Philosophy of Life

Image Credit:  Zarora, Wikimedia Commons

Every right-minded man has a philosophy of life, whether he knows it or not. Hidden away in his mind are certain governing principles, whether he formulates them in words or not, [regulating] his life.  

--John D. Rockefeller, Random Reminiscences of Men and Events

 

Off the top of my head, I would say my governing principles are:  to be kind, to act with integrity, to be fair, and to be open-minded. I am the first to admit that I am not always successful with these.

What about you?  What are your governing principles?

You Just Call Out My Name…

Have you heard about the Lifeboat project?  I stumbled across this today and even as I type this, I can hear a little voice in my head* intoning that there are no coincidences.**

You see, I was just thinking recently about how I miss our old house, as it was in the flow of things and friends would kind of regularly drop by. We were just down the street from the local elementary school and the park where many in our circle played Little League and basketball. We averaged one to two drop-in visits a week, and it was nice to be so plugged in to our friends' lives.

Since we moved to our apartment a year and a half ago, we are out of that pleasant little loop. We are just a few miles away, but parking on our street is challenging to say the least, and there’s the intercom to deal with, and the maze of our complicated apartment complex that newcomers have difficulty navigating. However, even beyond that little circle of local friends, I miss my larger circle of friends and how full my life has become that I live in the same city as many of my friends and still don’t get to see them.

So, back to Lifeboat, a “movement of people rediscovering great friendships.” Apparently in this hyperconnected age, it is quite common for people to have tremendous numbers of Facebook friends but still spend only 4% of their actual face time with their friends. The movement was spurred by a couple who were lamenting the decline of their relationships with their friends the further they moved into adulthood (in their case, their 30s). Well, good heavens! You might say this is a very first world problem to have.  But I do think there is something to this, as our emotional relationships are so very important to our overall health. I can say that despite my busy life, there are times when I do feel very lonely.  I love my husband, and I love my children, but sometimes I just need a girlfriend to vent to or hang with, and sometimes it just seems like such a project to get it together that I stop before I’ve even started as the thought of organizing something exhausts me.

Recently, I had lunch plans with some girlfriends who had to cancel because they work together and got roped into working on a Saturday (March 2^nd) at the last minute. As we were trying by email to coordinate our schedules around our children and other commitments, we realized that we probably wouldn’t be able to get together until nearly mid-April. We were all pretty bummed. A couple of hours later, one friend excitedly emailed that her stepson’s mom had emailed to ask to switch visitation weekends, so we are good to go for March 23^rd.  Ultimately, it worked out, but it gives you an idea of how difficult it is to plan things. Lunch during the week is out because of distance and after work is out because two of us have issues with childcare.

That’s not to mention friends who I only see once a year or every couple of years, who live in various far-flung areas in Los Angeles County. It is not impossible for us to get together, it just takes some planning. In the Lifeboat spirit, I am trying to reach out and see people I haven’t seen in some time. Consider yourself forewarned.

Has the frequency of your friend interaction changed over time?  Do you think this Lifeboat movement might be helpful to you or are you appalled that such a thing exists? Or are you somewhere in the middle? I’m curious.
 

* Note that I am not hearing other voices. I am not having auditory hallucinations. But thanks, thanks if you were concerned. No, really, thanks!

** Note that I am really disturbed to realize that the voice I am hearing in my head is Master Oogway (one of the Worst Phonetic Spellings Ever, I have to add) from Kung Fu Panda saying, “There are no accidents.”

Frowny Face

This morning I was sitting in a ballroom listening to a talk on the neurophysiology of empathy. The presenter stated that one of the major factors involved was facial feedback.  Basically, however your face is arranged impacts how you feel—your mood, and even your respiration and your posture. The example she gave was when you are talking with someone and their face is scrunched up in an expression of distress, you subconsciously do the same, and that this impacts you physiologically. She told a very interesting story: research shows that injection of Botox into the area between the eyebrows, where people typically get a frown line, has been shown to reduce depression. Because you can’t physically frown, it impacts your mood!

This is fascinating to me. Not that I’m going to run out and get Botox, but simply because I never really thought about this at this level and yet it makes sense. How many times have you heard from self-help gurus something along the lines of “fake it ‘til you make it” or “act as if?” The idea is that no matter how you feel, if you put a smile on your face and act as if everything’s great, you create that reality. It becomes a self-fulfilling action. Naturally, if you have a serious mental health disorder, this is not going to cut it. But for most people, often times it’s just a matter of a shift in attitude. Take a minute and regulate your breathing, relax your face (unfurrow your brow!), and you are going to feel better. 

Now, I must have missed the flap about this research when it first came out—and having delved into it now, it turns out that the doctor who conducted this research only used ten patients as subjects, nine of whom were allegedly depression-free two months after treatment, so it’s hardly an authoritative study.

  

But anecdotally around the web, a number of people have come forward to state that while they got Botox for cosmetic reasons, they noticed two unexpected side effects: the first, a lifting of what had previously been a lengthy depression; and the second, a reduction in headaches, including migraines.

Okay, that all sounds pretty great, but then there are the cons, among them: facial paralysis. Thanks, but no. Others have said Botox seems to suppress certain emotional responses. How can that be healthy? It seems like if you were sad and wanted to cry, but couldn’t, it would be toxic to your insides. 

Well, I think I’ll be keeping my frown line and just try to be more mindful not to scowl while squinting at my screen. How about you?

Wistfully, Summer

Today I do not like being The Grown Up.

Today is the first day of summer camp for my little schnitzel with noodles, the All-Wonderful Viva.

Her father, the Ever-Amazing Sweet Dub, was a little concerned, I mean, curious, about how her day was going, and since he is not working, he thought he would sneak a peek a few hours in to see how she was doing.

Here is his report:

“I can see her right now, it looks like they’re just finishing lunch. She can barely sit still. She just jumped up and ran over to the counselor and I can’t hear what she’s saying, but she looks like she is really excited. She’s kind of standing on one leg and leaping around while she’s talking. Okay, he said yes to whatever she was asking and she ran back inside the gym all happy. So it looks like things are going well. You know, I can’t hear her but I know my baby. I can read her body language and it seems like she is pretty excited, so – oh, here she comes. She is sitting back down at the picnic table and it looks like she is doing some kind of art project.”

I wish I was doing some kind of art project. I wouldn’t mind an art project and maybe some kind of group game that involved kicking a ball and running and then having a cold beverage and a snack.

I loved camp. I loved the swimming, and the macrame, and making those plasticy lanyards, and playing soccer, and eating PB&J on the grass. And the smell of the grass, and the heat, and the sweatiness, and flinging oneself from activity to activity with total encompassing joy.

It’s hard being The Grown Up some days, is all.

There’s Nothing I Hate More Than Nothing*

Bad things are not the worst things that can happen to us. Nothing is the worst thing that can happen to us!
- Richard Bach

When I first read this quotation I misunderstood that second part. I thought it meant, “There is no such thing as the worst thing that could happen to us.” Maybe it was because I hadn’t had my coffee yet.

But what he’s saying is that the worst thing that can happen to us is that nothing happens to us. And that, yes—that I agree with. How are you to grow as a person if nothing happens to you? Think of how much all your varied life experiences have shaped you--whether for good or bad. They are what make you so distinctly yourself.

Similar wisdom from another and very different source:

Just because it's different, doesn't mean it's scary...try new things!
-I'm From Barcelona, on the Yo Gabba Gabba! Music is Awesome CD

* Showing my age! Can you guess where the line comes from?

Acceptance

Just a quickie:

Catching up on my blog feed reading, and I came across this little gem which had me nodding my head. In it, Leo Babauta of Zen Habits reiterates what has been floating through my mind since Sweet Dub got laid off: in essence, this too shall pass. This happened to us, and it was neither good or bad, and something else will happen tomorrow, and that too shall pass. And life will go on.

“A weed is only a weed when we don’t like it. Children are only naughty if we don’t like their actions. Life only sucks if you judge it as bad.”

This is very hard for me, this dropping of judgment and expectations. Very, very hard. But it’s a great exercise in retraining your brain.

Blog Pondering

Curiouser…

This evening, Viva and I were talking about twin brothers in her class. I mentioned that I hadn’t seen them in a while. “They come to school later than I do,” Viva said. “But you know what I don’t understand about them? I never see their mom.”

“I don’t think they have a mom,” I said, without thinking. Viva gasped.

“Not have a mom? What happened to her?” she cried.

“I don’t know what their situation is,” I said, cursing myself. “But I believe they have two dads.”

“Two DADS?” Viva said. “Does one act like the mom, and one like the dad?”

“I don’t know, sweetie,” I said. “Maybe they just act like two dads.”

I could see her filing this away in her brain. Oh, we will talk about this again, I can feel it. But in the meantime, she got distracted by her Curious George book, and I got distracted by the unbelievable amount of rice under the table. Did any of it make it into her mouth?

…and Curiouser

Yesterday I was at Target and in sort of a hurry (when am I not in a hurry) but trying to mellow out about it because they had only two checkers open. The woman in front of me had two piles of items, which she was paying for separately – one with a gift card and one with a credit card – and I think she was also trying to apply for an adjustable rate mortgage and access all her health records through the little card swipey dealio they had there, because somehow the transaction was much more complicated than it seemed it had to be. At any rate, once the cashier got to the second pile of stuff, I realized it was all underpants, of all different colors and varieties. Briefs, boyshorts, thongs, lacy polyester, cotton, she had it all. In all honesty, it was kind of fascinating to watch. The cashier was exactly the kind of young nerdly type that you might imagine – (I swear I can’t help it) well, you might imagine that this is the only access he ever gets to ladies’ panties, if you know what I mean. He was actually sweating a little bit.

So he rang up this towering pile, and I was watching the total add up with great interest. Because, hello, it was a lot of damn panties. And the total came to $175.12. FOR PANTIES! AT TARGET!!

Completely unfathomable. I can see paying that much for panties in a department store. But at Target? Wouldn’t they have to be something along the lines of $4.99 apiece? How many panties do you need? I started to wonder. Maybe she’s going on a long trip around the globe and doesn’t want to do laundry along the way. Maybe it’s something more salacious that I can’t even imagine because I am such a naïf. Maybe she has some sort of chronic uncontrollable bowel disease and it’s easier to just throw her underpants away. Maybe she’s a hoarder or impulse shopper and some switch in her head told her that today was Panty Day. Maybe she’s a good Samaritan and she’s buying underpants to give to a shelter or something. Maybe she’s a set dresser and needed underpants for a shoot.

Everybody’s got their story. What do you think?

P.S. By the by, new post over here.

Let It Go

Eeps! Despite having forgotten about NaBloPoMo until a few days after it started, I am trying to participate in my own charmingly forgetful, ass-backwards way. I've been posting every day since I realized that was what we were supposed to be doing. Yeah, whatever.

At any rate, I just started reading the blog Flawed But Authentic, and one of the recent posts by Jessica was about forgiveness (sorry but I can't figure out where the permalink is, or I'd link to it...it's the Nov. 7th, 2007 post). When I was lunching with my dear friend MG yesterday, she mentioned that an old mutual friend had called her several years ago to announce that when they were roommates, she was struggling with bulimia and anorexia and that part of her program was to contact people she had wronged somehow with behavior related to that. So she rattled off a list of ten things she wanted to apologize for. Evidently MG was quite gracious and empathetic, but, as she confided to me, "I honestly didn't remember most of the things she was apologizing for! But then I didn't want to say that, because she has clearly been carrying around all this guilt about it, which I felt guilty for, and then I thought she might feel worse if she realized she'd been so worried about it -- I mean, she must have really had to buck herself up to call me in the first place if she felt this bad about it. And really? I probably was drunk for most of these incidents anyway!"

So I guess our old friend was asking for forgiveness for these actions which she perceived as wrong. And yet, MG certainly was harboring no ill will toward her at all. It made me ponder about how many things we all internalize and carry grudges and worries over -- things which may not really be all that important in the grand scheme of things.

In my own family, recently, more drama has arisen over things that took place in the past. My sister Lola and I had a conversation this week in which she referenced the way I had behaved in the past toward my mother, which is evidently impacting my relationship with her now. Since my mother never ever directly explains what is bothering her to the person she has a problem with, I have never fully understood what I have done. However, my mother has given Lola an earful. My sister won't share with me what my mother has said because she thinks it is between my mom and me.

Pause.

Yes, how I am not completely mental from these passive-aggressive twists and turns is truly beyond me. I feel we are at an impasse. It always seems to me, when dealing with my mom, that there has to be a better way, yet no matter how I try, it always devolves into something completely unproductive.

I know I can only do what I can do. I accept that I am a flawed but well-meaning human being. So for the moment, I am concentrating on being good to myself, protecting myself from the bad vibes, and hoping that understanding may ultimately flow from that. And trying not to wonder what I did that I have clearly glossed over (evidently, it is not just one thing) and fervently swearing not to continue this same pattern with my own lovely and amazing child.

Happy Friday, and if you can't make amends, make brownies or something.

Scatterbrained. What?

I am working from home today and barely know what to do with myself. We welcomed a new VP to our department three weeks ago and since then I have been even more insanely busy than usual - mainly because we are approaching the end of one fiscal year and the beginning of another and we have been working together to create a work plan for our department. The new VP is a great addition to our department - very positive, lots of great ideas and follow-through - and we are all very excited. However, I'm finding it difficult to get other work done.

My blog looks like crap and I want to fix it but have not made the time.* Has anyone out there used Listal.com? I like the look of Shelfari for cataloguing my library but I'd also like to include music I'm listening to, where it updates automatically on my blog as I add it to my online account.** It would be wonderful to be able to do both things on one site rather than having to either update manually on my blog template or update two separate sites. Since I'm barely posting to my blog these days, I need to find something that is fairly quick and easy.

I am also trying to figure out how I can make my blog a little more specialized. When I post, my thoughts tend to be all over the place, depending on what I'm interested in that day. Now some might say I'm a dilettante, but some might say I have a bit of attention-deficit going on. What? Where was I? Oh, you!

I guess what I am resisting is the idea that I might be pigeonholed in some way depending on what I write about. But even reading back over that sentence makes me want to smack myself - I mean, just frickin' write something, for God's sake.

Here's what I want to write about: family dynamics (I had a great Mother's Day post in my head, but hey, that was days ago), children's welfare issues, race and gender issues, parenting in general, parenting in an environmentally responsible way, real estate, clothes, and shoes. And I'd like to reserve the right to occasionally post about politics, religion, philosophy and pop culture. You know, I'm just multidimensional, is all. I'm embracing that in myself because I am a strong woman warrior who needs answer to no one.

Okay, I no longer know what the hell I'm talking about, so I'm signing off. Love and kisses!

* "Our perception that we have 'no time' is one of the distinctive marks of modern Western culture." - Margaret Visser

** UPDATE: Never mind, I found a Pandora widget. Now I just have to figure out how to bookmark what I'm listening to. Whee!

So Much to Say

Apologies to everyone out there in BlogLand. I have been experiencing an unusually heavy workload of late, and I don't anticipate it lightening until at least June. I am working from home today so I can get in uninterrupted time on a $900,000 project that is due Monday. And yet, after I dropped Viva off at school, I ran by the supermarket to get a few things. It's a beautiful day today here in Los Angeles, clear and sunny. The sky is blue, it's breezy -- in short, it's a day when it's hard to be in a bad mood. As I got out of my car in front of the market, I took a deep breath of spring air and felt a bit wistful for the days when Viva was a wee tot, when my most pressing decision was whether to go to the park, the library, or maybe venture out to the children's museum.

Don't get me wrong -- I love the people I work with, I love the organization I work for, and I think what I do for a living actually does make a difference. But I miss the unstructured free time. What a luxury! I was so blessed to be able to stay home with Viva for the first 2.5 years of her life, and I know that.

I just know that our lives ran more smoothly when I was home. When Viva was first in preschool (a few hours a day, three days a week), I began freelancing again and that was great, too. I was making a little money and utilizing my brain cells and during the week I was able to do all the things that made our lives easier -- grocery shopping, cleaning, scheduling doctor's appointments and haircuts, getting the car serviced, whatever. Now all that minutiae is crammed into my weekends, when all I really want to do is relax and spend time with my family. I'm not exercising, and I'm not doing any creative writing. It kind of sucks.

I relayed all this to Sweet Dub recently, and he groaned. "Now you want to quit your job?" he said, and then screamed theatrically, "Why can't I ever make you happy?"

I'm not quitting my job. That would be silly, and it would really squeeze us financially. I'm just, like every other working mother out there, trying to figure out how I can make things work better. I think they call it balance.

Perhaps more coffee is the answer.

In other world news: Viva turned 4 on April 1st. This was a happy occasion and I will remember it with great fondness, always, especially because almost immediately afterward she morphed into this great whining, screaming, constantly pissed-off creature. Every now and then, on the weekends mostly, her old, sweeter side will show itself. I cherish those moments. I am really disliking the age of Four. It has failed all my expectations of it.

On vacation: we are traveling to Maui in June*. Can I get a "fuck, yeah!" We haven't had a real vacation since, well, forever. We went to Legoland last April for Viva's birthday, but I really don't think that counts. Sweet Dub and I have been trying to get to Hawaii since 2001. We were supposed to go for our honeymoon, but you know, we got married three weeks after 9/11 and travel was a very scary proposition at that time. So here we are, five-and-a-half years later. I'd say we earn points for patience.

And finally, last but certainly not least: a HUGE and hearty and very affectionate congratulations to the entire Oral Hygiene Royal Family. (I have been meaning to congratulate you for, I don't know, weeks? And I can't ever get near my blog or any blogs to comment? Frickin' firewall.) I wish you all the very best on the new addition! Sneaky, sneaky!


* We will be traveling sans grandma. She has serious sinus issues causing her sinus passages to fill up with fluid if a flower even looks at her the wrong way. Since Hawaii is pretty much abloom with tropical floral goodness round-the-clock, it seems pretty likely Mama Jay would be incapacitated as soon as the plane landed. Oh well -- so much for her free vacation. Sweet Dub's best friend, who has a 5-year-old daughter, is trying to schedule a few days in Maui when we are there, so maybe this will all work out just fine. I am a little bummed, because unlike most folks, I adore my crazy mother-in-law, but I guess it's not in the cards.