So... as I mentioned in today's earlier post, tonight my Mother received an award from The Alzheimer's Association.
My mom started volunteering for the Association around the time my grandmother was diagnosed. Since then, she has become an incredibly active part of the organization, going to meeting after meeting, dripping blood, sweat and tears over every detail of her involvement. Although I know she loves this work, I often wished she would cut back, just because it seemed to be so stressful to her. Last year, when she was required to resign from the board (term limits) I was so excited that she was going to get her life back. So when she told me she was going to re-join the board as soon as she was eligible, I thought she was crazy. But tonight, I finally understand.
I have never seen someone so beloved as my Mom in that ballroom tonight. And it was more than the three tables of friends who joined us in helping her celebrate. I always know how much she means to her friends. She is always the rock in their lives. She is the one they always turn to, the one everyone trusts with their darkest secrets. The one that everyone most respects. It's an incredible thing to have a role model like that. I always aim to be the same kind of friend as my mother.
But, tonight, I saw the respect, the gratitude and the appreciation that my mom inspired in all the employees and volunteers at the Association. I saw how she is their support system and their friend. I had so many people introduce themselves to me tonight and say, "We just love your mother! She is such a wonderful person." And I would agree.
My mom isn't comfortable with the spotlight. She's been anxious for this night to be over for a while, possibly since the day she learned she would be receiving the award. I, in my attempts to make sure she appreciates tonight, have been badgering her mercilessly since I got to town the other day. I've been making her swear that she would accept every compliment graciously, that she would save the self-deprecating comments for another night. And she has agreed, although reluctantly. I told her we would give her standing ovations and she begged me not to. I made jokes about creating a cheer with her name in it and spelling her name with our bodies, which made her turn white with fear and say "You better not!" But when they introduced her, it didn't matter what I did, because half the ballroom was on their feet anyway. I have never been so proud of her or so grateful to be her daughter (and that's saying a lot because I have always looked up to my mom.)
So Mom, congrats again for tonight. I am so pleased that you finally got the attention and thanks that you so richly deserve. And I know Grandma and Poppa are too.
From the program book: "Marsha's involvement began in the late 1990s when she casually mentioned to an acquaintance, "let me know if there's anything I can do to help with the Alzheimer's Association." Since then, she has served as a member of the board of trustees, is a member of the development and finance committees, has served on the executive committee, has chaired A Celebration of Hope and Memory Walk and has been an active member of countless event committees. Marsha is known as a real go-getter who is always willing to take on roles of responsibility and leadership...
When asked to describe her, Chris Stevens, the current chair of the association's board of trustees, said, "We have all benefited from Marsha's grace, dedication to the mission of the organization and hard work. She has always been very generous with her time, energy and talents and is our serene leader."
That's my mom!
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Pack-rat or Archivist? You decide
So... my mother is receiving an award tonight from the Alzheimer's Association (I will be writing a blog later with the details from the program) and I flew home this week to go to the event. I'm so proud of her and everything she's done, but that's for a later post.
No, today's post is about my childhood desk. It sits on the wall of my childhood bedroom, below a faded yellow post-it note on my wall that says (in all caps and underlined, no doubt for emphasis) "STUDY!" The note is a relic of my long-ago days of school-dom. I asked my mother yesterday how it can still be on the wall. They stripped the wallpaper since I moved out and painted the room white. She says she liked to leave it there because it was so iconoclastic.
Anyway, I was getting dressed yesterday and happened to glance over at my desk and noticed a little round piece of plastic sitting there. I realized it was one of those plastic discs that you put in the center of a 45 record to play it on a normal record player. As I was looking at the little disc of yester-year, suddenly, as though I had blinders on before, my entire desk and everything sitting on it (including the yellow post-it reminder to study) materialized. I realized that since I moved out of this house in 1991, I have never really looked at that desk. So, I decided to dig in and discover it's contents. Here's what I found...
On top of the desk:
Drawer #1:
No.
No, when I was done looking at everything, writing it all down so I could record it here, I shoved it all back in the drawers and pushed and pushed until they closed again.
And it's not that the idea of purging the drawers and throwing things out didn't occur to me. It did. Many times. However, ultimately, the garbage bags were downstairs and the alarm was already on. And, you know, I had such a good time combing through all this crap, that who am I to deny my future self the same enjoyment 10 years from now? When I can again wonder why I'm saving that empty file box, or that yellow yo-yo, or the 15 copies of the resume I sent to LA when I was trying to find an internship for 2nd semester senior year. How sad would I feel one day to not be able to comb through pages and pages of badly written fiction with teacher's comments written in green on the side, pointing out gramatical and spelling errors?
No, I can't deny my future self this joy. And what if I should become famous? I know it's not likely, but it could happen. Shouldn't I save all these important momentos for the opening night of the Sheri Spitz Collection at the Smithsonian?
Yes, better to leave things as they are. Who knows what I will need someday.
Tune in for the next time I return home and document the contents of my closets, where I promise you, there is a Married With Children board game!
No, today's post is about my childhood desk. It sits on the wall of my childhood bedroom, below a faded yellow post-it note on my wall that says (in all caps and underlined, no doubt for emphasis) "STUDY!" The note is a relic of my long-ago days of school-dom. I asked my mother yesterday how it can still be on the wall. They stripped the wallpaper since I moved out and painted the room white. She says she liked to leave it there because it was so iconoclastic.
Anyway, I was getting dressed yesterday and happened to glance over at my desk and noticed a little round piece of plastic sitting there. I realized it was one of those plastic discs that you put in the center of a 45 record to play it on a normal record player. As I was looking at the little disc of yester-year, suddenly, as though I had blinders on before, my entire desk and everything sitting on it (including the yellow post-it reminder to study) materialized. I realized that since I moved out of this house in 1991, I have never really looked at that desk. So, I decided to dig in and discover it's contents. Here's what I found...
On top of the desk:
- A jar full of pennies in a mug that says "Please don't bother me, I'm studying." (Yeah, I'm sure...)
- 8 different coffee mugs with various sayings... "Official Left-Handed Mug" (which had a small hole on one side so if you tried to drink with your right hand it would dump the liquid all over you) "Coffee and Cruellers will hold back the honk" (That's a Wayne's World mug, of course) and one with a pretty unicorn leaping over a rainbow.
- A Giant Guinness mug filled with hair combs.
- Four, count them, FOUR pencil cups jammed full of writing implements (including some Crayola markers) which no longer have any hope of working. (And I know they don't work, cause I tried several of them as I began my inventory of the desk. None of them were up to the job. I just put them back, naturally.)
- A Guinness bottle with a red and white pom sticking out of it from my Shaker Heights Red Raiders days.
Drawer #1:
- A program from my high school senior honors dinner, in which I did not receive any honors.
- My report card from the fall of '92 (Mostly Bs with an A- in Fiction writing)
- A directory of my C:/ drive from my first computer
- A Colleco Quiz Wiz with 1001 questions (I wonder if I can get money for that from eBay)
- A container of Pick Up Sticks
- A File box that says "Pick a Book" on the outside. Inside are cards describing books. For example: "This book is about all kinds of animals at a hotel. It is very funny" and "This book is about a boy who loves soccer. If you like soccer, this book is for you." (For the record, I believe this box was a class project in Elementary School and I took it upon myself to procure it secretly. Not all these descriptions were written by me, as evidenced by the fact that there is a book about soocer.)
- Two boxes of reel to reel tape from my days as a radio Production Manager on 106-VIC- the Voice of Ithaca College.
- A notebook containing questions from my first (and last) celebrity interview... yes, friends, it was Julio Iglesias.
- A folder full of fiction writing, most of it involving death and bad metaphors. I was a very, very dark writer in my youth.
- A college Viewbook from the University of Hartford. (A school which I did not visit, nor apply to, nor, obviously, attend. However, I live on a street called Hartford now, so that's something.)
- A book in which I wrote down song lyrics I liked with the title in calligraphy (or what I believed calligraphy should look like) on the facing page. Many of the titles are Beatles songs, but there is some Simon & Garfunkel thrown in for good measure. (It seems to me this was early practice for my future career. It also seems to me that I got a lot of song lyrics wrong back then.)
- A reminder on a slip of paper to call Lee Fisher's office (candidate for State Representative) on Monday for myself and Molly. Mol and I volunteered in his office in 1990, mainly because the Volunteer Coordinator was very cute and used to call us Slut-Puppy. (Which we also called ourselves, to be fair.)
- A yellow Yo-Yo
- The letter I earned for my letter jacket from High School Marching Band. (Which I clearly had the sense NOT to put on my jacket, cause how lame is a band letter?)
- A book of piano sheet music with TV and Movie themes. (Ex: The Theme from Ice Castles, St. Elsewhere and Happy Days.)
- A Certificate of Merit from Temple Emanu El for Outstanding Scholastic Achievement in Grade 10 Judaic Studies. (Really? They must have set the bar VERY low...)
- A wall calendar from 1990 titled "PMS Attack." Complete with countdown to the day I left for my summer trip to Cambridge in England. The countdown begins 117 days from departure. (From 4/22-4/30, I wrote "Dante's 9th Level of Hell" across the dates. Which puzzled me until I saw that the SAT's were held on May 1st. Ah!!!)
- Paperback book version of the movie "Big" starring Tom Hanks.
- Flash cards for Division. (Truthfully, I should take those home and study them. I could use the practice!)
- The shooting script from the August 25, 1994 edition of Entertainment Tonight. John Tesh: "All that pushing and squeezing and pushing and squeezing and finally... rock hard thighs. Now watch Suzanne put them to work." (Ok, I'd really like to know what was happening in the tape package that came after THAT intro!)
- My Driver License that expired in June of '93
- My SISTER'S Driver License (which I was stupidly using as a fake ID even though there was a three inch height difference and we look nothing alike) which expired in January of '95.
- A recipe printed on dot matrix printer for Skyline Chili (hmmm.... can't wait to try that!)
- A copy of Cliff's Notes for Macbeth.
No.
No, when I was done looking at everything, writing it all down so I could record it here, I shoved it all back in the drawers and pushed and pushed until they closed again.
And it's not that the idea of purging the drawers and throwing things out didn't occur to me. It did. Many times. However, ultimately, the garbage bags were downstairs and the alarm was already on. And, you know, I had such a good time combing through all this crap, that who am I to deny my future self the same enjoyment 10 years from now? When I can again wonder why I'm saving that empty file box, or that yellow yo-yo, or the 15 copies of the resume I sent to LA when I was trying to find an internship for 2nd semester senior year. How sad would I feel one day to not be able to comb through pages and pages of badly written fiction with teacher's comments written in green on the side, pointing out gramatical and spelling errors?
No, I can't deny my future self this joy. And what if I should become famous? I know it's not likely, but it could happen. Shouldn't I save all these important momentos for the opening night of the Sheri Spitz Collection at the Smithsonian?
Yes, better to leave things as they are. Who knows what I will need someday.
Tune in for the next time I return home and document the contents of my closets, where I promise you, there is a Married With Children board game!
Sunday, April 5, 2009
I freakin' love my job!
So... I have had a bad couple of weeks, as you can probably tell from my previous two posts. I feel like I've been non-stop cranky for months. (I'm sure if I asked some of my friends if that's true they would confirm... which is why I won't ask). I've been feeling a bit lost, a bit confused, a bit like everything I want in life is just beyond my reach and I will always come close to what I want and but never quite get it.
Then, miracle upon miracles, PR scheduled an all day educational Empowerment Summit in Charlotte. Well, not just in Charlotte. In eight other markets as well. But Charlotte's happened to be today. And all I have to say, having spent 9 hours sitting in a hotel ballroom, in the same chair (with a half hour lunch break and loooots of bathroom breaks cause my bladder is apparently the size of a pea), listening to five different speakers and watching five different Powerpoint presentations...
I FREAKIN' LOVE THIS COMPANY!!!!$#@$#@
Feel like I'm shouting at you? I am.
Seriously, I have always loved trainings and meetings from the day I signed up. I go to every meeting that I can for our team in the Carolinas, I've been to National Convention twice in Las Vegas and chose to ignore the city and its trappings to sit in voluntary training sessions (of course, to be fair, I don't like Vegas very much, so I didn't feel like I was giving up anything) and I've gone to Annual Corporate Training in Cincinnati, OH every year for three days. Every year, at the end of training, I start getting excited and can't wait for the next one. It's always so empowering and exciting and amazing to be in a room with SO MANY women who are all about bettering themselves and each other instead of being nasty and bitchy as you know we women can be in large groups.
But this Empowerment Seminar blew all those previous trainings away. I am so pumped, I want to do a party right-freakin-now to show off what I learned. I want to memorize every bullet-point, every note, every demo that I heard today and recite them to strangers so they can get as excited as I am. (Hence the blog! Aren't you glad I didn't call you personally?)
I have been to quite a few trainings for other companies. The Pump Factory in Monroe, North Carolina (pronounced MONroe by the folks who worked there...) was a special treat of sheer, mind-numbing, excrutiating pain. The sales trainings I used to have to organize when I worked at Hair Color Xperts made me want to cry and beg my boss not to make me actually attend. And then, of course, there have been the ENDLESS tech meetings (yes, telethon, I'm thinking of you!) and production meetings where I seriously considered jabbing myself in the eye with my mechanical pencil just to make life more interesting.
This was twice as long as most of those (except the Telethon meeting, of course!) and flew by in a blink.
What I love about PR sales trainings is that they don't train us and say "Here's how you can make better sales." Instead, they tell us how we can like ourselves more, appreciate our customers more, be more educated... thereby increasing our sales. I genuinely walk away from our trainings feeling happier, more empowered and more in love with this company than ever.
Anyway, this is probably getting nauseating, so I'll stop here. I guess I just wanted to let everyone out there in blog land who might be feeling some concern for me based on previous posts know that "HappySheri" is back and ready to go!
PR rocks!!!
Then, miracle upon miracles, PR scheduled an all day educational Empowerment Summit in Charlotte. Well, not just in Charlotte. In eight other markets as well. But Charlotte's happened to be today. And all I have to say, having spent 9 hours sitting in a hotel ballroom, in the same chair (with a half hour lunch break and loooots of bathroom breaks cause my bladder is apparently the size of a pea), listening to five different speakers and watching five different Powerpoint presentations...
I FREAKIN' LOVE THIS COMPANY!!!!$#@$#@
Feel like I'm shouting at you? I am.
Seriously, I have always loved trainings and meetings from the day I signed up. I go to every meeting that I can for our team in the Carolinas, I've been to National Convention twice in Las Vegas and chose to ignore the city and its trappings to sit in voluntary training sessions (of course, to be fair, I don't like Vegas very much, so I didn't feel like I was giving up anything) and I've gone to Annual Corporate Training in Cincinnati, OH every year for three days. Every year, at the end of training, I start getting excited and can't wait for the next one. It's always so empowering and exciting and amazing to be in a room with SO MANY women who are all about bettering themselves and each other instead of being nasty and bitchy as you know we women can be in large groups.
But this Empowerment Seminar blew all those previous trainings away. I am so pumped, I want to do a party right-freakin-now to show off what I learned. I want to memorize every bullet-point, every note, every demo that I heard today and recite them to strangers so they can get as excited as I am. (Hence the blog! Aren't you glad I didn't call you personally?)
I have been to quite a few trainings for other companies. The Pump Factory in Monroe, North Carolina (pronounced MONroe by the folks who worked there...) was a special treat of sheer, mind-numbing, excrutiating pain. The sales trainings I used to have to organize when I worked at Hair Color Xperts made me want to cry and beg my boss not to make me actually attend. And then, of course, there have been the ENDLESS tech meetings (yes, telethon, I'm thinking of you!) and production meetings where I seriously considered jabbing myself in the eye with my mechanical pencil just to make life more interesting.
This was twice as long as most of those (except the Telethon meeting, of course!) and flew by in a blink.
What I love about PR sales trainings is that they don't train us and say "Here's how you can make better sales." Instead, they tell us how we can like ourselves more, appreciate our customers more, be more educated... thereby increasing our sales. I genuinely walk away from our trainings feeling happier, more empowered and more in love with this company than ever.
Anyway, this is probably getting nauseating, so I'll stop here. I guess I just wanted to let everyone out there in blog land who might be feeling some concern for me based on previous posts know that "HappySheri" is back and ready to go!
PR rocks!!!
Friday, April 3, 2009
Messages from the Subconscious
So... last night, I had two very weird dreams. Not unusual for me by any stretch. I am the most vivid dreamer I know and my dreams are regularly active, dark and often involve life or death situations. If anyone out there in blog land has a cure for that, let me know. Please.
These dreams last night were no different, generally, than the others. Quick action, representation from people in my life etc. But usually, I wake up from these things thinking 'What in the holy hell did that mean?' and writing it off. Like the other night, I had a dream that my whole family was going to Greece for a vacation and I had volunteered to stay and watch my cousins' restaurant for them (despite the fact that none of my cousins actually own restaurants) and was very anxious about doing a good job. What does that mean? I have no idea.
But two dreams from last night actually seem like they are sending me a message. In the first of the two, I was driving a large mobile home type thing with a group of friends home from some kind of vacation. For some reason, I have a memory that we were a band on tour? But anyway, we were driving this mobile home and we put it on autopilot (!!!) and went into the back to play cards while the car drove us home. But something was bothering me and I couldn't figure it out. So I went back up to the driver's seat to check on things and started to come a very slow realization that we were driving the wrong direction on the highway.
I didn't panic, but I got off (driving backwards so I could go with the flow of traffic) at the next exit I could find. My friends didn't seem bothered by it and no other cars were honking at me. Which is probably why it took me so long to figure out that we were going the wrong way. But we did eventually get off the highway and turn around to attempt to get back on. As we were starting to turn onto the entrance ramp, I noticed there were some orange cones blocking part of the ramp. I tried to see if I should go around the cones, but there was so much traffic and they were all honking to get me to move forward, so I just went around the cones and started driving down the ramp, only to discover that the ramp was only half finished and didn't connect to the highway. We were trapped. And then I woke up.
I had to get up to go pee at that point, and as I went, I was doing my usual to reassure myself that none of that actually happened, that it was just a dream, blah blah blah. But I realized it seemed like a pretty telling one and I thought to myself, 'If I still remember it in the morning, I'll write a blog about it.' Then I went back to sleep.
In the next dream, I was at a gas station, filling up my car (which was actually my car on and off through this dream. Sometimes it was the Element, sometimes it was a big van) when all of a sudden, someone came by to pick me up and I left. I came back a long while later to the same station to pick up my car and pacing around the car screaming was Luke from Gilmore Girls. He was mad that I had left the car there so long with the gas pump handle in the car, taking up room. He was threatening to tow. I came running over, apologizing over and over and he started telling me he was going to sue me for all the business he had lost while my car sat there. I was horribly embarrassed and apologetic and tried to pay for my gas, but he kept ranting and raving and getting angrier and angrier. Finally, he started to calm down and eventually agreed to just let me pay for the gas I bought. Then my friends and I climbed into the car and started heading home.
Do you ever think maybe you're doing something wrong with your life and no one has bothered to tell you, or even noticed? I hate to take such a literal translation with these dreams, especially since my dreams are usually so screwy that there isn't a lesson to be learned among them. My dreams are abstract and strange. But these dreams just seem so obvious. At a time in my life where I am a feeling a bit at loose ends, these dreams seem to be screaming at me. Am I going the wrong direction? Am I taking dead-end roads? Am I just taking up space in places where better things would get done if I would just move out of the way?
I don't think this applies to my business. In fact, work, as usual, is the one thing in my life I am completely certain about. I know I am doing good there and I'm proud of the work that I do. At least, I know I'm good at parties, at selling, at educating and supporting my clients in a very intimate setting. Recruiting, on the other hand... not my strongest area. But I don't feel like I'm going the wrong direction there.
Maybe the dreams happened because I have spent this entire week carrying around the intention of getting organized as hell in my house and never getting it done. Is that it?
Is it my personal life? Is that where I am standing at a dead end road? I don't get the chance to meet a lot of people to spend time with in this line of work. I work from home, I work at night... not a lot of new friendships or relationships to be made in that context. Back in LA, I would do new shows every month and at every show, I would make a great new friend. Sometimes they were just friends that I would see at shows occasionally, but more often, they became friends that I would hang out with after shows ended. I had so many incredible friends out there and I do miss that here. The friends I have made in Charlotte are amazing and I love them all, but there are not a lot. At least, not by my standards.
Maybe the dreams were the result of frustration that I've been feeling this week over trying to prepare my books without really understanding what I'm doing. I finally got them done on Tuesday and gave them to my accountant who then called me to ask a hundred questions about things I had done wrong in my Quickbooks, even going so far as forgetting she was on the phone with me and muttering to herself 'she has got to take a bookkeeping class.' Which, yes, I need to do.
Maybe it's to do with my fear that practicing and learning Pilates so I can make an extra couple hundred a week teaching is not going to work out because it appears there are not enough clients for me to actually get a class to teach.
I don't know exactly what they mean, but I have a feeling it might be all of the above. I also know that I have these types of moments in my life, these feelings of being at a turning point, on the cusp of something, every few years. And everything always works out in the end. I have no doubt that all these issues I'm facing right now will be resolved and when they are, of course, the answer in hindsight will be obvious and I'll wonder why I spent so much energy trying not to think about them.
In the meantime, until the light turns on, I guess I'll just assume these dreams are a warning sign. A reminder to me that even though I'm pretending these issues aren't there, they do exist and probably need some attention.
And my Element does need some gas. I'll just remember to stand there while I fill the tank and take my car with me when I go.
These dreams last night were no different, generally, than the others. Quick action, representation from people in my life etc. But usually, I wake up from these things thinking 'What in the holy hell did that mean?' and writing it off. Like the other night, I had a dream that my whole family was going to Greece for a vacation and I had volunteered to stay and watch my cousins' restaurant for them (despite the fact that none of my cousins actually own restaurants) and was very anxious about doing a good job. What does that mean? I have no idea.
But two dreams from last night actually seem like they are sending me a message. In the first of the two, I was driving a large mobile home type thing with a group of friends home from some kind of vacation. For some reason, I have a memory that we were a band on tour? But anyway, we were driving this mobile home and we put it on autopilot (!!!) and went into the back to play cards while the car drove us home. But something was bothering me and I couldn't figure it out. So I went back up to the driver's seat to check on things and started to come a very slow realization that we were driving the wrong direction on the highway.
I didn't panic, but I got off (driving backwards so I could go with the flow of traffic) at the next exit I could find. My friends didn't seem bothered by it and no other cars were honking at me. Which is probably why it took me so long to figure out that we were going the wrong way. But we did eventually get off the highway and turn around to attempt to get back on. As we were starting to turn onto the entrance ramp, I noticed there were some orange cones blocking part of the ramp. I tried to see if I should go around the cones, but there was so much traffic and they were all honking to get me to move forward, so I just went around the cones and started driving down the ramp, only to discover that the ramp was only half finished and didn't connect to the highway. We were trapped. And then I woke up.
I had to get up to go pee at that point, and as I went, I was doing my usual to reassure myself that none of that actually happened, that it was just a dream, blah blah blah. But I realized it seemed like a pretty telling one and I thought to myself, 'If I still remember it in the morning, I'll write a blog about it.' Then I went back to sleep.
In the next dream, I was at a gas station, filling up my car (which was actually my car on and off through this dream. Sometimes it was the Element, sometimes it was a big van) when all of a sudden, someone came by to pick me up and I left. I came back a long while later to the same station to pick up my car and pacing around the car screaming was Luke from Gilmore Girls. He was mad that I had left the car there so long with the gas pump handle in the car, taking up room. He was threatening to tow. I came running over, apologizing over and over and he started telling me he was going to sue me for all the business he had lost while my car sat there. I was horribly embarrassed and apologetic and tried to pay for my gas, but he kept ranting and raving and getting angrier and angrier. Finally, he started to calm down and eventually agreed to just let me pay for the gas I bought. Then my friends and I climbed into the car and started heading home.
Do you ever think maybe you're doing something wrong with your life and no one has bothered to tell you, or even noticed? I hate to take such a literal translation with these dreams, especially since my dreams are usually so screwy that there isn't a lesson to be learned among them. My dreams are abstract and strange. But these dreams just seem so obvious. At a time in my life where I am a feeling a bit at loose ends, these dreams seem to be screaming at me. Am I going the wrong direction? Am I taking dead-end roads? Am I just taking up space in places where better things would get done if I would just move out of the way?
I don't think this applies to my business. In fact, work, as usual, is the one thing in my life I am completely certain about. I know I am doing good there and I'm proud of the work that I do. At least, I know I'm good at parties, at selling, at educating and supporting my clients in a very intimate setting. Recruiting, on the other hand... not my strongest area. But I don't feel like I'm going the wrong direction there.
Maybe the dreams happened because I have spent this entire week carrying around the intention of getting organized as hell in my house and never getting it done. Is that it?
Is it my personal life? Is that where I am standing at a dead end road? I don't get the chance to meet a lot of people to spend time with in this line of work. I work from home, I work at night... not a lot of new friendships or relationships to be made in that context. Back in LA, I would do new shows every month and at every show, I would make a great new friend. Sometimes they were just friends that I would see at shows occasionally, but more often, they became friends that I would hang out with after shows ended. I had so many incredible friends out there and I do miss that here. The friends I have made in Charlotte are amazing and I love them all, but there are not a lot. At least, not by my standards.
Maybe the dreams were the result of frustration that I've been feeling this week over trying to prepare my books without really understanding what I'm doing. I finally got them done on Tuesday and gave them to my accountant who then called me to ask a hundred questions about things I had done wrong in my Quickbooks, even going so far as forgetting she was on the phone with me and muttering to herself 'she has got to take a bookkeeping class.' Which, yes, I need to do.
Maybe it's to do with my fear that practicing and learning Pilates so I can make an extra couple hundred a week teaching is not going to work out because it appears there are not enough clients for me to actually get a class to teach.
I don't know exactly what they mean, but I have a feeling it might be all of the above. I also know that I have these types of moments in my life, these feelings of being at a turning point, on the cusp of something, every few years. And everything always works out in the end. I have no doubt that all these issues I'm facing right now will be resolved and when they are, of course, the answer in hindsight will be obvious and I'll wonder why I spent so much energy trying not to think about them.
In the meantime, until the light turns on, I guess I'll just assume these dreams are a warning sign. A reminder to me that even though I'm pretending these issues aren't there, they do exist and probably need some attention.
And my Element does need some gas. I'll just remember to stand there while I fill the tank and take my car with me when I go.
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