Take Back Your Life!

Hey fun-loving folks,

If you’ve got 5 minutes, please check out The Rebel You Haven’t Met my guest post at ex-patharem.com. It’s fun and so are the links in blue. Would love some rebellious comments!

Savor your long, luscious weekend!

Giulietta, always musing

Hey Rebels,

As a young child, I wandered about my world asking many burning questions. Why are pussy willows furry? Where do babies come from? Why did my neighbor have the word “butts” on her outside ashtrays? How long would it take me to dig to China? Why did the neighbor’s dog kill my rabbit? How does the player piano make music when I press on the giant pedals? Where does the wind start?

Later in life, I learned to suppress my burning-question asking tendencies and instead focus on giving the “right answer” to other people’s questions: parents, teachers, professors, supervisors, doctors, government leaders. The pressure to always have the right answer became intense, especially at work. One morning the CFO called me to his office with a PowerPoint question. “Fortunately,” I knew the answer or who knows what employment horrors might have befallen me. (Looking back the so-called horror might have been welcomed if I’d been focusing on a question other than, “How do I keep my job?”) (more…)

Hey risk takers!

Last Thursday night at karaoke I sang, “I’ll Always Love You,” by Taylor Dayne. Remember her songs from the 80’s? Needless to say, it’s what my mind considers a hard song – maybe equal to one of those double somersault reverse inward pike Olympic dives with a 3.2 level of difficulty. Six months ago, I listened to that song and said, “no way,” snapping it back into the CD case.

In the interim, I started going to a local karaoke night every Thursday. No matter how I felt or what excuse my little mind tried to come up with to worm its way out of the adventure, I showed up with at least 1 or 2 new songs to perform. Needing to sing a new song each week pushed me into unchartered singing territory. (more…)

Hey questioning ones!

Yesterday, Jimmy and I drove by a field filled with lots of children wearing red and blue shirts doing some kind of organized exercise. Simultaneously, we turned to each other and said, “Mao’s Cultural Revolution?” Something about it left me with a unsettled feeling. The same feeling I get when I bike by a pre-school in a nearby town where the children spend 6+ hours a day “learning/playing” inside a chain-link fence. It feels like captivity has become the new childhood normal, a radical departure from my own. (more…)

If you’ve read my Skirt! essay, River Talk, then you may recall that I don’t remember much of the information stuffed into my head in high school. In addition to Siddhartha, I’ve recalled the basic premise of the Samuel Beckett play, Waiting For Godot. Two guys, Vladimir and Estragon, wait on a country road by a tree and talk about how they are waiting for Godot. But of course Godot never comes. As a high school student I thought, “what a dumb play.” Now as a middle-ager, I think, “wow, that play’s brilliant. It’s a commentary on life.”

Do you have a Godot (or Godots) in your life? Something that you’re waiting over and over for that never comes? (more…)