French Christmas

Wild Card Day

I declare today a Wild Card Day.

A "Do Something Nice for Yourself" Day.

A "No to The Should-Haves" day.

I had a lot of things to do today, a very long list of "should haves." I should have updated my LinkedIn profile, I should have read the specs for a new freelance project I'm starting in a few weeks, I should have re-arranged my books by genre to fit in the new bookshelf I got and assembled (with the help of my Dad -- thanks Dad!) yesterday.

I didn't do any of these things. Instead, I ate: one chocolate peanut butter brownie, half of an M&M sugar cookie, and one vanilla cupcake with buttercream frosting. Then I took a nap.

It was glorious!

I feel the way Sleeping Beauty must have felt after sleeping for all those hundreds of years, or after Super Mario hits one of the bonus mushrooms and gets a life boost. I feel like my tank is full, instead over dipping below a quarter like it usually is.

So I encourage you to slip a Wild Card Day into your deck, a bonus unexpected day that can be whatever you want it to be.

Best of all, there's one cupcake left! Photo by: Me (as are the vast majority if photos on that site, for that matter.)

Quote of the Day

"Open up the watermelon of your heart."

-- Christine, my awesome Wednesday night yoga instructor

No introduction, conclusion or extrapolation necessary.

#Reverb10 Prompt 14: Appreciate (aka In Honor of the Umlaut)

What's the one thing you have come to appreciate most in the past year? How do you express gratitude for it?

I have an umlaut. (Nope, it’s not a disease.) It looks like this: ë.

For a long time, my umlaut was orphaned. The typewriters, pre-historic word processors, and Commodore 64s of the early ‘80s just didn’t know what to do with those two gorgeous dots hanging out above the “e” in my name. So they got erased, deleted, banished from the kingdom like red-headed stepchildren.

As a result, I got called “Noel” (pronounced No-Wuhl instead of No-well) a lot by substitute teachers in school and addressed to as “Mr.” in form letters. When I was younger, there would be snickers from my classmates, which I grew accustomed to. In fact, I got accustomed to ignoring my umlaut, the very part of my name that made it feminine and not masculine. I got accustomed to people not being able to say it, not knowing where to put it, and not knowing what to do with it. Over time, I stopped using it, because it just seemed like too much of a hassle. My umlaut sat banished in the tower castle, lonely and collecting dust.

This year at work when I wrote my name on our company whiteboard, someone commented to me: “Oh, you have an umlaut? That’s so cool!” And it was cool—exotic, unusual, a little Mötley Crüe -ish. And I realized in that moment that if I couldn’t be bothered with my umlaut, why should anyone else?

So I appreciate my umlaut this year, apologize for ignoring it for so long, and thank it for reminding me that you have to see yourself as a goddess first before anyone else will.

'Lil Bits

We all want to change something about ourselves; we want to reach right in and scoop out the part of our brain that likes cigarettes or devil's food cake or gratuitous spending. Hollow it right out like a pumpkin and stick a pretty little candle inside.

And because we're Americans, we want the changes to be BIG and RIGHT NOW, just like we like our cheeseburgers and our SUVs. That's why we like New Year's resolutions so much. We like the idea that one magic day will turn our whole lives around, no assembly required.

But if you really want to shift those massive continents in your heart and mind, the turning over has to happen gradually, over the course of an ice age or a paleolithic era. You have to keep at it, like a glacier nudging its way across a frozen landscape, leaving pieces of itself behind along the way. That's the only way to make it stick.

What I love most about writing

They say there are no original thoughts. That for every thought or feeling that fires through your neurons, that someone, somewhere, maybe an anciet Roman centurion or an Egyptian high priestess or a Russian peasant, may have had that exact same thought or feeling hundreds or thousands of years before.

But the way your share that thought or feeling, the words you use to shape it, and they way your turn that thought into action in the world--that is completely your own.

A Cloven Hooved Kind of Day

Have you ever felt like the devil is #@$&ing with you?

This is something Aaron mentioned sometime in the early months of our relationship after a particularly bad day at work, and it took me buy surprise. Having been brought up by two lapsed Catholics and a Jewish stepmom, I tended to think to think of the devil in a cute-sparkly-horns-on-Halloween sort of way.

But there it was. A big dose of biblical good and evil dished out in my living room. “I feel like the devil is #@$&ing with me,” he said, shaking his head.

I was intrigued. “Like as in you need an exorcism?” I said, wondering if I had a stash of holy water handy under the kitchen sink (and then remembering that was highly doubtful).

“No,” he said. “Just like he’s trying to, you know, make me give in. Being that bad voice in my head. Hanging out on my left shoulder and saying things I don’t need to hear.”

I didn’t quite get it then, but in the past 18 months, I have grown to understand this whole concept of the devil fucking with you. I won’t bore you with details – especially considering they are no where near the catastrophic levels of things like Hurricane Katrina or the BP oil spill or the earthquake in Haiti – but I’ve recently realized that becoming a grown-up involves situations that can be … disheartening.

Because once you become a grown up, you see how often bad things can happen to really good people. Bad things like layoffs and cancer and death. (Sometimes all at once.) Because good things can happen to people who seemingly don’t’ deserve it, over and over again. Good things like big paychecks and million dollar condos and other American-dreamy type things. And at the end of the day, there’s not a whole lot you can do about it.

When these things happen, it’s hard to stay positive and focused and motivated.

When these things happen, it’s easy to think about taking some easier route or shortcut.

I asked Aaron what he thought about this, since he is at this point, sort of my go-to on all issues related to God and religion. He told me about Job. Which I sort of remembered from a childhood bible I had one upon a time, and which guess I sort of get, except for a point my friend Kim made over coffee one day: “Why am I going to put blind faith in a God who can’t put blind faith in me?”

This is the point in the blog where I’d really like to wrap it all up for you in pretty tissue paper and a bow. But I can’t. What I can do is tell you what I decided to do, after going over and over and over in my mind about all the things I couldn’t do, about all the things I could not fix or make better for people that I love and care about.

I said a novena to St. Jude. (Aaron keeps it handy for emergencies.) I said it for nine days, six times a day, just like the instructions said. And that St. Jude, he really does get a bad rap, his name being so close to Judas and all. Because while my nighttime whisperings might not rectify any great cosmic injustice or imbalance, I felt like maybe I sent some sort of distress signal out into the universe for all of us who are struggling. Like even though there wasn't much I could do, I could do this.

And I definitely slept a whole lot better.