This Old House—More Carl Jung, Less Bob Villa

If you dream about a house, the rooms in the house are supposed to represent aspects of your life. Kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms…every room in your dream—how you see it, what you find in it, what you’re doing in it—may help lead to a certain amount of clarity in your conscious life.

But what about your actual house, the one where you cook your meals, take your showers, neglect to dust? What does this house represent?

Nearly three years ago, my husband, daughter, and I moved into the house I lived in from ages seven to eighteen. Just like with any other person who has had life experiences, there were things that happened in my life that I used to wish hadn’t happen. I don’t wish those things away anymore because now I get it. Everything’s got to happen the way it does so that you get what you’re supposed to get out of it.

Coming back to my childhood home has opened this metaphorical door for me. It’s the excavation of my personal history. I’m digging up my past so that I can reinterpret what happened.

There have been moments when specific memories have resurfaced and allowed me to see an event in a different light. There have also been times when just painting a wall felt as good as a bowl of warm soup.

In my house, the one where I spend my waking hours, each room represents a chance to grow.

I have two uncles who have both renovated their childhood homes. They live with their wives in the houses that they grew up in. Both of them have made dramatic improvements, tearing down walls, laying new floors, installing new kitchens and bathrooms. I haven’t talked to either about their experience, but I hope they have enjoyed it as much as I’ve enjoyed my renovations.

Top Ten List

When I can’t think of anything to write about, I think it’s best to slide in a top ten list—kinda like calling Papa John’s when you don’t want to cook dinner: it’s cheap, doesn’t take too long, and keeps everyone happy.

Tonight’s subject:

Top Ten Things I Want to Experience in My Lifetime:

1. Sitting in front of an audience while Oprah asks me about my book
2. Being interviewed by Terri Gross
3. Writing for Vanity Fair
4. Having a novel adapted into a screenplay
5. Living in Italy for a month at a time
6. Having a house—exactly like Diane Keaton’s in Something’s Gotta Give—only I want mine to be on a Gulf Coast beach
7. Total resolution of all conflicts in my life (is this possible? Makes the Oprah thing sound easy)
8. Watching Clive Owen play the role of a male character from one of my books
9. Flying to New York with my sisters just to go shopping
10. Doing a book tour along the West coast, by train, with my daughter

Lofty stuff, but you got to put it out there if you want to see it happen. Probably a result of too many feel good, self-help books lately. Right now I’m reading a new one from Robert Johnson, Living Your Unlived Life. I think the target audience is supposed to be a little more mature demographic than my 34 year old self (the rest of the title is: C0ping with Unrealized Dreams and Fulfilling Your Purpose in the Second Half of Life.)

My plan is to get a head-start so that by the time my second half arrives I’ve got the pedal to the metal in the living-your-dreams department.

How Not to Get an Editor’s Interest

Part of my job is pitching article ideas written by me and/or my CEO to business publications so that we can build content and help position ourselves as the thought leaders in our fish bowl.

Usually, I’m pretty on target when I email an editor asking to write an article for their mag/site. But not today.

Here’s how it went down. I’ve edited the editor’s response so as not to name anything or anybody who doesn’t want to show up here:

Hi Amy,

Thanks for thinking of us again [[i wrote an article for them about four years ago]]. The description of the [[insert my proposed article title here]] is actually counter to what we teach in our seminars.

Given that, we’ll pass on this article.

Best in 2008 and thanks for keeping in touch.

In other words, “Hey, thanks for wasting my time and not doing due diligence before sending an idea that is the complete opposite of what we preach. How about you wait a whole year before you show up in my email box again. PS…You might want to read Pitching Editors for Dummies. “

Sometimes I fly high and sometimes I fall flat on my face. At least, I wore all my own clothes today.

Nice Pants

If ever the Universe put a big ass billboard in my front yard, it was today.

My daughter asked me this morning if I would take her to school in time to eat breakfast there. I guess her usual breakfast of Dinosaur Egg Oatmeal didn’t sound as appetizing. So in true manic-like fashion, I got myself dressed and my daughter suited up and out the door a whole hour earlier than our regular leave-time.

To quicken things up a bit, I dressed in the same outfit that I wore to the Superbowl party the evening before (yes, I mistakenly thought the Superbowl was last night and showed up at my aunt’s house a whole week early).

I put on a long black sweater with a tie-like belt that went around my waist and khakis. The khakis fit much looser than they did the previous evening. Either I had lost weight during the night or the pants material had stretched out a bit—either justification worked for me.

Low and behold, I get to work and stick my hands in my pants pockets and immediately think, “Hey, my khaki’s don’t have pockets this deep.”

My husband’s khakis on the other hand…

WTF?! It took me sticking my hands in my pockets to realize that I was wearing my husbands pants. Yes, they were way baggy and did not fit around my waist. But still, I should need suspenders to keep my husband’s britches on.

After being momentarily sickened by the situation, I laughed. Then I called my husband so that he could laugh.

I hear ya Great Shining Universe. I’ll get my ass on the treadmill first thing tomorrow. Wearing my husband’s pants to work is as deep as I want to dive into this bucket of sludge.

When’s the Superbowl Again?

My husband and I are the only people in America who don’t know when the Superbowl is.

My aunt throws our extended family’s weekly Sunday dinner at her house every year for Superbowl. The shindig starts at 4:00 p.m. and the house is filled with my grandmother, aunts, uncles, cousins, and all the food you could stuff into an arena.

Tonight, my husband and I showed up at my Aunt’s house late for the party (4:18), but were the first to arrive.

Funny, I thought. I’m never the first person to arrive anywhere.

“Is the Superbowl tonight?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I just was going along with whatever you said. I didn’t even think about it,” said hubbie. Which is strange, because earlier today he refused to go along with anything I said.

In fact, I’d be willing to bet that the entire mix-up started because he refused to go along with my idea for the lighting in our soon-to-be-finished basement.

Our day started with an estimate from a contractor to renovate our bedroom that is currently gutted out to the studs and finish our basement. We gave the go ahead for him to get started on our bedroom the first of next week.

Hooray–right? But, what we’re really signing on for is a series of ridiculous, inconsequential quibbles that will last as long as the work does.

Today’s argument was like the kick-off event. Similar to when the mayor uses oversized scissors to cut a big red ribbon in front of a new business. We chose recessed lighting to be our inaugural quarrel—super intriguing and so profound.

Let’s just hope that by the time our bedroom is complete, we still want to share it.

…I should mention that my aunt was gracious enough to let us stay for dinner even though we showed up a week early.

A Sign of Things to Come

The following horoscope showed up in the Courier-Journal yesterday (Friday morning, the day after I made a commitment to start writing again):

LEO: You’re not sure how much work it will take to bring a project to completion.  But don’t let that question mark keep you from forward movement.

Nice–right?  I love when the Universe uses the daily paper to remind me how important my dreams are.  I usually don’t even bother reading the CJ horoscopes because they sound more like friendly advice from your great aunt than a glimpse of what’s to come.  But that one worked for me, so now it’s taped to my laptop.

We rented 3:10 to Yuma.  Something tells me I’m going to be asleep somewhere around 3:20.

There Will Be Slaps

My two days of vacation are officially over. The time was well spent since now I know:

• sushi is better ordered at restaurant than made at home
• in the other hand, homemade cappuccinos are definitely worth having a countertop appliance devoted to them
• an afternoon spent watching an anti-happy movie and getting a sub-par manicure a is still a great afternoon
• just because a movie is gets an Oscar nod doesn’t mean you would have voted for it
• superfluous writing is good for the soul
• so is taking two weekdays to spend your time EXACTLY how you want to spend it

Now, let’s dish movies. Today I saw There Will Be Blood with Daniel Day-Louis and the brother from Little Miss Sunshine, and yesterday I watched The Savages with Philip See More Hoffman and Laura Linney.

We’ll start with the Savages. Two unbelievable actors. Both fun to watch. And yet, sitting through a movie where they play emotionally stunted siblings having to deal with their father’s dementia–a father they hadn’t talked to in years–was just depressing. I get it. Caring for an ailing parent is hard and it sucks, and it’s especially difficult when the parent was awful to you growing up and absent when you were grown up. But spending two hours of my life watching the storyline bleed out was excruciating. I do wish I was as good at something as Philip is at acting.

There Will Be Blood: 1911 Daniel Day Louis slaps Paul Dano, 1912 Paul slaps Daniel, 1914 Daniel slaps his son, 1915 his son slaps him. There was a lot of good acting in between. The church baptism scene with Daniel and Paul was worth the whole movie for me. I don’t know what else to tell you. Definitely interesting, but the story just didn’t have as much to offer as No Country for Old Men.

Here are my choices for the best pic of 2008 in order of preference:

1. No Country for Old Men (javier’s hair should win it’s own Oscar)
2. Juno (this is just a super entertaining flick–which is kinda the point–that didn’t make me cringe in anxiety or cover my eyes once)
3. Michael Clayton (I enjoyed this more than my hubbie, but that’s probably the George Clooney factor)
4. Atonement (I haven’t seen it yet, but I’ll always choose an epic, unrequited love affair over oil)
5. There Will Be Blood (he’s got a bowling alley in his house)

I forgot how much I loved going to see matinees on a workday. It’s got a very decadent feeling about it, like when I used to skip 4th period to take an extra long lunch and drive around the knobs smoking cigarettes and listening to the Beastie Boys.

838 Down; 149,162 To Go

My body is too tired to sit upright for any length of time so this is going to be short. I took a cardio boxing class at the Y tonight and had to drive most of the way home with my knees because my arms feel like two strings of wet spaghetti that got whacked with a bat.

I’m beat like a mo-fo and do not have the energy to write about how great my day was. I did write—838 words. I wanted to start with 1,000 words a day, but today was mostly about getting started. I spent the first part of my writing time cleaning off my desk and then creating a playlist–Tunes to Write to, you get the idea.

After I was finished doing everything else I could possibly do: get the mail, make some more coffee, decide if I wanted to type in a different font than Times New Roman (I did–book antiqua, it’s softer), I got my writing on. It felt odd. Good, but like I was doing something completely superfluous (where the hell did that word come from?!).

So I’m going to do it again tomorrow and Saturday and Sunday and hopefully by then, it will be something I fit into each day. 1,000 words a day would be a complete novel by August. Not necessarily a good one, but a finished one.

Other things I did today:

• saw a somewhat crappy movie (it was crappy because it was depressing)
• got a totally crappy manicure (fortunately, I didn’t get all purpose cleaner poured in my eye this time, but my cuticles looked like I used a hedge trimmer on them)
• made crappy (crabby?) sushi at home. i tried to do a yum yum roll. my crab mixture came out tasting like something that should have been on a baguette and my rolls were sad messes of sticky, hot rice.

And yet, it was a great day — I worked on my book. I’ll try to have less crappy things happen tomorrow.

Call Off the Suicide Watch – I’m Good

In the past three days, I’ve had two dear friends contact me because they were concerned about what I had written.

What this means to me:

1. I am very, very fortunate to have friends who actually read my stuff
2. My writing has been a lot more depressing (translate: boring) than entertaining

No worries. Whatever depression lingered through the past days–and posts–is gradually coming to a close and I’m getting back to my usual, unaffected self (I don’t know if unaffected works here, but it’s the first word that came to me so I thought I should keep it).

Tomorrow is already looking way up as I have taken the next two glorious days off of work for personal time. My plan: get a manicure, see a movie (probably The Savages with Laura Linney and Philip S. Hoffman), take some classes at the Y, and write, write, write.

Promise to let you know how it goes. Also promise to stop being so God Damned depressing with such piss-poor commentaries about all the shit I’m trying to quit.

Safety Nets Can Be Dangerous

It seems the more people push themselves outside of their comfort zone, the more they achieve and/or the greater the reward.

Diablo Cody stripped —> Blogged about it —> Found literary agent —> Wrote a memoir —> Wrote a screenplay —> now is an Oscar nominee

Barbara Kingsolver decided to eat only locally grown foods for a year —> Wrote a book about it —> Got a bestseller (granted, she’d been a bestseller before, but I’m trying to prove something here)

That guy who ate McDonald’s for 30 days —> made a documentary about it —> ended up with his own tv show

One of my favorite stories: the author of Julie and Julia who decided to create every recipe from Julia Child’s The Fine Art of French Cooking during the course of one year. She started blogging about it and ended up with a book deal, and now possibly a movie deal.

So I really don’t have it in me to strip and while I would love to eat McDonald’s every day for the rest of my life, it would only work against my wholesome, healthy living regime. The cooking thing is great; but just like everything else, it’s already done.

So what’s going to make me step out of my comfort zone?

I don’t want anything that would dramatically affect my family’s regular routine.

And I don’t want to give up my career just yet. Of course, this counters every other comment I’ve written in the past week about wanting to be a full time writer. But I like my job. Good-hearted boss, extremely flexible work environment, more creative freedom than any other job I’ve ever had. And the paycheck is nice.

It’s a great job. But is it also the safety net that is hazardous to living my dreams?

I don’t know..don’t want to think about what’s next right now. So I’ll just keep writing here until something comes to me.

In the words of Kevin Federline, “Later Bitches!”