The List

I am formally lodging a complaint with the Powers That Be about New Years Resolutions Lists.

Don’t get me wrong. I think that those lists are great. I used to make one of them every year myself. I believe that I started this practice when I was in Therapy. That in and of itself probably says a whole lot about my List.

But an even greater problem with The List other than my general neurotic state, which The List quite clearly pointed out, was that the older I got, the longer The List got.

Each year like clockwork I would sit down and look at last years List and figure out where in the grand scheme of things I stood. And somehow, no matter how many of those things on The List that I had accomplished, there were still one or two things that I had just never quite gotten around to. So of course, they went onto the NEXT years List.

Now I’m no mathematical whiz, but even I can see that over the years The List will ultimately seem to grow at an alarming rate. And to be perfectly honest, having attained the ripe old age of 44, I now find the length of The List positively exhausting just to read. These days looking at The List just makes me want to lie down with a cold rag on my forehead and take a nap.

And lets face it. The List is essentially a list of our shortcomings. You are putting in writing all the messed up, stupid things that you did that year. It’s like that tag on the hairdryer that says “Do Not Use While In Shower”. You KNOW that someone HAD to have done this for it to be on The List in the first place!

So for the sake of all of us that bathe with electrical appliances and never get everything on The List done, I am formally boycotting The List.

And that’s going right up there at the top, at #1.

Table For One

I made a pot roast today.

Wandering through the grocery store the other day, I gazed longingly at a lovely pot roast that was on sale. But I moved on regretfully, because everyone knows that you can’t make a pot roast for one person. Ridiculous. Absurd. It’s just not done.

And then I thought, why not? So what if I end up eating pot roast for a week! Heck, I could even throw the darn thing out after one meal if I wanted to, and it would still cost less than one dinner out at a restaurant.

So I bought a pot roast.

Of course going through the checkout stand I was guiltily convinced that everyone knew that I was a decadent single woman cooking a pot roast just for herself. So what do I do? I start EXPLAINING myself to the woman in line behind me! No – really! There I was babbling on about the cost effectiveness of a single person buying a pot roast, while this poor woman looked around frantically for some kind of Adult Day Care provider that surely must have lost track of me. Fortunately I was saved from myself by a checker who drug my cart over to a newly opened cash register. The other woman stayed where she was.

So this morning I was planning my day around my pot roast, when it suddenly dawned on me that not only could I cook a pot roast for myself, but I could cook it anytime I wanted too!

I could cook my pot roast at 6 in the morning and eat it for breakfast if that was what struck my fancy. I had no one that I needed to please but myself. What an entirely liberating idea.

So I popped my pot roast into the oven at 11:00 a.m. and have been nibbling at it all afternoon.

And you know what? That is the best damn pot roast I’ve eaten in a very long time.

A Small Step Forward

It always amazes me how quickly things can change in one short year.

Last year at this time, I was busily planning a New Year's feast for myself and my husband. Now this year, I am planning my divorce.

But while one relationship in my life is ending, if there has been an overall theme to this last year, it would be that of reconnection.

I attended my cousin's wedding in Oregon, and once again reaffirmed that no matter where we go, or how far we travel, Family is always just a step away, standing with open arms, acceptance and love.

My Mother and I spent a week together in Hawaii, strengthening a bond that only a mother and daughter coming together for the first time as women can truly appreciate.

Two old friends have reentered my life after a six year absence, proving that time and distance won't break the bonds of friendship.

My restless feet have taken me back to the city that I lived in twenty-four years ago, when I first moved to California. This seaside town promises to offer the peace and sense of community that has felt so lacking for me in recent years.

This last year has taken me places that I didn't plan. But as one friend likes to say - The best way to make God laugh is to tell him what YOUR plans for the future are!

So as this year begins to draw to a close, I'll take a deep breath, cross my fingers and step into 2007.

Who knows what this New Year will bring . . .

Reading The Signs

Starting over scary.

Each day I hesitantly walk out into this new life that I'm creating for myself, desperately afraid that I'm going to fail. That I won't be able to make it on my own. I don't even have a job yet, how am I going to support myself?

I try to take comfort in the small things, like meeting my new neighbors, taking walks along the shore, and exploring the local shops.

Today, during one of my quit-feeling-sorry-for-yourself-and-go-do-something days, I found the most wonderful shop. I'm not sure what the name of it is, so I'll just call it the Odds & Ends Emporium.

Inside this store is an unimagined treasure trove of stuff, all tossed together in some vague order, that must only make sense to the eccentric mind that created it. The first thing to greet my eyes as I walked into the store was a display of scarves with a sign that read "Scarves Mostly $2.29. Some not." For some reason this strikes me as terribly funny. It's a sign with an attitude! And it pretty much sets the tone for the whole store.

There are neon colored feather boa's (no - really) hanging from the ceiling next to assorted house plants. Candles mixed in with baskets and little plastic holders for Beanie Baby tags next to incense burners. I never knew that Beanie Baby tags needed plastic holders but at 29 cents I was tempted to buy one, even though I don't own any Beanie Babies!

Various hand written signs were hung from wires and tacked to shelves. One sign admonished customers with "Don't take these hats. Take the ones from the other shelf." Another sign preempted questions by stating, "NO! There Are NO MORE In Back". No more of what, I'm not sure.

An entire row was devoted to toys and party favors, the likes of which I haven't seen since I was a child. And have you tried to find a toy gun at Toy-R-Us these days? Not gonna happen. But they have them at the Odds & Ends Emporium. There were oddles of tiny plastic trickets tossed about in bins, and nearby hung another of the ubiquitous signs, this one saying "No Pinata Stuffing". Who would dare?

I'm sure that the pricing makes sense to someone but I was mystified. I found the cutest little oil burner for just $2.00, but a wonderfully tacky beaded curtain was priced at a whopping $60.00. Bamboo poles for $1.29 fought for attention with greeting cards for $8.00, and a fine layer of dust coated everything.

But my favorite part of the Odds & Ends Emporium was a sign that hung above the checkout stand that encouraged shoppers to place their chosen houseplants on the hooks overhead.

It read "You can do it. Just reach higher".

Candor and Restraint

Still bleeding from the wounds that I sustained when the my real world and the blog world collided, I'm stepping carefully back into the blogshere.

With any luck, a little wiser than before.

At first I railed against the idea that I couldn't write exactly what I wanted, when I wanted to. This was essentially my online journal after all. As I'd never censured myself there, why should I be forced to here? But as my belligerant, self-righetous indignation began to fade, I realized that while I may not necessarily have suppressed my feelings in a traditional journal, I also didn't let go in the entirely unrestrained way that I did in my now defunct blog. In writing a journal, I have always considered the possiblity that someone may indeed someday run across what I have written. I have always been aware that there is always a chance, a slim chance, but one nonetheless, that my mother, my friend, my husband will run across one of those books that carry my most private musings.

In my arrogance, I overlooked this simple possiblity when I was writting my blog. And I've paid an incredibly steep price.

Which is not to say that my blog killed my marriage. But it did, I believe, hasten it's demise.

The question then becomes, where do you draw the line? Balance is tough. Particullarly when you are talking emotions. But I guess that the bottom line becomes the knowledge that you should never say ABOUT someone, what you wouldn't be willing to say TO them. And quite frankly, some thoughts should never be spoken aloud.

Words are very powerful tools. Wield them wisely.

Changes

I think that God must have been in a somewhat Puckish mood the day that he created me.

Because I certainly seem to be bumbling around in the woods a lot lately.

Life seems to be taking me in an unexpected direction these days, although in retrospect I suppose that I should have seen it coming.

The first week in October, I came home from a family wedding only to find that my husband wanted a divorce. He had discovered a Blog that I had been writing for several months, and he was not pleased, to say the least. I believe that blind fury might be an apt description for his mood when he picked me up from the airport.

Oh the Blog wasn't the only thing going on in the marriage. Not by a long shot. But it was a significant symptom in a marriage that had gone horribly wrong.

I took the Blog down, and even stopped viewing the Blogs of others, in the vain hope that I could repair the damage that had been done. But once something is said, or in this case written, it cannot be taken back or forgotten.

And thus my marriage has ended.

In the time between then and now more has changed than has remained the same. I've moved to a beautiful seaside town about an hour north of where I had been. I have friends here. With all that is secure crashing down around me, the comfort of being near friends seems like a good idea.

I'm grieving. Although I believe that my grief is more for what I wanted my marriage to be, rather than what it actually was. But dreams die hard, and the loss feels the same.

So I'm picking myself up and trying to dust off the the sharp shards that seem to be clinging to me. And I'll move forward, though towards what, I haven't got a clue . . .