Confessions of an e-mail hoarder…

I try to delete my e-mails.  I really, really try.  I’ve spent an entire night deleting, moving, and organizing e-mails.  I’ve had zero e-mails in my inbox…not zero “unread…” …ZERO.  It seemed so empty.  I moved a few back into my main inbox.  It looked better.  It felt better…well, I felt better.  But, sure enough, the e-mails piled in again.  I soon hit 1,000, then 2,000, and recently, 3,800.  I swear I delete the unnecessary ones!  There might be one here or there that I forget to delete….like the Facebook notification or the Sephora e-mail.  There was a reason I saved the Costco one…maybe a good deal?  So tonight, when I began scrolling through, I looked at the e-mails I had purposely not deleted and am dumbfounded as to why I saved them.  I know that there’s a thought process (albeit highly ineffective) to this madness.  I think I know what it is….I save these little bits of information and use them as a storage vault for all the miscellaneous facts that I have no space for in my head and no time to act on at the present moment.  But then I never annotate or move the e-mail to a specific folder so I almost immediately forget why I didn’t delete the e-mail in the first place.  And the other part of this…deleting an e-mail seems so…permanent.  What if I need to reference it later?  The reality is, unless it’s work related, there’s a very, very small chance that I’ll need to reference it later.  So, new plan…from now on I will annotate and move an e-mail to the appropriate folder if I feel it need to be saved for future use.  Ahhh, this blog is therapeutic. 

Life After Death II

I wrote about life after death last night.  As I finished the post, I saw a window on my screen flashing.  I had a facebook chat message from a girl I know.  She told me she was drunk.  Up until this last week, she had over 3 years of sobriety.  She wanted to know if I knew of any AA meetings she could go to right then.  It was 1:30am and there weren’t any that I knew of.  I told her that I would come over.  She agreed to that after I assured her I wouldn’t make her pour out the remaining booze.  I said I wouldn’t want her to waste it.  So I went over and we talked.  We laughed a lot.  We cried, too.  After 3 hours, she finished off the booze and said she was ready to sleep.

On my drive home I thought about how I had just finished pondering life after death and then faced death on earth.  It’s easy to forget about the people who are dying right next to us.  The people who aren’t physically ill, whose pain isn’t obvious.  It’s easy because they usually hide their pain so well.  I’ve been one of those people.  I have been nearly dead on the inside and no one knew, which is why it’s weird that it always shocks me when I see it.  I see a lot of it.  But it never fails to jar me.  When I hear someone say that death would be a relief from the unrelenting ache inside, it breaks my heart.  It breaks my heart partly because I know that, if they choose to face it, they won’t feel that way forever.  And partly because it reminds me where I come from.  It reminds me of the emptiness, the hopelessness.  It reminds me of a time when I thought death was far more appealing than life.  And when I attempted death.  As far removed as I am from it now, I still understand it.  For some people, life after death, even if there is no life after death, seems much easier and far more peaceful, than life on earth.

Life After Death

Is there life after death?  I try to avoid thinking about it because the reality is, I’ll never know until I die and I don’t like not knowing the answer so thinking about it is rather masochistic.  But, I watched the movie “The Lovely Bones,” tonight, so the concept is at the forefront of my mind for now.  I read the book but it’s been so long that I can’t actually say with any conviction that the book is better than the movie.  I do remember loving the book and crying non-stop through most of it, I just don’t remember any of the details.  I liked the movie.  I teared up a few times but didn’t really cry.  I’d like to use that as a gauge to how well the movie stands up to the book but I’m not nearly as emotional as I was back then so who really knows.  My guess is that if I watched the movie back then I would’ve been bawling after the first five minutes.  But I digress….

Life after death…

I remember the first time I felt like someone who died was there with me.  I was about 10 or 11.  I’ve always had trouble sleeping.  It took me a good half hour to an hour to fall asleep.  So, as a child, and really, as I am right now, I would lay in my bed and think.  Sometimes that was fun.  I had all kinds of fantasies.  I was going to grow up and be wildly successful.  And not just at one thing….many things.  Academy Award’s, Grammy’s, Pulitzer Prize’s….they were all within my reach.  But then there were the nights when I didn’t want to fantasize but my head was ready for action and I would think about scary or sad things.  On one particular night, I started thinking about my grandpa (my dad’s dad) who had passed away.  I started crying.  The kind of crying that physically hurts.  My chest ached so bad from heaving, but I could not stop.  Then, out of nowhere, I did.  And even though it defies all logic, and I cannot say why I believe it other than the fact that I do, I know my grandpa was there at that moment.  I felt instantly at peace.

There’s one other time I felt this way.  My Aunt Louise passed away a little over a year ago.  We knew she was going to die but it happened very fast.  My parents called me early that day and told me that Louise was in her final hours.  I lost it.  I had not yet experienced death on this level.  My family is down in LA and that’s a 7 hour drive for me.  I told my dad I was getting in my car and that I’d be down there as soon as I can.  He told me no.  He said I wouldn’t make it.  I shouldn’t have been driving in that state of mind anyway.  I would wait till the next morning.  I spent the rest of that day calling friends and family and just crying.   I fell asleep crying.  While I was sleeping, my Aunt Louise came to me and told me it was okay that I wasn’t at the hospital.  We had our goodbye that night in my dream.  And again, even though it defies all logic, I felt it so deep in my bones that I cannot deny it was my Aunt’s spirit.

I don’t know if there’s life after death.  It’s nice to think that something happens to us after we die.  What I know from my own experience is that logic cannot explain what I felt on those two separate nights and I am okay with that.  It’s nice to have a little hope that there’s something more out there…

Just another night…

I’m tired but I can’t sleep.  It’s hot and I like to burrow under the covers which makes it even hotter and more uncomfortable.  So I just have to wait until my tired body and mind can no longer stay awake and finally succumb to the heat.

In the meantime, I thought I would post something.

I have this whole weekend to myself.  Not only that but I have very few plans.  These weekends are so rare these days that I’ve come to regard them as sacred time.  But with sacred alone time, I also have the freedom to think.  Think a lot.  And my mind likes to think.  It likes to think long after I have pleaded with it to stop.  And yet, it is still sacred time.  The reason I ask it to stop is because it goes places I don’t want to go and makes me think about feelings I would rather repress.  But alas, it wins.  Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.”  So to separate myself from my mind is often nothing more than a power struggle.

So, what am I thinking about.  I’m thinking about turning points.  I’m thinking about the future and what I want it to look like.  And I am trying to figure out if my ideals have a chance at reality, and how important or unimportant some of those ideals are.  What is realistic and what isn’t?  I’m a dreamer.  But I’m also chronically dissatisfied which leaves me at a crossroad.  Will anything ever be good enough for me?  Will anything ever live up to my standards?  The dreamer in me says I can find that.  The cynic in me says stop dreaming.  There must be a balance.

Then I start thinking about missed opportunities and the what might have been.  Did I choose safety over chance?  Can one make the wrong choice?  I don’t know.  I honestly don’t.  I can say that, in my life, the choices I’ve made (both positive and negative), have all made sense when I look back on the road I’ve walked.  The what if’s are simply what if’s.  But what if “what if” is still possible, just that it’s now in the future?  And do I chance that?

I’ve tested fate before and fate won – but I do love a challenge.

Fate?

A brand new year, a brand new set of weddings to attend.  So far I only have three which isn’t too bad and I do adore each of the women so no complaints on that end.  I’m helping one of them plan her wedding which is scheduled for October 3rd of this year.  Funny thing about October 3rd: my ex and I had set that as our wedding date.  It doesn’t bother me that she’s getting married that day.  I encouraged it.  It just makes me a little nostalgic.  For the wedding planning process.  Not our relationship.  Well, that’s not totally true because I do miss him.  I just don’t miss us.  But the nostalgia got me thinking about the fight that led to our break up and if there’s a chance that we decide our own fate.

I won’t go into the details of the relationship, but I’ll give ya the basics.  We were in the same city half of it and across the country (Rocklin, CA and NYC) for the remainder of it.  We laughed a lot (I miss that most).  We fell in love as fast as we fell out of it.  The plan was that after he graduated from grad school I would move to wherever he got a job and we’d start our life together.  That did not happen.

We broke up in March of last year.  He came out over his spring break.  His parents were in Sonoma for the week so we drove over there for part of his visit.  We had already told people we were planning on getting married and everyone was supportive.  His parents had, at one point, commented on our constant bickering, but we brushed it off as a quirky aspect of our relationship.

At the end of the weekend his parents sat us down (with the ex’s permission) and told us that they would love for us to consider getting married at their place in California, the place we were staying the weekend.   This place is amazing….so, so beautiful.  I was a little excited.  We had already figured 10/3 would be our date and now we had the place.  It was over a year and a half away and we weren’t officially engaged (although I did try on engagement rings which is as magical as one would suspect), but that didn’t matter to us because we thought we’d be together forever.  Funny how things work out.

We got in a huge fight on the two hour drive back to my place.  I truly cannot remember what started it.  It was one of those fights that scares you.  I was so upset, more upset than I had ever been.  We were both shook up and I was literally shaking.  We talked well past midnight and finally fell asleep, still in love.

The next night we went to meet his friend for dinner.  I really liked (and still like as we have kept in touch) this friend.  I liked all his friend.  He was a good friend-picker.  Anyway, I remember sitting at dinner and the ex and I were giving his friend relationship advice, using the previous nights argument as evidence that we were oh so healthy and together.  The irony of it still makes me cringe.  We were such fools (and I say that in the kindest way…we just didn’t know that we weren’t invincible).

After dinner we dropped ex’s friend off at his apartment.  Ex told me that he was going to go inside and grab a book and he’d be right back down.  After he was up there for 8 minutes, or maybe it was 7, I don’t know, I honked the horn (the car was running and I was in the middle of the street…had I known he’d be up there that long, I would have parked).  He came out right after the honk not because he had heard the honk, but because he was already on his way down.  When he got in the car he looked at me and lightly said, “That wasn’t you that honked the horn, was it?”

ENTER FATE

This was a “Frost Moment” for me.  As I think back on it, there were, “…two roads diverged in a yellow wood…”  Terribly sappy, I know, but let me explain.  I knew, KNEW, that if I answered, “No, no, I didn’t honk the horn,” that everything would be fine.  But I made a conscience choice to tell the truth.  I don’t know if I wanted to push his buttons or if I was just being truthful, probably a little of both, but either way, I set off a chain reaction when I replied, “No, that was me.”  The good thing is, and again, I won’t get into details, I do not regret honking the horn for reasons I still stand by today.  He, on the other hand, doesn’t like horn honking so much.

The fight that ensued was the fight that ended our relationship.  Now, I do know that, if the honking of a horn inspires a fight so bad that the relationship falls apart, there were probably more problems lurking in the background and we weren’t as committed to our future as we thought we were.  I get that.  That fact was a great comfort to me throughout the healing process.  But what if I had answered the other way?  I have thought about that and I think we were fortunate to learn early on.  If we had to find that out after we’d moved to some city together, well, that would have been unfortunate.  But what if we hadn’t found out?  What if that was a fluke fight but we broke up and that’s it?  Did I decide my fate?

Looking back, if I actually did decide my fate, I am okay with the outcome so far.  Like I said, I miss him, not us.  It’s just interesting to look at that single moment now, almost a year later, and still recall, with detail, the decision making process that went on in my head prior to admitting that I honked the dreaded horn.  I can’t help but feel that I chose a path that night.  Can’t wait to see where it leads me.

Taos

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/garden/08idaho.html?hp

I love this house.  I love the idea of this house.  I want to live like this one day.  Hopefully I can afford it.

I fell in love with nature in Taos, New Mexico where they say the town either pulls you in or pushes you out.  The history of Taos is incredible and I could go on and on about it, but I could never do it justice.  I will just say that the town itself is a spiritual experience if you are one of the people it “pulls in.”

I remember arriving in Taos on March 4th of 2005.  It was not under the best circumstances.  I was a bit out of it.  My plane landed at Albuquerque International around 8pm and I hopped in a van for the three hour ride to Taos.  New Mexico, at first glance, is fairly unenchanting, especially in the dark, and, if you’re like me and you grew up in a city, the bare skyline leaves one unsettled.  Its expanse, its never ending horizon, marked with the occasional adobe or broken by a mountain in the distance, feels lonely and, for me, enhanced the deep loneliness I was already experiencing.  But I needed a bare canvas, a new beginning, so that I could redefine myself, which was the purpose of my extended visit anyway.

I arrived at my destination, a six bedroom adobe house on Blueberry Hill, but it wasn’t until the next morning that I saw my new home in daylight.  It was winter and it was cold.  Taos is a mountain town and there were mornings that the thermometer registered below zero.  The sky was gray and the ground was sparsely covered in snow.  What looked like tumbleweeds, to me at least, scattered across the brown dust and decorated the yards of the homes nearby.  The sacred Taos mountain presided over the barren land, its skull white for the winter.  The breathtaking beauty of it all eluded me.

It wasn’t until early April, when winter broke and my heart had opened a little, that I began to see how incredible my surroundings really were.  I am not sure if I became more and more enchanted with Taos as I came to life or if I came to life because Taos enchanted me.  I believe it was a solid mix of both.

I ended up staying in New Mexico longer than I’d planned.  What began as a month long stay turned into a year and I immersed myself in the culture and the land.  I found beauty in abundance in a place where I could not initially see it.  The endless brown horizon that terrified me upon my arrival ended up signaling freedom.  The mountain that loomed in the distance became a haven, literally and figuratively.  Nature has played, and continues to play, a huge part of my spiritual recovery/journey.

When I saw the house in the article I thought, ‘I want to build a house like that on Blueberry Hill,’ surrounded by the elements of the land that rebirthed me.  And maybe, just maybe, one day I will.

Old friends…

I found an old friend on Facebook last night and could not help but smile and laugh out loud a little when I saw her profile picture.  She was one of my closest friends during my freshmen and sophomore years of high school and the memories I have from the times we spent together are precious to me which is probably why my heart ached a little, the way you might remember a lost love, when I read through her profile.  There was a level of intimacy in my relationships during this time that I have not since experienced.  I think I was very vulnerable during those years, exposing my inner thoughts and dreams in a way that I don’t feel comfortable expressing them anymore.  So it got me thinking about friends – those that have slipped away and the relationships we still foster – and the impact each one has on our lives.

I’m a girl’s girl, a girlie girl, a huggy, you mean so much to me type of girl because my girlfriends have, very literally, saved my life more than once.  They’ve given me more than a shoulder to cry on, they have given me a lifeline.

My mother has always maintained incredible friendships with the women in her life whether they are a friend from grade school, high school, college, work, or now, one of her tennis leagues.  My mother’s impeccable example of how to make a friend, be a friend, and keep a friend paved the way for the amazing relationships I now share with the women in my life.  I only hope to pass that onto my own daughter one day.

Volumes have been written about female relationships and the intense bonds that arise from them.  I could write volumes on just a few friendships alone.  I know the ins and outs, the good shit, the bad shit, the jealousy, the loyalty, the back stabbing, the blind faith, the gossiping, the covering for one another, all of it equally trivial and monumental at the same time.  And all of it only something that two women, who have been part of the same friendship, can really understand.  I can’t tell you how many times I have looked at other women and asked them why they are friends with a certain person or that they have looked at me and asked me the same question.  The answer is always similar and it usually goes something like this, “You don’t understand.  We’ve been through a lot together and she’s…” (insert good qualities at the end).  And that is the truth.  The honest truth.  What we go through together and the different pieces of ourselves that our friends know, binds us.  The friendships that end or the friends with whom we lose touch, those never leave us, either.  I think that’s why my heart ached a bit when I saw my old friend last night.  She reminded me of a piece of myself that, while I left it behind a long time ago, still lives on in the memory of our friendship.

Sunday Funday

Ohhhh how things have changed.  Sunday Funday’s are a bit different for me now.  While they weren’t known as Sunday Funday’s back when and where I was still drinking, I definitely participated in them often.  Usually with beer (and the occasional beer helment) during football season or with Sunday brunches where food came second to bloody mary’s and mimosa’s.  Sunday’s were the perfect excuse to drink in the morning, which I did every other day anyway, but not out in the open since it was, for some strange reason, frowned upon.

This morning I woke up at 8:45am, had a great conversation with my dad, and then drove down to my sponsors house where we made pancakes, had a Big Book study, and went for a long walk.  It’s times like these that I can’t help but be insanely grateful for my sobriety.

Don’t get me wrong, there are still times that I wish I could have a traditional Sunday Funday because, well, they were, on occasion, fun.  From time to time, nostalgia will creep in and I will remember how nice it was to sit at a table with friends and recall the events of the prior night over a drink or two.  And then I am reminded of the fact that, with me, there was never a drink or two.  I was lucky if there were only five or six.  The morning always started off fun, but then the drinking (as a group) would end and my buzz would wear off and depression would settle in my gut which would lead me on a desperate search for another drink.

I don’t have to deal with that today.  I get to go on with the rest of my Sunday without living in fear that the depression will return.  And for that, I am grateful.

Future Tripping

I turned 28 about a month ago.  Sweet, cool, no problem….28, I’m alright with that age…I’m almost 30!  I have friends who have turned 30, are coming up on 30, are dreading 30.  I was looking forward to it.  Yes, “was.”  While I was home for the holidays, my sister made a joke about the fact that I am almost 30 and it hit me – holy shit, I’m almost 30.  I don’t even know what that means – almost 30 – but it felt, well, heavy.  So it got me thinking about, yes, you guessed it, 30, and it all came back to one thing – Sex and the City.

Sex and the City first aired in June of ‘98 and by the time I got to college, in Fall of ‘99, it was a full fledged phenomenon.  Here were these four amazing, beautiful, fun women in their thirties, each living life to fullest in New York City.  They wore fabulous clothes, dated handsome, interesting men, drank cosmopolitans, and they had each other to lean on through all of it.  Ohmigod, I, along with every other girl I knew, wanted to be them.  Hello, 30 looked AWESOME.  We would have Sex and the City parties where we’d drink and watch an entire season on DVD and figure out what characters we were most like.  (Side note – men HATE this.  I have had several men tell me that it’s so annoying that girls feel the need to define themselves as a SATC character…and, yes girls, the character we all want to be like…Carrie…she is the worst one!  Apparently “neurotic” isn’t a charming quality.)

Armed with the idea that THIS is how the 30’s looked, I was hooked on the decade to come.  There are a few problems with this scenario.  Problem number one, and perhaps the biggest problem, I don’t drink.  You could say I cashed in my drinking chips early on.  This means no crying in my cosmo with the girls after a long day.  This brings me to problem number two – assuming I’m Carrie, my Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte all live in different cities, the closest one over an hour away.  So, even if I wanted to cry in my diet coke, that would be difficult.  Problem number three, I live in Sacramento, which is a wonderful city, but it’s not NYC.  I know the city, I love the city, and it’s not the city.  Problem number four, the men I date, well, actually, that’s not much of a problem.  My dating life is pretty interesting.  Problem number five – while Target does have some cutting edge fashion, it’s not 5th Avenue.  The closest I get to designer clothing is my sisters closet, and that’s only when I am home.  Problem number six, and wait, THIS is actually the biggest problem, my life is not a half hour HBO series.

And now I am screwed.  Thirty doesn’t look so awesome anymore.  Maybe that’s the sudden weight I felt?  Back to my original question: What does it mean to be 30?

There were a lot of things I thought I would have done at this point in my life.  I thought I would have finished college, met my husband, or at least my fiance, have a career that I’d chosen…and while, in my case, I have had a few road blocks and thus taken a few detours, I guess I’m still hooked on the ideals that I set for myself as a little girl.  And I know I shouldn’t hang on to the “dreams” I had as a child and let them define my feelings around my current situation and obviously society’s standards play a role as well, though they’ve definitely loosened up over time.  There’s also this part of me that is ashamed to admit that I wish I was settled, or in the process of settling, down.  Maybe the impending doom of 30 is really more of a realization that I’m dissaatisfied with where I am at this point in my life….

But, back to reality, I just turned 28, so future tripping on 30 is probably a waste of time right now.

It’s a dawg e dawg world

So, here’s the deal…I have no idea what will come of this blog.  I have a friend who blogs regularly and I enjoy reading his blog and I’ve wanted to start one of my own, so I decided to do it…here it goes…