consider making the proposal.  An added bonus – and I’m being completely picky here -- would include their insistence on helping me out with some light household chores like doing laundry and emptying the dishwasher. 

Today, during my morning workout, I spotted two perfect candidates for my old man camp.  They were decked out to the nines in camp-type attire just to walk the college track.  Five-foot-tall wooden walking stick?  Check.  Fishing hats?  On their heads.  Decorated t-shirts from some tourist attraction (location unidentified)? Keeping them warm.  Tiny, six-inch boombox (complete with handle) playing Roberta Flack’s “Where is the love?” You bet!  This last detail was what melted my heart into pure gold because of the beautiful dichotomy of two old-thyme Mainers not listening to some old-folky Conway Twitty or Shelby Lynne, as one would expect (which would’ve still been adorable and dandy, BTW), but rather taking their morning constitution jamming to some sweet old-school R&B.  These men knew how to do it right.  Let's just say it was a sight for sore eyes on a Sunday morning. Complete with smile and a friendly hello, Clifford and Lou (my invented names for them) were the men for me. 

You may ask why I don’t envision a camp for old ladies too, or even a co-ed camp, and to be honest, I’m not quite sure.  While old folks, in general, get my heart strings, I have always had a particular soft spot for the old men.  Something about their way just speaks to me, I suppose.    

So if you know of any old men who are adorable, good natured and fun, and are in need of a granddaughter-type figure, you know who to call.

Hello, Spray Tan.

I shun laying out in the sun and UV tanning beds, because, let’s be honest – I’m too effing vain for that.  Premature wrinkles and skin cancer?  That’s for the birds.  As a result, I’m forced to embrace my alabaster pallor, even if I do think a little color is a necessary accessory for bikinis and sundresses.  With summer upon us, I decided it wouldn't hurt to go Hollywood for a day and see what this spray-tan business is all about.

So I did as I always do before embarking on a new situation by doing my research.  Specifically, I Googled, “What to do before getting a spray tan.”  All signs pointed to exfoliating and not applying deodorant and greasy lotions, to which I heeded. 

At the salon, Terry the Technician walked me through the process, which included getting undressed to the point that I was comfortable and standing on the white towel on the floor.  She said people wear whatever they’re comfortable with, which is either going completely nude to wearing a bathing suit. 

See?  Tan lines are hot.  Bar thinks so too.

Terry started spraying me using an airbrush, having me turn and lift my arms in varying degrees.  Once she was finished spraying, which took about five minutes (I made sure to tell her to go light on my face so I didn’t look like “tanning mom”), she instructed me to stand for about 10 minutes while the tanner dried.  Afterward, she checked in on me, touched my skin to make sure it wasn’t still tacky, and told me to wait to shower until the next morning.  She said that when I did shower to dry myself lightly with a towel – helpful advice considering I hadn’t yet researched “What to do after getting a spray tan.”  I dressed back into my post-spray-tan uniform -- sweats and a loose t-shirt that I didn’t care about getting stained, and black flip flops. 

When I got home I admired my head-to-toe glow, which I haven’t had in years since the tanning-booth tan I got when I was a silly 17-year-old prepping for prom.  Remarkably, there was no orange hue or icky self-tan smell and it actually looked really natural and passable for a "real tan."

I understand the temptation to tan, because everyone looks better with a little glow.  The beauty of a spray tan is that it imposes the same kind of glow that a suntan does, but without the potential for accelerated wrinkles and skin cancer.  But at $30 (plus tip) a pop, though, to have it done right, it’s not something that every person’s budget can accommodate, especially on a weekly basis when the tan fades.  But who needs to be bronzed all the time? 

I think a spray tan is a perfect once-in-a-while treat, especially when you want to wear a cute sundress or bikini, and are like me who pretty regularly dons the SPF 30 every time you step outside.   Long story short: you'll definitely find me getting my spray tan on again. 

I Love Girls!

I am a pretty big fan of the new show Girls.  About twenty-something recent college graduates trying to make it in New York, the show is no Sex and the City (SATC).  In fact, Girls is in many ways the antithesis of SATC: there’s no jazzy soundtrack, no sheen illuminating the sexiness of New York, no particular ambition whatsoever as showcased by the ladies of SATC.  Instead, the Girls of Girls are barely employed, can hardly pay their rent without the help of their parents, and are ill-matched by beta males who suffer from a similar lack of ambition.

The show represents a time when an expensive degree from Oberlin College does not a success make, when your parents pay for your Blackberry, and when boys treat you like shit even though they’re pretty shitty themselves.  In that sense, the show is both unrelatable and relatable.  When I graduated from college with my state degree, there was no question that I wasn’t going to get a full-time job with benefits.  With nearly $50,000 in loan debt, I had to get a full-time job with benefits.  And even though the job I got gave me anxiety and cold sweats every day, I stuck it out for three and a half years, while going to grad school and being miserable pretty much every day.  (That’s my walking-20-miles-to-school-in-4-feet-of-snow-story for you.)

So while I don’t understand the lack of hard work and motivation exhibited by these Girls, I do understand being in my early 20s, with so much promise ahead of me and yet being overwhelmed by it all – by the supposed promise that “the world is your oyster” -- because life is pretty hard when you’re young and no one wants to give you your big break.  It’s only when you learn that getting any kind of big break comes with hard work and sacrifice, both of which are things these Girls haven’t yet learned and which I didn’t know myself at that age.  You work that shitty job, you pay your dues, you get a little experience, and life gets easier and better. 

Where the Girls are particularly relatable, though, is in their need for love, attention, and ultimately, for their need to be understood, for better or worse.  Hannah spends her time fulfilling these needs by sleeping with Adam, an unemployed dirtbag of a guy, whose sexual demands range from asking that she pretend like she’s a prepubescent girl with a lunchbox, to smacking her around a bit, and to telling her to humiliate him while he masturbates in front of her (when she tries to take off her dress, he tells her it will ruin the fantasy and she obeys).  They have no relationship outside his apartment, aside from the occasional phone call or text, and have never set foot outside his apartment together.  We have all experienced a relationship like this in our lifetime, right? If you haven’t, well, good for you.  In your late teens and early 20s (for women in particular), it is not about being sexually satisfied on a personal level – it is about seeking sexual gratification by pleasing the other.  Once you hit your mid-20s, you hopefully learn that this is not the way any kind of romantic or sexual relationship should be.     

While I ultimately became a fan of SATC, I didn’t like it the first time I watched it.  I thought it was tacky and trashy and poked fun at the institution of romantic love.  Do you remember the pearl necklace episode?  Well, I was only 17 the first time I saw it, and the show’s target audience was clearly not 17-year-old virgins.  When I watched it a few years later, I had reached the point that sex and love are not always mutually exclusive.  Having developed that understanding, the show endeared to me the way it hadn’t the first time I had watched it.  To this day, I maintain that it’s one of the best series ever.

But what I like about Girls even more than SATC is that it does not sugarcoat the dim realities of love and sex, to want and to be wanted, and to find your way in a world that doesn’t give a shiznit about you.  When you're in your early 20s, the promise of hope and possibility looms over you like a dark cloud.  Hope and possibility are not necessarily tangible even if they exist in theory.  Moreover, wanting is much different than getting, and always requires some sort of painful sacrifice, something that this culture of young women may only be beginning to understand.  Girls is revealing these struggles in a very real, and at times, maddening, way, resulting in one of the best series out right now.  What can I say?  I'm in love with Girls.

Opie & Anthony: Just Another Pop Culture Obsession

My current pop culture obsessions as of late have been (1) John Travolta’s sex scandal; (2) the new show Girls; and (3) Opie and Anthony – all of which I can’t seem to get enough of. Somewhere sprinkled in there is an ongoing obsession with Bethenny Frankel and all her awesomness and the Real Housewives franchise, but that is nothing new. (If you’re too good for pop culture, may God bless you.)

Aside from Girls, which deserves its own post that I’ve been writing in my head since I started watching the show, I am a newcomer to the strange perverse goodness that is Opie & Anthony. Having recently bought a new car, for an entire four months I'm the recipient of a free temporary subscription to SiriusXM Radio. Only having had it for 7 days, though, I’m already addicted to it, a problem, since at the end of my free subscription I may be inclined to renew for a paid subscription just as I've done with HBO solely for Girls, and, oh yeah, "the documentaries."  Initially, I was ecstatic that XM had a station devoted entirely to “Old Skool R&B” (i.e., The Groove) and figured that would be the station to consume much of my radio time, until discovering that there are enough channels to turn any relatively focused human being into someone with prescription-grade Attention Deficit Disorder.  Well, THEN I discovered the Opie & Anthony Channel, of course. 

Okay, so it kind of makes me feel a little like a 17-year-old boy, and not at all a better human being for it, but I can’t help it myself – I’m completely entranced by it, good or bad. Just the other day they had an entire show dedicated to local foods, in a non-trendy or annoying food snobby kind of way -- about how great the bread is in Long Island (I had no idea! Now I want to try the bread in a Long Island!) and why they can’t make cheese steaks as good in NYC as they can in Philadelphia and yada yada yada. And then, somehow, they transitioned over into, well, completely crass and brash chitchat about unmentionable topics. And it was all funny and entertaining and freaking awesome.

The only problem is, now I’m having a very mild identity crisis that I may be a 17-year-old- manboy masked as a 20-something-year-old woman. (I really shouldn’t joke about that, but you get what I mean, right?)  This is what guilty pleasures do to us.  They make us feel like super shallow, base, perverse semi-complete versions of ourselves, and yet, there's pretty much no escaping them, unless you have a ton of religious self-control, which I don't have.  My self control has limits, people.  Some days not eating an entire sleeve of Oreos is a big accomplishment.   And while living life as a 17 year old boy is probably not the worst thing in the world, in practice it actually sounds pretty miserable.  Being a 17-year-old girl was bad enough.