…I eat Lucky Charms, or lots of salads, both of which I have eaten today (and LOTS of salads all week) I get green poop. I was thinkin’ perhaps something was wrong with me, till I found this website doing a Google search for "green poop".
What?! It’s a very informative site. I learned a lot.
What?! Too much information?
Sorry. Just wanted to share the poop scoop.
Don’t you just love my Pajama Days!! I sure do!
Its 5:30pm and I’m still in my pjs. Its the first Saturday in over a month that I haven’t had some place to be, something I had to do or someone I had to meet up with.
These are my favorite kind of Saturdays; spent reading, sleeping and catching up on TiVo-ed recordings of the week. I never got them growing up. My parents thought to spend a day this way was a waste of time. That is, until they retired and spent most days reading and napping, when they weren’t traveling and seeing the U.S. from their truck and trailer. They just weren’t like me.
Me? I need downtime. I need time alone. I mean, A-Lone. Me, myself and I — and God. No one else. No friends, no parents, no roommates. I have rarely had this kind of time, mostly because I have rarely lived alone. I had roommates from the time I moved out of my parents’ home till I moved overseas in 2003 — except when I briefly had an apartment of my own in my late twenties, more out of need than of choice.
As an adult I always felt guilty for sleeping in on Saturdays and holidays, as most of my roommates were like my parents, either extroverts who were filled with energy by being with people or filled with conviction that a day not filled with activities was a day wasted. I grew up believing that my feelings and choices were basically bad, or not allowed at all, so I spent my life pretty much like Julia Roberts’ character in "Runaway Bride" — taking on the attitudes, beliefs and fancies of those I most wanted to be loved by and denying my own desires to the point I didn’t even know what they were. I spent my life believing my longing to spend the day in my pjs just kicking back and reading or napping was at the very least selfish and shameful, not to mention sinful. Most of my roommates, I can pretty much guarantee, to this day think I’m crazy to want to spend a Saturday the way I have today.
But that’s okay. I think they are the crazy ones to want to start a day off work getting up at 6am and going strong and hard all day. To me that’s not relaxing. Nor is it fun; especially when you’re just going to go. You know, to just be busy. And especially when the long day isn’t followed by a day of real rest.
Yet that’s the way I spent most of my days throughout much of my adult life. I got up not because I was ready or I wanted to, but because I could hear my roommates up and felt embarrassed that they might be thinking that I’m so incredibly lazy. Yes, sounds crazy. But to me, what people thought of me was much more important than what I wanted. And what they thought of me determined what I thought of myself. told you: "Runaway Bride".
That’s not to say I don’t enjoy days I get up early and go-go-go. I had a wonderful time working hard and long at Jenn’s charity event two weeks ago. And I had an incredible time attending Rosh Hashanah services with my friend Donna at her reformed synagogue last Saturday morning. Its just that I come away from it exhausted and longing for a "real" Saturday; one where I can just chill out and not go anywhere.
The crazy thing is, its taken me until I was nearly 41 years old (and two years of counseling) to really embrace this part of me and recognize that I am not sinning or wasting a day by spending the day as I have today, reading and napping and just hangin’ out. This is part of who I am, part of who God made me to be. Perhaps what they say about life in your 40s is true: you really do finally get comfortable with who you are and start not caring about what other people think. —Truthfully, I think its more the effects of my counseling, more about God using that time to transform me and teach me how to accept who I He made me to be, rather than an effect of age… but that’s just me.
I’m a huge introvert with a huge heart and love for people. My dad once pointed that out to me years ago, saying that I had been blessed and cursed with inheriting dichotomous aspects of both my parent’s personalities, but I couldn’t really understand it or embrace and comprehend the complexity of it then. My mom was such a people lover, and a huge extrovert. Huge. Dad was a huge introvert. It’s a testament to their love for God, His love for them and their willingness to partner with Him and with each other in this thing called marriage that they stayed together for 61 years of marriage, only separated by their deaths. I had the blessing (which sometimes feels like a curse) to be given dad’s introversion and mom’s huge heart for people.
People exhaust me. Being with them drains me of energy that can only be recouped by being alone. But people also fill my heart with unspeakable joy and deep pleasure. I love them and long to be with them. Finding the balance between my desperate need for alone time to rest and recharge and my desperate love for people and longing to know them deeper and more intimately has been a life-long struggle. But now that I live alone, I’m beginning to find that balance.
And the freedom (from self-condemnation) to have my pajama days and fully embrace and enjoy them. I’m finally recognizing that I am not wasting my day spending it the way I have today. In fact, I’m giving myself a much needed gift, a very good thing for my spirit and soul, as well as my mind and body.
I need the rest I got today. Between my age, my weight and the fact I’m titrating down to elimination my anti-depressant, my body needs even more this time to catch up on rest it’s not getting during the week. And my soul needs time to contemplate, time to absorb what it’s taken in, endured and experienced during the week. And my spirit, my sweet introverted spirit, just needs time to re-energize. I’m like my iPod. I need to be connected to my "source" and just left alone for a long while (in the case of my iPod and long, loooong while — sheesh, 5 hours and counting!) to recharge my battery. My friend, Wendy, calls it Selah. A pause. I guess Saturdays like today, my pajama days, are my Selahs.
I need more of them.
Do you have Selahs in your life? What do they look like for you? Are they Pajama Days, or Park Days or Library Days? How do you pause, reflect and recharge?
…this is me at work today….
…And this is how I will look tonight and all day tomorrow…
Any questions?
PS — Pictures stolen from Cute Overload.
Despite starting the day with the worst traffic I’ve seen on Hillsboro ever, the day turned out to be rather magical.
You’d think that after 40 of these things, I’d be tired of them. But they never seem to lose their magic for me. There’s just something about bounding into a place and announcing, "its my birthday!" that brings me joy and excitement. And I spent most of the day doing just that — or pointing to my big Disneyworld button that says, "Today’s my Birthday!"
I am now the proud owner of a black 30gb video iPod. Woohoo! I’ve already spent the better part of the night playing with it and checking out all the nifty little settings and such. But as wonderful as that is, it cannot top the present I received when I drove down my driveway.
As I came down in the darkness, my headlights caught three beautiful young deer making a dinner out of our hedges. One got skittish as I drove closer, so I stopped the car and just sat watching them, keeping my high beams trained on the three. Soon enough the third one came back to the hedge and began eating again. Then a third one came clamoring through the a gap in the hedges that I’d never noticed before. The four greeted each other as only deer can, hung out for a bit longer, then slowly headed toward the back of our property, out of range of my headlights. What a beautiful gift to come home to!! Nature’s beauty right there in my back yard. I wish I’d had my camera with me in the car so I could’ve shot some pictures of it. Simply wonderful.
The evening ended with a series of calls to and from my sister, Nina, who sent me a very delicious birthday card. 
A perfect ending to a perfectly magical day. Thanks, God!
Today I enter my 41st year on this earth.
At 7:41am central time on September 25, 1965 I made my grand entrance into this world. My dad was in Vietnam. My oldest sister was off at college. And my mom had been in the hospital for several days, since I had threatened to come during Wednesday night Bible study (my mom, Chaplain’s wife to the core, refused to leave until Bible study was over), but changed my mind shortly thereafter.
That’s a pattern I continued all through my life, changing my mind. Frequently and often. Though not many people really know that. I tend to think a lot before I speak, which generally helps. Though it has been my downfall from time-to-time. But I digress.
It’s kinda funny, really. I used to look at the "40s" as being old. But I don’t feel old. I still feel like a freshman in high school, all geeky and goofy-looking but like I’ve got the world by the… well… and my whole life is in front of me.
I still feel that way. Well, except for the last part. I don’t feel like I’ve got my "whole" life in front of me anymore. I feel like it’s mostly behind me. Whether that’s really true or not is yet to be determined.
Ah, the dreams I had of where I would be, who I would be, by the time I was in my 40s. And how far I am from any of them! In my early 30s I was convinced that by the time I was 41 I would be married, with at least one or two children. I’d be living in LA, a stay-at-home mom with a big house and a dog or two. My husband would be a doctor, or a writer-producer (told you I changed my mind often). By the time I reached my late thirties, I was thinking more of marrying another missionary, or someone in ministry somewhere. But the kids thing was still very much in the dream.
In my late 20s I definitely saw myself as married long before I turned 40, with a husband/writing partner on a successful television show — and three or four kids running around too.
In my late teens early 20s I couldn’t even conceive of my 40s — but I know the dream was to be married with six kids, and several Grammys, Oscars and Tonys decorating my mantles around my huge home in Malibu. I still believed I could be Olivia Newton-John, Patti LuPone and Debbie Reynolds all rolled into one.
My, how different my life turned out. Not that I’m complaining. Those were nice dreams. But that’s all they were. Dreams. Fantasies. Real Life is so much different. And, for the most part, so much better.
41. No kids. No husband. No boyfriend. No big house. No shiny awards. I’m not even working in entertainment anymore (unless this blog counts as "entertainment"; if so, I’m grossly underpaid and need to unionize NOW).
I’m extremely grateful to God for unrealized dreams. Not that kids and husbands and big houses and awards aren’t great to have (or want). It’s just that I look around at my life and I’m satisfied. I like where I am at this moment. I don’t want to stay here forever, but I like it for right now. I’m grateful I don’t have children. More for them than for me. I look at who I was back then, even just two or three years ago, and I know I would have inflicted much pain and brokenness on their young hearts and minds. Not that I won’t still should God create a new miracle and give me a child in my "old age". But I’ve learned so much about who am really am, in God’s eyes, and what really matters, that I think the damage I’ll inflict will be much, much less than it would have been had I had those six children in my 20s that I dreamed of and so longed for.
And while having a husband, a partner, to share my life with would truly be a blessing, I’m so grateful he’s not in my life yet. I couldn’t be the wife and partner and lover he deserves, not then, and perhaps not even yet. I’m still dealing with some stuff that needs to be resolved, needs healing, before I’ll be there.
And truthfully, I really love being single. I couldn’t always say that. I don’t know that I could ever really say that and have it be the truth. I know I wanted to believe I was happy being single, but the truth is that I spent most of my adult years dreaming and fantasizing of my "knight in shining armor," rather than living the life in front of me. I didn’t really give myself the chance to be single, in body, spirit and mind because my mind and spirit were always elsewhere, pining to be married.
(Boy does my grammar suck in this post — I just started two paragraphs with "And" and I have no desire, or ideas how, to change it. I’m either getting old in my head too, or getting more rebellious — yeah, probably both.)
While I miss my friends in Hollywood, and I miss working on the Paramount lot especially, I don’t miss the constant popularity contest of that world. I don’t miss feeling like I was perpetually back in high school and was once again not in the in crowd, but desperately wanting to be. The corporate world of health care (is there another industry in which to work in Nashville, besides music??) is just as filled with politics — which, if Friday is any indication, I’m completely failing at still; but that’s another story — but it isn’t as high school-ish as Hollywood is. And the politics are easier to ignore, because, unlike television, sometimes what we are dealing with really is life-and-death-brain-surgery stuff.
I’m so grateful I didn’t realize those dreams of success in the Industry, of Grammys and Oscars and Tonys. Can you imagine? None of that success, none of those awards would have made a difference in who I really am, down inside, and how broken I was and still am. It just would have made it that much harder to admit my brokenness and need for redemption and transformation at the deep level God has provided.
Had all those dreams been realized, I would not be able to live the life I have now. No, it’s not a perfect life. I will probably spend my birthday evening alone (plans fell through late last night) catching up on my TiVo’s activities after a day filled with budget frustrations and constantly changing numbers at work. My dreams for a hybrid car and a couple acres of land to call my own still elude me. My longing for a life partner is still unmet. My Weight Watchers plans all went to crap this week and the only present I’ll probably get today will be the iPod I’m planning to buy myself after work tonight.
But you know what? I still have an awesome life. I have this wonderful little place that
is all my own. A place where I feel safe, not just physically but emotionally. I didn’t realize that I’d never really felt that before; not until recently. I’m a safe person for me to be alone with — I’ve never been that before. Too much self-beating and emotional self-abuse.
I have a wonderful little car, a complete gift from God! I have family and friends who love me (even though most are a couple thousand miles away), a God who adores me and a few dear friends who truly believe in me.
Most of all, I’m finally discovering who I really am. For the first time I’m finally truly delving into all the parts of me I so carefully avoided for fear of offending someone I loved and losing their love and I’m staring it all down, studying me from every angle and learning who and what I am, from the inside out. Perhaps that’s really my birthday gift this year: Me.
This is the best new show I’ve seen in a looooong time. It is a must see and a must keep on the air. God pless Tommy Schlamme and Aaron Sorkin for their creative genius and their hutzpah.
The female president seems to me to be a very obvious hat tip to Jamie Tarses — a ballsy but excellent network president of ABC until 1999. She was known as a tough, volatile, yet incredibly creative and insightful executive, writer-friendly but also uncompromising in a pursuit of excellence. The character’s name is even similar, Jordan.
The writing on Studio 60 is excellent, as is the casting, the acting and the production. There are probably some Industry in-jokes that those outside the Industry won’t get, but overall I think it will appeal to most. They even have an unflinchingly, unapologizingly normal Christian character, rather than succumbing to the tired Hollywood cliches of a rabid, prejudice, stupid Christian caricature.
It’s a promising start. One on which I believe, based on Schlamme’s and Sorkin’s track record, they can deliver on a weekly basis. Unless, of course, they fall victim to the same network creative hacking as the fictional "Studio 60" did in the pilot.
Speaking of Much Ado About Nothing… To have a man act like this over me, that would definitely be a dream come true.
Sorry for the language but it’s the only thing that fits my mood for the day. I was in a nasty snit all day and I really have no rational reason why.
I only know it started early this morning, perhaps when TiVo was trying to record something random for the umpteen millionth time when all I wanted was to watch GMA. It grew when I once again couldn’t lock my front door with my key because the lock is too stiff (guess it needs WD-40??) forcing me to lock it from the inside, go through the back door and lock that then walk through the wet grass (it rained early this morning) to get to my car. And it exploded fully with all the idiots on the road this morning who insisted on doing 10 mph in front of me down every road I went even though there was no traffic in front of them and the speed limit was 40+. Aaaauuugghhh!
My Royal Bitch Mode (RBM) continued unabated throughout work, as my boss found nit-picky errors in the formatting of the Budget Directives I was desperately trying to get out to our IT department for web publication. Poor man had to put up with me snapping and being utterly snarky at every turn.
The RBM kept its strong hold on me as I drove home, once again behind people going 10
mph down 35mph+ streets all because a few rain drops dared to fall on their cars. All the way to the grocery store I spewed forth words that would make a sailor blush.
It didn’t get any better as I walked the isles of Publix wracking my brain for all the
things I needed to get (forgot to write a list), looking in vain for several items I really wanted to get and never found and failing miserably at avoiding all the children and haggard mothers creating chaos in every isle.
I know I was a complete and total bitch all day. I tried not to let it take me completely down, but the RB inside pinned me to the floor and took over in spite of my every effort. And no matter what I tried I could not get rid of the ‘tude and act like a lady.
I didn’t deserve any reward, but I gave myself one anyway — I guess for just surviving the day without killing anyone. I treated myself to something I haven’t had in nearly four months, a Starbucks iced chai latte (I broke the caffeine habit at the end of May). It tastes wonderful, and took the edge of the RB. Now that I’m safe at home and in my comfort clothes and watching my TiVo-recorded shows, the RB is calming down — 
perhaps even getting sleepy.
Sometimes its a pain to be a woman — the hormones and emotions just boiling over and spilling out everywhere. It can be overwhelming. I don’t know if this was just hormones, or perhaps a side-effect from the tapering off of my antidepressants (I cut my current dosage in half last week in an effort — and under my doctor’s supervision, btw — to get off the antidepressants all together, taking at least a month or more to do so), or whether the RBM was just due to being so tired after a long and exhausting weekend, allowing emotions to flow more freely and without my usual filters.
It was all just so exhausting, keeping pace with the RB. She, or rather I — because it really is me, just a part of me I don’t like so much — can be a raging lunatic when I’m in that mode. It’s embarrassing, and yet I just did not have the energy today to fight it
off.
Do men have to deal this this kind of stuff? Do you guys find yourselves struggling with
your emotions, or with bad attitudes — days when you are just a "bitch" for lack of a better word? I know my gay friends would have their bitchy days, but then again, they are more in tune with their feminine side than the average man.
What is it with us women, that we have such emotional spill-age??
Sheesh. What a day. I pity the people who found themselves in my path today. All I gotta say is, I’m so glad the day is over and I hope I don’t have a repeat tomorrow (and yeah, I’m in an Emma Thompson/Much Ado About Nothing sort of mood).
