"It's not you...

....it's me." I said to myself as I looked in the mirror.

I'm coming clean: I have issues with change. I do just find in changing situations, changing environment, etc. But when it comes to personal change, I definitely have my fair share of challenges.

Right now I am going through a "transformation" so to speak. I know I need to step it up a notch, to grow up and look the part. Too many year of complacency with tee shirts and jeans, jeans and tee shirts. I'm hiding, from nobody but me, I'd hasten to guess. Who knew that buying a new blouse today would cause me to have a major melt-down and start to crack up?

I have this obsession with clothes...it's probably not very healthy. The irony? I have an obsession with clothes yet 90% of the time, I'm a mess. My socks don't match, my belt is broken, my shirt is wrinkled and my cardigan is pilled.  Oh did I forget shoes that are falling apart? It's a comfort thing and an inability or unwillingness to be uncomfy. I had to come to terms with this today. Again, a shirt from Kohl's could cause all of this introspection? I don't even LIKE Kohl's!

Deep down inside I want to be this cute little Parisian girl who can pull it all together with the toss of a scarf and the perfect bag. The reality: I've become a typical Portlander, afraid of being muddy, wet, and cold in this uber casual, uber grunge environment.

Deep down inside, I want to love the shirt, embrace the shirt, become ONE with the shirt. Seriously. It would be one little hurdle to overcome, one more baby step in the right direction. Embracing "the shirt" means I am embracing ME.

How do you deal with change? Do you run towards it with open arms or cower in the corner?

Word of the Day: Pithy

Pithy: Concise or forcefully expressive.....or if I was a fruit, containing too MUCH pith.

Just what fruit WOULD I be??? I digress.....

That just about sums me up. I'm this whirling, churning ball of energy, full of light and heat and as I get hotter and hotter, I become pithy.....things just come out of me with the force of a chicken bone wedged in my windpipe after a successful Heimlich maneuver has been performed. Out of my way, I'm spitting fire...and maybe a few singed feathers.

I always whirl and churn and brew and stew.....I wish I could say I shoot from the hip when it comes to me stating what needs to be said but I don't. Fear of rejection maybe? Who knows...I don't. I just tend to chew on things until they are all-consuming and then BAM stand back. Did I REALLY just say that? If I had a dollar for every time I DID say that!

Modest as I USUALLY am, I must occasionally boast my few God-given talents, one of them being my wit. It was dormant for a pretty long time. Gone were the quips that came out of me as spontaneously as carbon dioxide. Everything was well thought and well planned. God-forbid I hurt anyone's feelings or tarnish their perception of me. I wasn't even quippy let alone pithy. 

It all started coming back about a year ago....the spontaneity, the quickness, the come-backs that just worked right. I took baby steps and started with quippy. I was fast, I thought on my feet let alone my toes again. Eventually I was pithy again too. The light just didn't fade away while the heat burnt itself out. Instead it spawned some kind of radioactive, scientific, explosion of neurons or something and suddenly, I became ME again, thankfully. Probably not so thankfully for the Comcast customer service rep nor the checker at Whole Foods both who had the good fortune to cross paths with me (or butt heads) today, but hey, it can't be everyone's lucky day!

I missed me. Me was sounding forced, and brow-beaten, worn down, bullied. Now me is

.....pithy......and I like pithy.

What word sums YOU up in a nutshell?

May, 2014....Resurrection...

I am resurrecting this blog. Why did I let it die such a slow, agonizing death? I practically held its head under water!

I eventually had to be honest with myself.....what the heck was I doing? Who was I trying to be? Certainly not me! I was trying to be any number of the other bloggers I follow and in the end just felt like I was stalking them, stealing bits and pieces of their creativity to use perversely as my own. I felt dirty. I felt like a thief.

It had to end somewhere. It ended almost 2 years ago to this day.

One thing I made a promise to myself NOT to do is delete the old posts. No. They deserve their place in this blog to show where I was and hopefully serve as the bridge to where I will be going. Nothing good was ever gotten without at least a little pain. These old posts are like dozens of little pin pricks reminding me not to go back. I need them. Little wounds occasionally oozing blood or not, or not, they are part of me.

I had been going through a lot up until that point....a lot of life changes. In the meantime, I've gone through more.....hey I wouldn't be alive if I wasn't! While I still find almost a teenage awkwardness with expressing myself, I am at a point where it's time to rebel and date the bad boy and try whatever way I can to gain my own attention and keep it. I can't care about you, reader. This is for my benefit......it's just a cherry on top if you actually like what I have to say or even if you don't like it, KNOW what it's like to feel this way, no matter how awful. And it's chocolate drizzle on top if you actually continually tune in and follow me.

Some posts will be good, probably mostly bad,with a sprinkle here and there of the mediocre or trite. I'm not perfect and neither is my writing. But then if it went against who I was I wouldn't be fooling anyone anyway. You'd see right through it and bam...there rolls the cherry onto the sticky parlor table neglected all day by the sophomore working behind the counter. Yuck. But I would have no one to blame but me since I did nothing to stop that terrible trainwreck, did I?

It's gonna be a bumpy ride, so throw you hands up in the air, don't hold on, and roll with it, scary turns and all!

Oh Cozy Mysteries, Why do I Love Thee?

Because your characters seem REAL to me and have real flaws!

I hate reading picture perfect stories about picture perfect people. I'm not one of those people; most of us aren't. So why would I want to read about someone or something I can't relate to?

I guess that's why I've always had a hard time reading fantasy or science fiction. It makes no sense to me.

My cozy mysteries, however, are just that: cozy, mysteries, and involve real characters. Okay, maybe not real in the sense of why does murder and mayhem follow them around, but you know what I mean. They have relationship issues, body image issues, they all seem to own a cat or two (now who doesn't like that?), they love food, they all have a great best friend and a "potential". They also all seem to have a mom who's still in the picture and "with it" (something which I can TOTALLY relate to!). They fell into sleuthing by chance; they weren't looking for it. You couldn't call any one of them Nancy Drew. Dead bodies just started popping up in their paths!

They do, however, seem to live in eye-pleasing, idyllic towns. THAT may be a little unrealistic, but it makes for good reading and a great escape. It also makes living in small towns seem not so appealing. They, too, come with their share of problems (again, a bevy of dead bodies and murderers living double-lives among the fine citizens of the community).

I'm drawn to them for all these reasons and many more: colorful book covers, animals with sixth sense, handsome plumbers and contractors who just seem to hang around, and life-balance; all of the main characters seem to have plenty of hobbies to keep their lives relatively stress-free.

And they all are strong women to boot!

Check out the various cozy mystery writer blogs in my blog list and cozy mystery websites!

California Dreamin'

My craving for California is worse than ever. Maybe it's from all the rain and cold weather we've had here in Portland for, oh, 2 years now? I don't know. Call me crazy!

All kidding aside, it's more than just the weather. I miss open spaces, rolling hills (not mountains), the ocean with it's TRUE surfer-infested beaches, driving down precarious highways that practically hang off of cliffs, and, yes, the sun. I miss the laid-back attitude, but at the same time, it's only minutes into the BIG city. I even miss the superficiality of tanned skin, bottle blondes and deep checkbooks. You have to had lived it to know what I mean. It's all a little gift, wrapped in pretty bow!

Sure, Portland and Oregon are beautiful, don't get me wrong. But for a girl who's used to sunshine, golden hills and smog, yes, even smog, it can be somewhat stifling for me here. I never feel like I can see the proverbial forest for the trees, literally. I'm always looking THROUGH something or OVER something to see what I really want to see....and by then there's usually a bank of clouds or a mountain in my way blocking my view.

And the beaches aren't the same here, either. I'm used to true seaside living, complete with restaurants, shopping, PERMANENT residences (not vacation abodes) and crowded beaches with sunbathers, surfers, and roamers. I'm used to driving to the beach to only be greeted with disappointment as there are no more parking spaces to be had. I miss ducking under and around surfboards and longing to be able to swim in the ocean and ride the waves. I miss the smell of suntan lotion permeating the air and bad suntan lines from falling asleep in the warm sand. You don't see sunbathers on an Oregon beach (and yes, I do use sunblock!); it's an oxy-moron.

I could go on and on, but I'll only make myself more homesick. I can't wait to get back there and hopefully someday soon!

Ah, Memories....Yours or Mine??

Being on FB (yes, I'm back on that tirade) has it's ups and downs.......sometimes travelling back through time is good. It can be fun to reminisce. Other times it's not so good.

My memories of me seem to be different than that of others memories of me. Opinionated? I've never thought of MYSELF that way. Outgoing? I always considered myself rather shy. Is it all a distorted view of me? But through whose eyes?

It's sometimes hard enough to see oneself in old photos. Yes, I was THAT blonde at one time. Yes, my hair was THAT stylish back in the day. Yes, age is creeping in slowly around my eyes. But when someone describes you as they used to think you were, that's an entirely different story. You begin to retrace your steps and wonder what if....what if I WAS that person being described? That may account for this or that.

There's a point though where you have to let it go. All of our perceptions can be distorted through time. We remember things as we want to remember them...sometimes the bitter seem more bitter and sometimes the bliss seems more blissful. What we thought of as difficult at the time, seems like nothing now. It's all relative to everything and everyone around us. As we get older, we're able to let more and more of it go or use youth as an excuse for the absurd. The past is all about who we are today.

Acceptance. That's what I've learned. Right, wrong or indifferent.

Simplify

It's Monday...sigh....but the beginning of a fresh, brand-new week! I plan to make the most of it.

I've started by simplifying....clearing the clutter out of my life, slowly by surely. I deleted a couple of books off my Kindle that I really don't need. I unsubscribed to feeds on FB, I deleted some pictures out of the photostream on my iPod Touch. Feels good!

It's like a little weight has been lifted. A few less things to distract me, more time to pay attention to things that REALLY matter. I feel like the world is slowly opening back up from under the burden of being bogged down by the unnecessary.

I want to be able to carry this mind-set through to other aspects of my life. I need to in order to survive and to keep my spirits up. I don't want to be distracted by things that don't really matter, yet still tend to upset me for no reason...but I guess there really is some reason or I invent one just for the sake of drama. Maybe it's my mind's way to giving it something to think about out of boredom or escape. I think I rather read a book instead!

Maybe on Monday's I will think of ONE thing to eliminate each week, whether it be the tangible (too many socks with holes that I have good intentions of mending but never do) or the untangible (bad feelings towards someone). Either way, it out out lighten the load!