Birthday Gathering on Friday, Dec 7th

Phenomenal people who have blessed my life,

I'm turning 35 on December 7th, which makes me very happy. I have to tell you, I didn't think my life would look like this. I'm wildly grateful that I have been offered so much more than what my own challenged imagination could have ever conceived. It's all been such an extraordinary series of exciting surprises and as most of you know, I'm clear that I'm the luckiest woman in the world. Most of what makes me so incredibly lucky is having what seems like a limitless supply of truly remarkable, inspiring, genuinely good and kind, bright and loving people in my life. You people make my head spin and my heart swell and being connected to you is a neverending source of joy. From the bottom of my heart, I very sincerely thank you.

Last year I had a huge party on my birthday. It was much bigger than I could have expected. It was a great night. A really great night. This year I'm not really caring how things look. I'm opening my door on my birthday, Friday December 7th, at around 6 or 7PM and it will stay open until whenever. I'll be in my apartment. I'd love to see whoever's interested in visiting. Please don't feel obligated to show up. Come if you'd like, because you'd like. Bring whatever you want to eat or drink. This is very casual and since I'm not requesting RSVP's and I therefore have no idea whether there'll be 10 or 100 of you, I can't figure out how to provide for the unknown number. So just come on over. It's the end of the work week. This shouldn't be a hassle in any way. It's a nice warm place to hang out with superb people. I can promise you that you'll be surrounded by extraordinary human beings. Bring anyone you'd like, anything you'd like, whatever. You don't need to ask. Come and go as you please - early in the evening before other plans, late in the evening after other plans, or come early and stay the night. It's my birthday and I feel like it should be easy and joyous and love-filled, just like my entire blessed life.

Friday, December 7th. After work.
1825 Madison Avenue #5E (at 118th St.)
take the 6 or 2/3 (not the 1!!!) train to 116th St

in joy, in love, in gratitude,
Beth

breakups suck

and I feel sad
a little hurt. a little angry. a little relieved. but mostly just sad.

that's all

Fu-huck yeah!

Today: fretting about plane tickets and why US Airways wouldn't/"couldn't"/wouldn't let me redeem my voucher for my ticket to Reno, I almost took their consolation prize to redeem the voucher for $200 off the lowest fare instead. Last minute rechecked sidestep.com and found a better flight from a closer airport (LGA) for only $60 more than it would have cost me after redeeming the voucher (i.e. a very reasonable price for any time but a steal for this late date.)

Which leaves me still in possession of said voucher to use for a whole flight to CA another time. (Saving much more money)

THEN! Lisa and I were kicking around what the hell to do about getting a big fat tent that we don't even own yet from NYC to NV. Lisa found a decent tent online with KMart so I called the KMart in Sparks, NV (cause the one in Reno didn't answer the phone.) They told me there was no way to hold a tent there for me whether it was purchased prior or not. As I was packing it in I gave the Reno Kmart one last call and poof! Manager Ron offered to put the exact tent we wanted in his own office to hold for us right this minute until the afternoon of August 26th, when he happens to be working, without my even paying for it in advance. Even gave me his own phone extension to call and his personal work schedule, just in case.

Yay!! Good day!!
Thank you Easter Bunny!!!!

the work we do and how it works

Who ever talks about work on tribe? I hardly ever hear anything about people's jobs except for the artists. I think that's largely because we connect with each other in a space that's often separate from our work days. But my work days are a big part of my life (8 hrs each day to be exact) and I received some good news here today.

I'm a psychologist but for the past several years I've been mainly an administrator. I'm a Program Director at a college and historically I'm given programs that need to be fixed. I fix them, grow them, get them set and move on to the next program. This works for me. It suits my limited attention span and need to be challenged. I'm not one to leave well enough alone and if I'm left to run something that ain't broke, I'll still try to fix it. I seem to have found my niche as long as I'm wise enough to keep moving every few years.

The programs I fix are almost always related to some kind of psychological service offered to particularly at-risk populations. I still work individually with students and I also teach some but the bulk of my work is now administrative in nature. I'm currently fixing a program for students with disabilities. I like my job.

I've been in this particular position for about 7 1/2 months now. I started the day I returned from BM. That was crazy. The day I started I found out that I didn't yet have an office and the woman who hired me was leaving to go work at Stanford. I'd taken the job mainly to work with her because she was amazing and I knew she'd teach me tons. Crap. She was replaced by an acting VP who was in over her head and defensive about it. I spent a good deal of my last few months at work engaged in activity designed almost solely to mediate her insecurities regarding her inexperience. Frustrating. Recently more than frustrating. Recently beginning to feel depressing and a bit demoralizing. I have work to do.

Today I found out that the President of my college, in an admirable display of what we call "chutzpah," did not give the permanent position to the acting VP who has been with this college for upwards of 20 years. He instead gave it to a more impressive and more experienced candidate who also happens to be from the midwest. She's not even a New Yorker. For those who know anything about the NYC political climate, how insular it can be and how much our own backyard mentality tends to prevail for better or for worse, you know this is actually remarkable.

Today is a good day for me. Today I found out that though I certainly work in a bureaucracy, it might also be a meritocracy. Wow. Yes, this is actually a pretty big deal for me since I'm too young a professional to rely on nepotism anytime soon and my aforementioned need to move around also makes that a challenge. I also found out that as of mid-June, I will finally be working for a woman from whom it seems, by all accounts, I'll really be able to learn something. Excellent.

Today I found out that though I already liked my job, even with the flaws (or rather, one big flaw), it looks like I'll soon like it a lot more. Yay!

What is your job? And how is it going?

Blessings sometimes masquerade as curses

I'm reading this book (a novel) called "The History of Love" by Nicole Kraus and it's breaking my heart in the best possible way. It's written so that every few pages there's a paragraph I have to reread 3 times - not because I didn't understand it but because it feels so staggeringly beautiful that I know it's just changed my life in some way, forever.

I was reading it on the bus this morning and one of the quotes has stayed with me for the entire first half of this day. (Incidentally, I love when I'm sitting on the dirty bus in the middle of a really gray, really rainy day and I read or see or hear something that conjures a feeling of vibrance and vitality. It's easy to be awe-inspired when I'm in the park in the sunshine but when something can stop me in my tracks and make me contemplate the beauty of life and love in the middle of all the dirty dinge, that's some kind of gift!) Anyway, I'm totally digressing. One of the many pieces of the book that I loved this morning was this:

"....when the protagonist, Jacob, leaves the apartment of a woman to whom he has just made love for the first time, and, standing in the shadows of a street lamp in the freezing cold, watches a dog being brutally kicked to death by two men. At that moment, [he was] overcome with the tender brutality of physical existence - with 'the insoluble contradiction of being animals cursed with self-reflection, and moral beings cursed with animal instincts.'"

I loved this! It speaks to what I try to teach my counseling students about how emotions and logic live in two different places in our brains and they don't really have occasion to meet face to face being that they're not even neighbors. (The whole id vs. superego thing, blah, blah, blah. OK Freud, you were definitely more than just a coked-up sexist. Fine!) But the thing is, where I depart from the author is in that I don't think it's a curse. The dichotomy of being "moral beings (cursed) with animal instincts" is what, I think, makes human beings so spectacularly special - like the duck bill of the platypus or the blue feet of the boobie. We're the animals who ponder and the evolved thinkers who are still driven by many of the same things as my cat. I *love* this about us and I so hope more people will embrace it and love it for how amazingly wonderful it is instead of seeing it as something that needs to be negotiated and conquered.(This part's very Jungian of me today, right?) We are the beings who straddle two different kinds of existences. Yes it makes things tricky and difficult and I definitely wouldn't call it convenient but damn! which would you sacrifice for convenience?

So that's what's in my head this morning.

(No animals were harmed in the writing of this blog entry.)

A Valentine with a Twist

I love this day. I hate that it was created by greeting card companies to boost commercial spending between other major holiday seasons but any day that's dedicated to love - celebrating it, enjoying it, and spreading it around - is alright by me.

My mother likes to tell me that while my sister cried when approached, I was the child who would lean into the open arms of anyone who'd extend them. This amuses her as she maintains that my "open nature" has a very strong genetic component. It seems I've always been a big fan of people who see fit to offer their love to me. Thank you so much for extending your arms and know that mine are extended to you. Always. Whether we've loved each other long ago, are loving each other now or haven't yet found our space together, you are welcomed into my heart for as long as you choose to be there. Precisely because you choose to be there.

As a young adult, older women would instruct me to play "hard to get" but I never could find virtue in being difficult. I wear my heart on my sleeve, for better or for worse. This has cost me the favor of those who would find me overwhelming or confronting or boring for lack of mystique. But it has attracted a group of people who's primary motivation is real loving connection and this I would not trade to be enigmatic.

I love hard. There was a time when it was challenging for me to love others without losing my own identity. Now, in my 30's, I'm finding my way. I'm blessed with abundance and gratefully love from a calm, strong place. "Gratefully" is the key word because I know that any love I receive comes from someone's decision to offer it and I can't imagine taking that for granted.

So today and every day I celebrate love, especially the love we choose to share with others. Valentine's Day tradition encourages us to express our love for someone already in our hearts. I'm suggesting that to really celebrate the hell out of a day devoted to loving, we all consider taking someone new into our hearts today - in whatever way we see fit.

Spread love as only you can!
B

slowly but surely

I woke up today and didn't hack for an hour. Hot damn! I think this cold's in its final stage and I look forward to emerging from its evil tyranny to meet the world once again with a most enthusiastic, "HI!" A couple more days of taking it slow and then hold me back. :-)

For those who don't know, after going through a few rough weeks where there was a good deal demanded of me, my body decided that if I wasn't going to slow down, it was going to slow me down. Isn't it funny how that happens? I got that icky cold so many others seem to have right now. I actually got it at the same time as a handful of loved ones so go figure. It hasn't been the worst but it hasn't been the best either and I'm working on day 10 now and I think it's done its job and it's time for it to go now.

It's been incredibly difficult for me to take it slow. Really really hard, which is interesting. Cancelling plans and saying no to things I want to do with people I so love to see has been bizarrely tough for me. Taking time to be alone is a challenge - though I love actually having a night or an afternoon to myself, committing to creating one and sticking with that when other options present themselves is something I definitely need to be working on. I realize that I'm not always the best friend to myself. I often take myself for granted and make plans with myself only when there's nothing "better" going on. I think I might be resentful of this kind of treatment. I'm going to be a better friend to myself.

Thank you to those (mostly Lisa but a few others too) who've been consistenly whispering in my ear that I need to take care of myself. My self is grateful. I might be coughing for a month without those reminders and the reassurance that the world will still be here once I feel better has been really nice. She knows what she's talking about - she had *pneumonia* for Christmas *and* New Years Eve! After my much much smaller experiment, I can only imagine how that must have felt. I'm so sorry you went through that.

So if I haven't been taking or returning your calls it's because the cough has made talking on the phone a daunting, draining prospect and I've also been making a real effort to get enough sleep. But like I said, no hacking this morning so give me just a few more days and then watch out!

Looking forward to germ-free hugs and kisses! Tons of 'em!

wow

That last blog entry sounded kind of whiny rereading it once my head cleared up a little. Sorry about that and thank you for the words of encouragement and happiness! I'm good now. You rock.