Banishing Discontent

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Boundaries

I'm in line at the Larchmont Coffee Bean when a woman who is waiting for her coffee next to the big green eco-display prompts her child to speak to the barista, "we save water, tell him what we do."

The little girl answers "we sometimes don't flush when it is only pee."  The mother beams at the coffee guy.  Really?  I think.  This seems to fall into the 'too much information' category in my world.  But maybe I just don't care enough about the environment.

Comfort Food

And there it was – the bright yellow Mallomar box – like a box of sunshine just sitting there on the shelf at the Mayfair Market. A little ‘ooouwh’ escapes on a breath before I snatch the package from the shelf. This ‘ooouwh’ bubbles up from a place south of my lungs. It is usually reserved for the simple sensual perfection of a blue Tiffany’s box with the white ribbon or when opening anything from the Mac store. And what was this? - they were on sale – $2.94! where have you been all my life? Really – where have they been all my life? I vaguely remember experiencing the perfection of Mallomars in my youth. I’m not sure where I got them because in our home they were deemed ‘too expensive’ like Girl Scout cookies and any other cookie that never went on sale. Generic replacements like ‘fudge wheels’ were simply disgusting – oh my God – Mallomars! I’m a grown up so I purchase 2 boxes – one for me – one for ‘a friend.’ Seriously, I did give one to a friend – then ate mine every morning for breakfast for a week – not feeling a bit guilty. Does one feel guilty staring at the Mona Lisa or gulping in great breaths of air at Yosemite?
And sometimes a day of LA traffic – was made not so bad by thinking of that box of dark chocolate, fluffy marshmallow and crisp almost salty graham cracker goodness that was waiting for me in the big bottom right drawer my kitchen – the one that is supposed to hold bread, but instead held happiness. See – I can enjoy life - the simple pleasure of a Mallomar.
At the end of the week I returned to the market for another box, promising myself I would savor them a bit more now that the novelty was burned off. But I could have them – what fun! There were no Mallomars at the Mayfair. There were no Mallomars at the Mayfair’s parent store – the Gelson’s. Not at the Sherman Oaks Gelson’s, not at the Studio City Gelson’s, and not the Tarzana Gelson’s. Only the Gelson’s left was the Gelson’s in West Hollywood so I prepared myself before hand by checking on the web. Mallomars ‘due to their easily melting chocolate shell are only made available from late fall through April.’ It is May. Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn! Why does the world conspire against me? Why do I conspire against me? When I find something I love I try to grasp at it with both hands – making it stop -making it stay – making it always the same. I want to have it. I know this never work and that I am resigning myself to defeat, but I can’t seem to stop myself.
Standing in the gotdamn super efficient West Hollywood Gelson’s looking at a cookie shelf that doesn’t even have a Mallowmar shelf sign I know I’ve missed it. I’ve missed it for a whole year and I promise myself I’ll make time to find the street just south of Sunset with the Jacaranda trees that bloom in May. Massive trees made of flowers canopy an entire street with an absolute decadence of color – an explosion of purple that makes me want to get out of my car and stand on the sidewalk – head thrown back, – tongue out to catch them like snowflakes.
I had stumbled across this street quite accidentally a few years ago when I was attempting to find a shortcut home from my agent’s office. It felt like a blessing. It felt perfect.

Last year I hadn’t made a conscious effort to go until June and the trees were made only of leaves. I was angry - at myself – at this place, at the world. It felt like a loss. So on Saturday I washed my car and took my sparkling clean windshield to Beverly Hills to drive up and down the street with the purple trees and waited for it to take my breath away, but I couldn’t recreate the feeling. I mean the trees were there, kinda blooming and it was beautiful – but empty – was I too early? Too late? Or was it because I knew it would soon be gone and I couldn’t have it for an entire year?
But you can’t hold beauty – you have to trust that it will come to you.
The problem is - to let go you have to have faith in the next moment – you have to trust that the world is a loving place and holds more than enough to marvel at - a thousand lifetimes of things that will take my breath away - fireworks, sunrises, children, flowers – I don’t have to try to capture it in a photograph or write about it, I can just breathe it in - a lesson my heart knows but my brain refuses to accept – so I grasp at control - creating a log jam of resentment and disappointment.

But I’m learning – I have the evidence of knowing that this is how I had found this particular miracle the first time –a little lost - driving in a new direction – I let go of life to breathe – an accidental left turn and there it was. Trees. Made of flowers. For me.

One day I’ll learn. Until then I’ll try to recreate happiness –even if it comes in a bright yellow box.

Orange Earthquakes

Orange - the color of traffic cones, the color of warning. All week orange lurks, undermines my renewed determination to really think positive… Smokey orange sunsets – fires burning in the mountains to the east. Orange warns me of danger in this place I have stubbornly decided to call home. Orange rinds decorate the grass around my wooden bench at the Huntington Gardens - masquerading as fat cheese curls. Even nature here imitates the artificial.
I’ve been thinking a lot about earthquakes lately. The air has been hot and windy. My friend TJ once told me that this is earthquake weather, but he said to only worry if a lot of pets run away. There is a sign outside of my apartment for a lost poodle named Poopey who was “last seen wearing a blue and white sweater.” I see it and think “run Poopey, run.” Then I notice signs everywhere. Are there really more or is it me?
A few weeks ago, even before the wind blew in I attended a free LA Parks program. The “earthquake hike” at Franklin Canyon promised to explain “the unique characteristics of California’s fault lines.” It sounded almost as fun as the bug walk the week before.
Penny, the Universal Records data manager and fully uniformed volunteer ranger, informed us that the “earthquake hike” trail was closed “due to angry bees.” We spent most of the morning in the Sookey Goldman Nature Center. Thirteen adults sitting at school lunch tables in hiking boots watching videos of famous LA earthquakes.
Our brief walk around the reservoir reveals some fascinating information; Not too far from where we are standing geologists had found evidence of an ancient quake so violent that it had sheared trees in half from their trunks, “basically decapitated them,” Penny smiles and makes a chopping motion. She leads us back to the nature center with tales of out of control gas fires and buried first responders. She enthusiastically urges us to prepare and displays her perfectly packed earthquake bag.

Until this moment I had always equated being in an earthquake with the motion of getting hit from the side in a bumper car in Ocean City - jarring and unpleasant sure, but no reason to let up on the wide push pedal and keep lurching ahead.

But this was something different - an earth that could buckle and shear – disappearing beneath my feet or slamming a building aside. It is an awesome in a way that I have never quite considered before. I find it harder to breathe.
In the middle of a perfectly good day I stop to imagine the earth suddenly dropping out from under me or three feet to my left.

And now the news, - geologists warn that there is a 97% chance of a “significant earthquake” in the next thirty years. KTLA chooses this week to make this report?! - Now my only question is where will I be? In my apartment asleep? My apartment was built in 1929 so it will be fine, right? All four floors above me will stand defiant and worthy of architecture before plywood. Will I be able to find my glasses I the dark? What if the cute neighbor’s apartment is okay? Will I have to spend weeks a four eyed geek?
Will I be in my coffee shop with strangers? Is that better? I should definitely keep more gas in my car!
You know what – odds are I will be in my car! I am always in my car. That’s probably a fairly safe place to be.
The paranoia is cloying and now I feel it is well excused. But it is not good, I know it is not good. I don’t breathe. I think – ‘haven’t I learned how to talk myself out of this tree by now?’
But this rudder of worry I steer my life with goes deep. It comes from a childhood of fear. Not of earthquakes but of possibilities. I remember sitting on the brown carpet in our downstairs rec room in front of the dark giant console tv. Where I live when I grow up? I couldn’t be an actress – because and I couldn’t live in New York – that’s where the nuclear bombs would go – I had seen The Day After. And Los Angeles was out of the question – they were going to have a terrible earthquake and drop into the Pacific - I had also seen Lex Luther sink California along the San Andreas fault.
So I’ve spent my adulthood relearning life. A ship with hope as my rudder and sails that fly with breath.

A Simple Second Ice Cream

So yesterday I’m at this big volunteer event at an elementary school – helping some friends who have organized it and I’m passing out wrapped ice cream bars and cones – its fun – who doesn’t like passing out free ice cream? A little girl comes up to me with a partially eaten ice cream held close to her side and asks for another – which I hand to her – it is free we have plenty. I make my way around the school yard which is Bagdhad hot and she returns to me with another little girl in tow who now holds her ice cream down to her side and asks for another and snap – I’m an asshole. I lean in and say – “You already have one – We need to be sure everyone gets one first. Wouldn’t it be terrible if some people didn’t get any ice cream?” I say this with complete awareness that the first girl is standing there with both hands clutching ice cream. So now – even though we have plenty of ice cream – I have shamed both of them. So what piece – what fragment of my psyche was so fragile that it chipped off on the way across the school yard? The one that in a better mood would have smiled and reached back in the box – handing her ice cream drumstick cone number two and the lesson that asking for more - might get you more, - because history isn’t made by well behaved women! They could have talked about it years later – when they were happy and successful businesswomen with functioning families! - about how great was that volunteer day when we painted the school and got two ice creams !

No! Instead I reached inside and served up a healthy dose of shaming. They’ll probably become attached to external validation to disprove the idea that they are bad, greedy little girls... They'll do drugs and have to get a boyfriend who deals – then they’ll join the gang and hang out on corners late at night wearing that defeated blank stare and tight knit tops that don't cover their muffin top bellies - until one day when they are sent to jail because they had to knock over a convenience store to buy formula for the babies they had to fill that hole of longing and need that could once be filled with a simple second ice cream. :)

Good crazy or just crazy crazy?

So the other day I actually remembered to bring a couple of the empty paper bags from my trunk into the Trader Joe's (yes!) and found I only had enough groceries to need one.
"I don't suppose you guys could use the other one," I offered the cashier.
She smiled at me warmly, looking much like a pretty middle aged elf with a wee bit too much brown eyeliner and replied, "Yeah, we're not supposed to - you know, we don't know what you've been carrying around in there."
So I told her, "yeah, funny - I've been using these to carry around dead cats."
Without missing a beat she replied "Not to mention the neighbors missing cat," in a voice that made it sound like she was reciting a line from a school play.

Only in L.A. I thought! Good crazy - right?

But then there was today. I went to my public library - or the Santa Monica Homeless People's Lounge. It was a no audition day and I was attempting to get some work done outside of my apartment because I can't seem to concentrate when there is something to eat or clean or organize or... that's a different post. I sat at the only table with a free space - across from a homeless woman who didn't look dirty enough to smell (what? I can't think if I can't breathe!) She was very carefully, and in precise handwriting, copying recipes from the April Issue of Good Housekeeping (ironic huh?) into a top bound spiral notebook. Every now and then she would pause and then place her hands flatly around her notebook and around the table like she was playing the table like a giant piano. Her nails had a strip of pink along the center from being painted long ago. I tried not to stare - I tend to be pretty judgy and I didn't want her to pick up on that with her crazy homeless perceptive super powers. (you know - like in movies it's the homeless people who play the Casssandras - they say some great and scary truth, cackle and run off in bad knit caps...) Anyway - She gets up and sure enough comes around the table to me. She smells clean as she leans into me and says,
"I bet you'll be dead when I get back because I own the landmass you are trying to steal from me." She then exits - leaving behind a carefully written recipe for Roasted Spring Lamb.
But you know what? I wasn't dead when she got back. But my battery was - so I packed up and carefully did not look at her on the way out.

How would I live if I was exactly what's needed to heal the world?

Have you ever listened to Krista Tippet's Speaking of Faith on NPR? It's great, and it's on Sunday afternoons so I get to feel like I've fufilled some sort of church requirement - earned like a half credit or something. A few months ago she interviewed Rachel Naomi Remen, a doctor/therapist/storyteller and I was transfixed! Fascinated I tell you. It was what she was saying - her ideas and her stories, but it was also the humble and courageous way she did it. I ran right out and bought her books "Kitchen Table Wisdom" and "My Grandfather's Blessings." Okay - I went home and printed out my Borders coupon and ran right out... I read both books and while they were pretty amazing I had to go back to the original interview to transcribe the story that took my breath away. I hope it touches you as deeply.

Rachel Naomi Remen: Actually Krista this was my 4th birthday present, this story. In the beginning there was only the holy darkness – the einsof – the source of life and then in the course of history at a moment in time this world - the world of a thousand thousand things emerged from the heart of the holy darkness as a great ray of light, and then – perhaps because this is a Jewish story there was an accident, and the vessels containing the light of the world, the wholeness of the world broke. And the wholeness of the world – the light of the world was scattered into a thousand thousand fragments of light and they fell into all events and all people where they remain deeply hidden until this very day. Now according to my Grandfather the whole human race is a response to this accident. We are here because we are born with the capacity to find the hidden light in all events and all people. To lift it up and make it visible once again and thereby to restore the innate wholeness of the world. This is a very important story for our times. And this task is called tekunoh lam in Hebrew – it’s the restoration of the world, and this is of course a collective task, it involves all people who have ever born, all people presently alive, all people yet to be born, we are all healers of the world. And that story opens a sense of possibility it’s not about healing the world by making a huge difference its - about healing the world that touches you, that’s around you and that’s where our power is many people feel powerless in today’s situation.
Krista Tippet: Right, I mean when you use a phrase like that just out of nowhere – “heal the world” it sounds like a dream – right - a nice ideal – completely impossible
Rachel Naomi Remen: It’s a very old story – it comes from the 14th century. And it’s a different way of looking at our power and I suspect it has a key for us in our present situation –a very important key - I’m not a person who is a political person in the usual sense of that word but I think that we all feel that we are not enough to make a difference that we need to be more somehow, either wealthier or more educated or somehow or other – different then the people we are. And according to this story – we are exactly what’s needed, and to just wonder about that a little – what if we were exactly what’s needed? What then? How would I live if I was exactly what’s needed to heal the world?

Happiness Project

My inspiration for finally starting this blog comes largely from reading Gretchin Rubin's daily blog - The Happiness Project.

She writes about test driving as many tips and principles about being happy as she can, then reports about it. The blog is very appealing to me for several reasons, number one - she is very very smart. A lawyer who has clerked for a supreme court justice no less. Two - she has actually written 3 books already not just talked about writing them. Three - she is the mother of two little girls. On my score card that says she has a very good life and yet is driven to seek something more. Something even smart people can't seem to pin down. She's my kinda people.
A few days ago her post "How Not to Be Happy" set off a firestorm of angry comments. They called her Narcissistic, superior and all sorts of not so nice things. Some claimed she was being insensitive to people battling clinical depression (?) insensitive to introverts and insensitive to couch potatoes. Truthfully - I didn't really care for the post. She was on vacation and I thought she was trying to look at things in a different way - be funny and kind of turn things upside down, - and that is what you have to do as a creative person - pick the snow globe up - shake it around - see where things fall - and they are not always going to be a masterpiece. Okay, the snow globe was a bad example because who ever shakes a snow globe then looks at it and goes "well that one sucked, look at the way the flakes stuck to the top of the tiny church.." but you know what I mean right?
I admire her courage to put herself out there. Try some things out. You have to make mistakes to proceed forward. This is screamingly hard for me - as a perfectionist and I imaging it is hard for her. Reda her blog - let me know what you think.

Good Deed for Today

And I can't hardly stand it myself! Today I found a copy of my Great Uncle's (my uncle's father - is that whatca'ed call him?) book "In Search of Heroes" and bought it. It is his story of survival in Poland during the Holocaust and he published it himself instead of letting anyone else alter it. The friggin' thing is out of print and cost me a whopping $84 but, gulp - how else do I want to spend the money. Come on - I just spent $60 on a facial.... Anyway! Then I contacted the Weisenthal Center to see how to include it and his second book "Polish Indians and Other Short Stories" ($38!) in their archives. So good on me! I'll let you know what they say.

A Woman Without Apologies

One year for Halloween a friend of mine decided to go as "A Woman Without Apoglogies." I thought this was a fantastic idea Fantastic! But funny how adopting that attitude required and entire new persona. It is that hard for some people. Me included. I would like to try on a life where I explained myself less - apologized less and always wore splendid underwear. When we arrived at the party that night she accidentally let the door swing back on me, "Oh - sorry" and that was that.