Chronicles

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I’ve been so busy the last few months, I don’t even talk with my mom as often as I used to.  I’ve been pretty focused on setting up things that will make me money.  I don’t like the way my life is right now and I need to change it.  I need to be fully self-supporting if I’m going to do anything that matters to me.  I’m only partially self-supporting right now.

I’ve been monetizing my web sites and blogs and I’m still not finished yet.  It’s a lot of work and I hope it pays off sooner as opposed to later.  I’m also trying to make a routine for myself for getting the work done that I can really stick to.  I need to write content for 4 blogs, maintain all my sites, write workshops, and get my jewelry books updated, converted and back up for sale on the web.  I need to start putting out a little jewelry and art I can also sell.

In about 10 days, I start H & R Block tax school. I’m not the only one that’s going either.  When I found the classes, I thought it would be neat to get the whole family doing it.  Not everyone I mailed was interested, but my sister Sandra and my son Joseph will both be attending tax school with me.  We’re going to the same class at the same time.  God help that instructor for having 3 of us at once.  The class starts on 9/2 and is every Tuesday and Thursday morning from 9-12.  The class runs until Thursday, 11/18.

We might have an opportunity to work with H & R Block.  It takes 70% to pass the class and students scoring over 80% may be offered a position by H & R Block.  I don’t really want a job.  I’d rather be self-employed.  BUT it would be very smart the first year or two to take advantage of the additional training provided to hirees of H & R Block and it would guarantee income as well as lots of experience the first year.  So I’m going to do my best to get selected.

I have to find different sources for income now because I’m getting so deaf that I can’t do what I always used to do for a living.  People don’t want a secretary that doesn’t hear very well.  Even when I’ve gotten them to hire me, they’ve often made me aware of just what a pain in the ass it was that I couldn’t hear.  In fact, I’m getting that a lot lately in my personal life.  People, particularly those close to me, being snippy about the fact that I can’t hear them.  I’m not totally deaf.  I can tell when someone is mumbling or isn’t talking  with any wind (projection) in the their voice and this is a person that knows full well that I am hearing impaired.  I get sick of the inconsideration.

In related news, I’m trying to get help to get into a Web Design program at a career college so I can fill in the gaps in my web design expertise.  I would be totally happy doing that kind of work.  I do it practically all day anyway on my Winchester Mystery House suite of sites lol.  I’ve made darned good money in web design so far, but I’m not confident marketing my services in that arena, so I don’t make good money often enough.  One good web design project a month and I could be totally self-supporting.  Two or more and I could live above the poverty level.  Woot!  Mama needs a new pair of shoes life!

I’ve been designing and making my own web sites since 1998, but even so, I’m not confident marketing my web design services because I’m self taught and know my education is incomplete.  It has been limited to what I’ve needed to learn to build web sites for my own businesses.  I’m hoping to be able to get started at a career college before 2008 is done or at least early in the new year.

Web Design has several advantages for me:

• I’ve done it for years and know it’s something I enjoy spending many hours doing.  Hours and hours and hours.  Also, I’ve been doing it long enough that I have a well-developed “eye” for it.
• I’m confident I know at least half of the subject matter and look forward to not only learning things I don’t know, but learning things I do know from a different perspective that’ll make me better, faster, more efficient.
• It’ll help me in my own businesses.
• I’ll be able to confidently pursue business.
• It’s a flexible enough career choice that I can take a job with a company for awhile if I really need it, which would further develop my skills and provide steady pay & insurance benefits OR I be totally independent and hang my own shingle.  My first choice is to be self-employed, but as with the tax classes, I know that having an employer for a time will hone my skills and further prepare me for when I am self-employed.

I’m still trying to get my 1st workshop finished.  To my credit, I only have a couple of days left of work on it.  In fact, if I devoted an entire day to it and didn’t get distracted, it might only be a day’s work.  I’ve stumbled.  I’ve been discouraged.  Sometimes I get depressed.  I want to get it finished.

I have a very tingly wonderful feeling about what’s just around the bend, but it’s balanced by a feeling of impending doom.  I know what the doom is and I know too that I will most likely be the one to enact the doom.  I have a worrisome feeling I will enact the doom before I’m fully prepared to handle the fall-out of the doom.

In regard to this doom, I’ve been amazingly patient.  Those who know me well and personally have noticed an odd absence of my usual “assertive forthrightness” for lack of a better term.  In other words, there hasn’t been one time where I’ve said, “We need to have a conversation!” despite the desire on numerous occasions.  I did say, “You know what!?!” which is the bell tolling for whom the bell tolls.  On a side note, I’ve been wanting to work in a “for whom the bell tolls” for years.  Mission accomplished!

I’ve been feeling scattered lately.  My increasing deafness, the bank account robbery, my need for other work so I can be self-supporting, my need to change my situation, my incredible craving for art, my need for fellowship with others, all the art/jewelry/handbag/shoe & boot embellishment designs in my head, my need to get my house in order in all the possibilities of meaning, my desire to get the fuck out of California, my need to get my tooth fixed so I can stop feeling bad about myself, my need to learn Flash, my need to dance, my need to help other people - I could go on all day.  It’s a big swirl and I feel pulled in all these different directions.  As if in a pinball game, I bounce toward the priority of the moment and ricochet off of obstacles and still don’t anything finished.  Boing, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

I know some people who would say, “So what, that’s just life.”  Well, maybe it is and to those people I say, “You don’t have the privilege of living life from my perspective, so you don’t get to have an opinion about how I’m supposed to feel.  Deal with your own problems before you trivialize the experience of someone else.”  I know… that’s well into snarky, but it’s honest and honest is what’s on tap today.

I have to get some work done and I desperately want to think about something else because I can tell I’m vibrating like a victim since the robbery of my bank account yesterday (which I’ll blog about separately).  I don’t want to magnetize more of the same so I need to get my head somewhere else for awhile.  I will deal with the remaining things like filing a police report and filling out the dispute form on Monday when I should be feeling better in so many ways.  Today I’m going to work a little, study Flash a little, and make some art.  I will continue this right on through the weekend and deal with the unpleasantness on Monday, which is always a power day for me.

I’ll try to remember to post about whatever I make.  I have handmade boxes Tim has made that are waiting for me to embellish so we can sell them.  I have my own unfinished art projects as well as jewelry designs I’d like to start.  I have incredible, ornate tassels that are waiting not-so-patiently to be born.  There are bats and cats that want to be drawn and spiders and crooked houses and willows that weep for my pencil.

What are you going to do this weekend?

Listening to Niyaz by Niyaz.  Oh, how I love it!  It’s my favorite CD of the moment and has been for a couple of months now.  It’s about all I listen to lol.  Especially, Allahi Allah and Ghazal? Or is it The Hunt that is track4?  Anyway, tracks 3 and 4 are my favorites.  I love cultural music with beats.  I would like to make a belly dance routine to both of these songs.

When I can rent building space for my wellness center, I want to have a class for women that is a casual dance class where women can come dance for the sake of dancing, dance their songs to the earth, without worrying about the tittilation of men.  I want to play music of another culture each time or feature a study of the music of one culture for a month or something.  I want to have a dance teacher of a different culture come in every 4th class or so to teach us all some neat things we can incorporate into our own styles.

I think many women don’t dance because they don’t want to be seen by men or they don’t want to be seen by men at least not yet.  I think women need dancing fellowship with each other where they can test out different things for themselves that they see other dancing women do, where they can express their sensuality without it looking like a come on to a man.  In my experience, the call for the kind of dancing grows stronger with age and the deepening of spirituality.  I think one of the mysteries of being female is the call and the urge to dance our songs to the earth and to the heavens.  I want a place where women can live their dancing dreams, where they can even bring a dancing costume or make one of their own, and dance as they were destined to dance.  Not teach them to dance, per se, but help them find and express the dance within them.  Anyway, that’s what I’d like to do for myself and for other women.  I think it weighs more heavily on my mind every day.

Aren’t I just like a Pandora’s Box?  I’ll bet you are too.  We are all complex creatures with sometimes lush and exuberant ideas.  What a beautiful jungle, no?

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Sometimes life is so overwhelming
that I want to stand on a cliff overlooking the ocean
facing into a cold, biting wind
wearing just a long shimmery night gown
as pale as my skin
hair and gown blowing back
blowing   b l o w i n g     b  l   o    w    i       n         g
until little pieces of me
one by one
detach in wisps
and blow away with the wind
the wisps fly off of me
more and more quickly
until everything
even the scent of my perfume
is but a memory

©Cynthia Clinton 08/21/08

Note: I have an interesting relationship with the wind and have since I was small.  I’ve always felt like messages were carried to me on the wind.  I put messages for other people on the wind, sometimes little gifts, and I tell people to stick their head out their front door at some point that day so they can receive their gift.  It sounds corny, but there’s power in it.  Sometimes people will give me news and I’ll say, “I know… it was on the wind a month ago.”  I get messages in other ways too, but there’s something about the wind and me.  If I could choose the way in which I left this earth at the end of this life, this is the way I would choose to go.  I wish I could make it so (but not now lol)
This is what I’m currently listening to…

And this book sounds utterly yummy… Can you tell what kind of a mood I’m in?

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I commented on new friend, Veronika’s blog yesterday (see it here http://weblogmv.com/2008/01/22/do-we-all-need-to-dress-like-men-to-succeed.aspx#comment-1232037) and the subject really got me thinking.

In the past 10 years, I’ve been focused on developing my inner self and world, which is appropriate, I think.  I needed a lot of work, but I came out of it with an ability to help other people get there too.

In 2008, I’ve been focused largely on my exterior presence as I gear up to presenting and being more active in training and teaching others.  I’m a bit of a perfectionist.  Okay, I’m a pretty significant perfectionist.  My boyfriend has made OCD cracks in the past.  OCD is fashionable jargon these days, but it doesn’t apply to me - not even a little.  The reason I’m a perfectionist is because I have an eye for details.  The details leap out at me for some reason.  It isn’t anything I ever tried to cultivate and it’s not something I can turn off.  My awareness of the details is just *there*.

So, it would hold that I’m a stickler for a person walking their talk.  It’s an important detail that leaps out, but people don’t often consider it to be.  For instance, my boyfriend’s parents have a doctor they don’t want to move away from.  Their doctor is a diabetic who has so poorly managed his own condition that he had to have a leg amputated.  Now, if that were my doctor, I’d run away as fast as I could because a physician who can’t heal himself is a physician that probably can’t heal me either.  I would have no confidence in his ability to manage my condition.

Because I’m involved in fitness, I need to be in tip top shape or I have no credibility.  Sure, if my shape is less than perfectly fit, some women may like me better because I’m more approachable and “one of them”, but I would not and could not be regarded as an authority.  If what I preach isn’t what I practice, then what am I telling my clients?  People will assume, by looking at me, that I am the proof of my own pudding (as well I should be).  If I’m fat or out of shape, then I’m either not practicing what I’m preaching or what I’m preaching doesn’t work.  Either way, I lose.  If I don’t look million-dollar good, my credibility is gone.  So that, among other things, has been driving me to get fitter.  I refuse to offer my services until I feel I make my services look GOOD.

On other physical fronts, I’m getting older and really seem to be looking it this year.  I have additional pressure because my workshops are all about breaking out of negativity with a distinct law of attraction element.  If I don’t look like this stuff is working supremely for me, I’m not going to sell too many workshops.

So this year of outer work is not just about getting healthier, but also about taking care of the details and making sure I’m giving people a congruent idea of what I’m about, what I have to offer, and what it can do for them.

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I’m trying to learn Flash right in the middle of my crunch time for my Break Out workshop.  My timing is not impeccable, but you know what they always say, “There is no time like the present.”  It’s slow going because I don’t have a lot of time for it, but I’m confident I’ll learn it.  I promised myself an hour a day to learn it, but I haven’t been good about giving myself the hour.  I didn’t keep my “geek hour” promise.  So far I’ve made one graphic in Flash, but it wasn’t the kind that moved or anything.  I’ve pasted it below.

I know… not very exciting or beautiful, is it!?!  The only thing special about it is that it’s my first Flash image and it has rounded corners.  This might sound funny for someone who’s been making her own web sites since 1998, but I’ve never understood image software enough to make rounded corners without drawing it out by hand, using my drafting templates, and then scanning it in.  The topper is that this graphic is transparent.  I’ve never been able to do that before either.  How’d I do it?  Heh… wait for it…

I don’t know.

Yep, you read it right.  I have no idea.  The transparency was a nice surprise.  I’m looking at it as a special favor from Flash.  Like a nod from the universe if you will, as if the universe is saying, “Yes, my darling… Flash is the light and the way.  Learn it and we’ll all meet you on the other side.  In fact, you’ll then know how to add us back in and animate us!”  I know… started out cute and ended up creepy.  You ought to know by now that’s just the Cynthia way.  Heh, in fact the same could be said about me maybe… started out cute and ended up creepy bah haha!

And while I’m exposing my geeky underbelly instead of acting like I knew how to do this stuff all along (cuz really… you would never have known), I have to say that my geeky side is underserved in my love and social lives and I’m getting tired of it.

If I talk about a web problem I’m having to anyone I currently have in my social circle (or house) people’s eyes glaze over and they don’t know what I’m talking about.  They look at me like I’m a crazy old bag lady babbling nonsense.  I’m tired of being the geekiest person I know and the embarrassing part is that I’m geeky, but I’m not even *that* geeky, if you know what I mean.  That means there’s no one to have fellowship with, no one to brainstorm with, no one to help trouble shoot.  No one.  That just can’t happen anymore.

For once I’d like to have some people around me that know this stuff better than me.  I’d like to be blown away by their expertise.  I’d like to be jealous of their knowledge.  I’d like to aspire to their greater heights.

I’m so ronery!  But nobody else seems to rearize it.  Where’s that word play from, huh?  Huh?  I like my geeks with a good sense of humor ;).  Maybe the answer to that question and superior geek knowledge will be like the quests the princesses of yore would assign to prospective suitors… whoever slays the dragon or brings back the ring can marry bang the princess with the King’s blessing.

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Sometimes I need a good photo for my web site bio pages, avatars, etc. and so I start taking pictures of myself.  I won’t really let other people do it because I don’t usually like how they come out.  Not very many people put actual thought into taking a picture.  They just point and click because camera companies have taught us that it’s just that easy.  Sure, that’s how you take a picture, but that’s not how you take a good picture.  Given the choice between seeing a picture of themselves and a good picture of themselves, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t prefer a “good” picture.  Me, personally… I prefer good picture or no picture.  I don’t mess around.

Some people behind a camera “get” what they’re doing.  They are beholding the person framed in the lens.  They are capturing a certain something they like, love or admire about that person and it may not even be a physical quality.  My ex-husband used to take horrible pictures of me because all he cared about was whether my boobs or cleavage got in the shot.  The photos reflected his focus.  I was often caught in an unflattering expression, like tasting something horrible, but my boobs looked great.  When my mother-in-law would take photos of me, the pics came out nice most of the time because she thought I was a graceful and elegant person and that’s what she tried to capture when she took pics.  As a result, in most of her pics, I looked graceful and elegant. (I never knew that until she told me)

I know what I like about myself so I focus on that when I take self-photos, but as I get older I notice I have a harder time capturing what I see in the mirror.  If I think I’ll take a picture because my hair looks great, the picture doesn’t reflect that great thing about my hair that day and I catch myself wondering who that woman is because she doesn’t look familiar to me.  The stuff I see in the mirror is gone.  If I think about it too much I get insecure lol, so I try not to invest too much time in it, but instead try to get more interested in that stranger in my pictures.  I try to make friends with her and welcome her in the hope that she will one day look familiar and I will recognize her right away as someone I know, love, and respect.  She does have all the cool shit.

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Tim has been home all day, so it feels like it must be Saturday or Sunday.  Weird.

I’ve changed my mind on my hair again after seeing my sister Sandra’s luscious locks.  I can’t have a similar ‘do as she has because I don’t have enough hair.  Hers is certainly glorious.  She has a ton of hair.  I had some serious hair envy.  I kid you not.  I’ll try to get some pictures of hair when I go over there tomorrow and you’ll see what I mean.  Oh, and I thought dyeing my hair black might be exciting, but she makes black hair look boring.  You’ll see.  I’ll write the Sandra blog tomorrow or some time this weekend.

Mine has been growing out quickly from when I whacked it all off last July and I haven’t wanted to cut it because I hadn’t decided for sure what I wanted to do with it.  I kept saying I’d figure it out when it got a little longer.  Well, I haven’t figured it out and parts of it are down to my shoulder already.

I had bought a home perm a few months ago thinking I could perm myself since I didn’t have the dough for a salon perm from my favorite hair professional, Susan Kim.  I wish she had a web site I could link to.  Maybe when I go in to see her again, I’ll make her a web site.  So anyway, I didn’t give myself the home perm because I didn’t think I could roll it myself.  The box has been sitting here.

Since I’d given up on the perm idea for lack of rolling skillz, I was thinking I’d leave my hair in its relatively straight form and keep it henna’d.  But now after seeing my sister’s hair look so great, I want more of a style for mine, so the perm it is.  Lucky for me, my sister has the perm rolling skillz and she is going to do my hair tomorrow morning!  I know my hairdresser will be bummed I didn’t use her, but I don’t have the cash for $100+tip perm and my hairdresser doesn’t work for free, so cheat on her I must.

I’m still going to dye my hair auburn again and might even go to copper penny red.  It flatters my freckles.  I happen to be freckle-rich.

So anyway, tonight I’m going to pack a bag, so I can just grab it and go in the morning and it’ll have everything I need in it like the perm, the perm rods, the perm papers, the styling stuff I want to put in my hair after the perm, the jewelry I want to put back in and back on and an extra bag for the clothes my sis is going to give me.  Oh, and the huge torpedo dong.

She’s into sex toys and she said she had this thing that would make a great gag gift for me.  It’s a huge torpedo dong of impossible length and girth.  I figure I’ll use it as a dispaly piece.  Maybe I’ll take a pic of that too for the blog tomorrow :D

I finally got around my resistance to finishing my first workshop, but at the same time I did that I also made another decision to monetize my websites and blogs, so it turns out I got swamped with work all at once.  My goal, even if I have to stay up all night a couple of nights to do it, is to finish my workshop and have the read-only version ready for sale by download by Monday.  I can’t stay up late tonight to work on it because I have to get up fairly early tomorrow to get my hair done at my sister’s, but after that - it’s on, baby.  Then in the next week I’ll need to see if I can get an audio recording version added as well as a video version added.

Have a good night, everybody.

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Comments or no comments?  That is the question.  I’ve been doing a lot of research on the ‘net about it and the authorities seem divided.  Some say blogs and sites must be interactive if they are to be successful and others say that most people don’t read or leave comments so turning off comments won’t hurt your traffic at all.

When I read other blogs, I enjoy reading the comments, though I’m made aware every time that there are a lot of snipey people on the web that enjoy spreading their negativity.  I haven’t experienced this on my blog as much because I just started with these blogs and don’t have much traffic yet.

I’ve found also that people I know will post a comment if I post a blog someplace like MySpace, even if some are only commenting my blog because I comment theirs.  I’ve had some really terrific discussions in the comments of friends’ blogs.  However, most of those same people coming here to my blog will read and leave without commenting.

I wouldn’t care, personally, about comments on my blogs.  I could take them or leave them, but I have to wonder… Do comments on blogs sort of validate the blog entry?  I mean, do people think less of a blog where there are no comments?  That’s what I’m really curious about.

So speak up and let me know what you think about blog comments.  If people aren’t interested in them anyway, I’m happy to turn them off since it’s one less area in which to be spammed.

On an slightly unrelated note: The spam bots keep filling out my Contact Cynthia form with nonsense characters and links.  I’m thinking they are filling it out in the hope that there’s an auto-responder that will reply thus divulging the actual contact email address.  Lucky for me, I don’t use an auto-responder on the form - I answer all my mail “by hand”.  It sure would be nice to find some kind of plug-in that would protect my form from this kind of mail, though.  I must get 4-6 letters a day and I imagine that number will only increase as my blog grows more popular.  *sigh*

If I knew PHP, I’d design a comment form that had a hidden field on the html side, that didn’t show when a real person was filling out the comments, and then I could have php dump any mail that had the hidden form filled in (cuz that would mean the form was filled in by a bot).  Maybe some time this year I’ll have grown smart enough in PHP to do that.

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I’ve decided I’m going to stop dyeing my hair black.  I hadn’t tried that color yet and wanted to try it before I got so old that it would be too severe to wear.  It’s not as cool as I thought it might be and I don’t look dark and mysterious at all.

I’ve decided I’m going to dye it auburn again, but from here on out I’ll use henna.  I’ve read that it does really wonderful things like making your hair strands thicker and sealing them.  I’ve read reports from women saying they don’t have split ends anymore.  That’s enough for me, particularly since I’m growing my hair out again.  Normally I wear my hair long, but I cut it off on a whim last July.  I’ve since discovered that I like my hair long and pulled up better than I like it short.  One might think it’s the same thing, but it isn’t.  The look is different.  Long hair pulled up is softer, less harsh, than short hair.  Short hair is too blunt and I’m going through a baskeball-head phase right now.

My thyroid is waxing psychotic again (always when I’m under stress), so I put on 25 pounds.  Putting on 25 pounds gives me “basketball-head”.  This was my motivation for getting back into the bodybuilding lifestyle.  I want my old egg-head back.

It’s been so hot lately that my brain is all melty and it’s hard for me to think deep thoughts.  Not impossible, mind you, because I’m a deep sort of girl… but hard.  I can’t help wondering why we women even bother with under arm deodorant/antiperspirant when “under boob” gets way sweatier than arm pit.  I don’t put deodorant or antiperspirant under there because… well, because it just seems wrong.  I’m way more used to poisoning my pits than my under boob.

See?  Melty brain makes fluff posts about under boobs and hair color and all sorts of goofy things.  Oh, well.  Gotta talk about the fluff some time.  All depth and no fluff makes Cynthia way too serious.  I get bagged on enough as it is.  Okay, back to the fluff.

I keep trying to talk myself out of a nasal piercing.  I mean, really… am I NUTS?  But I really want one and have for years.  I don’t even know why I want one beyond liking the way they look.  I like the whole kind of earth-mama-Ubangi-native sort look.  On some level, I strive to become a woman of all cultures despite my Celtic white appearance.  I like a little of this and a little of that - just a little something to attempt to express that inexpressable something.  I know… sometimes I can be so articulate ;).

If I’d have had the cash and the jewelry on hand, I’d have gone down today and got my nose pierced.  Just like that.  I’ve been trying to wait to see if this program I bought for improving the eyesight makes it so I can throw my glasses away.  I told myself I’d wait until I could throw my glases away and then go have it done.  My son thinks I shouldn’t wait.  Maybe he’s right.  Maybe I shouldn’t wait that long.  And what if the day of throwing my glasses away never comes?  Carpe diem and all that.

I’ve been studying Flash.  I haven’t got to the point in the book where I’ve had to make anything yet, but so far it’s not looking as intimidating as it did to me before.

Things have been rough for me, emotionally, lately.  I need to refocus on the positives and on gratitude and get my head right again.  I had a great meditation session outside on my porch late, late, late last night.

Be well, everybody, and keep that under boob cool.

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Margot At The Wedding isn’t as funny as they make it out to be.  The characters are snipey, gossipy, bitter, emotionally stunted and/or immature and the relationships are full of bad behavior that’s always forgiven.  Some comments are darkly funny, but mostly the movie is just weird.  Think of this movie as going to meet the family of a new person you’re dating where they’re all talking about people you don’t know and things common to them that make no sense to you.  They spend time talking about, bitching about, and having memories about characters that aren’t in the movie.  In fact, we never see them.  Just when “Mom” and “Becky” arrive, the movie follows the weirder sister (Kidman) who is avoiding them, so we never do see Mom and Becky.  Relationships mend at the end, but it’s still not a feel-good ending.  You might wonder how that’s possible.  I’m still wondering myself.  All these loose ends are swirling around that have been swirling throughout the whole movie, but by the time it ended I found I didn’t care enough to even bitch about the crappy ending.

Also, the skin and the masturbating seem totally injected into this movie for no reason.  We see a covered Nicole Kidman laying on her stomach and masturbating in a frustrated sort of way.  Why?  It added nothing to the story, didn’t explain anything, and didn’t flesh out the character.  It added nothing.  Isn’t that sad?  And Jack Black gives us a 2/3’s view of his entire naked backside.  Why?  That wasn’t clear either and once again, it was skin that added nothing to the movie and didn’t add anything to the character development.  It was like Jack Black said, “Oh, and if I’m going to do a serious movie I want an ass shot like a real leading man!” and they replied, “Okay, we’ll fit it in somewhere.”  Seconds later, in the same scene, we see some cleavage from Jennifer Jason Leigh exposed by an open pajama top.  I got the impression it was to imply intimacy between these two, but it fell short and struck only as “the scene where Jennifer shows cleavage and Jack gets his ass shot in”.  Ho hum.  I have to admit it took a few seconds for the ass shot to fully register.  I caught myself thinking, “What the hell is that?” and then a second later, “Holy cow, that’s Jack Black’s naked back side!”  Ho hum.

So, the bottom line is this movie, and these characters, never really hit the mark at all.  Was this movie a total waste of 91 minutes?  Pretty much.  Was there any part that redeemed it?  Uh… nope!

Note on Nicole:

Nicole Kidman has always been an idol of mine.  She walks funny, but I think she’s a beautiful woman.  Oh, and she’s a classy dame, which I’ve always aimed for myself.  I want to love her in all her movies.  I really do.  But she hasn’t been in anything good in years.  Most of her movies are just too weird to enjoy and Margot At the Wedding is no exception.  Ms. Kidman was awesome in Practical Magic.  She was in Cold Mountain and the acting in that movie was great.  However, it wasn’t *her* acting that elevated Cold Mountain - it was Renee Zellweger’s.  She did an awesome job in “The Human Stain”.

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Man, I’ve been so busy!  I’ve been writing for this and that, doing a ton of work on various of my web sites and blogs.  I’ve done so much web work I’m starting to dream in FTP (File Transfer Protocol).  I have kind of a geeky, funny analogy I use to explain as aspect of law of attraction using FTP as an example that helps people envision the contact between “source” (which is all that is) and the “host” (which is us).  Maybe some day you’ll hear it in one of my workshops.

I now run a total of 4 blogs.  These are my blogs:

1. I have this blog, at which you’re reading now.  http://cynthiaclinton.com/blog
2. http://wholyone.com/blog - which is the offical weblog of my Wholy One Wellness Center.
3. http://femmepreneur.info which is me reviving a “enlightened women in business” site I had years ago, but this time in blog form.
4. http://bestofthesouthbay.info is my blog on California’s South Bay Area where I feature local businesses, articles about local goings on, and general local things.

All will serve their purpose, which is mostly marketing for my different businesses, charities, and interests.  It’s a lot of writing, but I do a lot of writing anyway.

Another big preoccupation is my health and fitness.  I’ve been struggling with an extra 25 pounds because I’ve been under stress and when that happens, my thyroid gets unstable.  When this happens, I put on weight (which is normally very difficult for me to do) and then I have a difficult time getting it off.  There are factors that concern me:

• I’m 45 and want the rest of my life (every last minute) to be as enjoyable as possible, which means I proactively do whatever it takes now to avoid health problems later.
• Both my father and my mother have been diagnosed with vascular issues.  My father has had every kind of bypass surgery there is.  Cancer is on both sides of the family as well.  I need to stay lean and active, cleanse often, eat as cleanly as possible, and control my stress level.
• I want to be a good example for my eventual clients at the wellness center I’m trying to build.  I’m a fitness professional and nobody believes a fat fitness trainer.  Really I’m not fat enough that very many people believe I’m actually fat, but my physical condition has sucked the last few years.  It can’t ever suck again.

So those are my main concerns.  In my struggle for fitness with a wonky thyroid (sometimes working, sometimes not), I’ve tried just about everything.  I’ve dieted, I’ve tried different kinds of exercise.  I’ve tried cardio.  I’ve tried what I saw with my own eyes worked for other people in my house.  It didn’t work for me.  I grew more and more depressed.  But then, I had a mini epiphany… the only fitness style my body has ever readily responded to was weight lifting.

I was a bodybuilder for over 10 years, from about my mid-twenties to my mid-thirties.  I originally got into it for personal reasons surrounding physical abuse against my person.  I was your typical 99-pound weakling story.  No matter what I tried, I couldn’t put on any weight without being pregnant.  Even after I had a baby, my body quickly boomeranged back to 99 pounds.  I was tiny and skinny and people took advantage of my person.  Finally, I’d been reading bodybuilding magazines for quite awhile, but didn’t really think any of it could possibly apply to me, when I had the notion that I should take up bodybuilding.

When I walked into the gym the first time and told the owner what I wanted to do, he ignored me and said, “You’re here to tone, right?”  So I told him again and this time I got specific, naming muscles I wanted to develop more.  Once he realized I knew all the names of the muscles, etc., then he started taking me more seriously.  He still thought it was funny, but he took me seriously and he helped me enormously.  I got very immersed in the bodybuilding lifestyle: the workouts, the way of eating, etc. and my body did change.  I got so muscular that my body weight was 127 pounds for the first time in my life (I weighed only 119 when I gave birth to my son).

The ‘89 earthquake happened and my gym fell - or rather parts of another building fell on my gym for the same result.  There weren’t any other hardcore gyms around and I didn’t feel like finding a new “home” somewhere else.  I had to work out at home now, so I bought the weights and got busy.  I got bored and decided I’d do some martial arts to satisfy my Emma Peel jones.  She was my hero growing up.  So I bounced for a few years from this dojo to that dojo.  I resented the belt system, feeling that as a woman my rank should be private.  So as soon as they told me it was time to test for my belt, I was out of there.

In this process, I fell in love with the calisthenics that began each martial arts class.  My body lost some of it’s bulk, but my muscles looked very cut and very awesome.  I felt like a well oiled machine.  However, I stopped doing martial arts because the cost became prohibitive.  After awhile, my muscles shrunk down and my weight hovered around 103.  I was still lifting weights at home, but just a maintenance program to stay over 100 pounds.

Then I met my second husband and weight lifting just didn’t seem to fit in my life anymore, so I stopped doing it.  Apparently, he stopped running as well.  So I’ve spent the last 12 years or so in varying states of fitness, but none of them as fit as I was before I met my husband and none of them had any lasting duration (and neither did the marriage).

My latest mini-epiphany was that if weight lifting helped me before when I had the opposite problem I have right now, odds are my body would respond in the same way now that I needed physical change once again.  So a few weeks ago, I started lifting weights again, but gradually.  First I was just training arms, then training arms and abs, and now I’m gearing up to add legs and back.  The exciting thing was that I started seeing body changes even when I was just training my arms.  The changes really started increase when I added in abs.

I notice I carry myself differently.  I even bend over differently.  I don’t really look a whole lot different to myself when I stand in front of the mirror, but when I look down, my arms are more shapely, my stomach is flatter, I look narrower in my chair.

People used to think I really loved working out.  It’s not that.  It’s that I easily get addicted to what weight lifting does for me.  I love the strength - how it feels, how it looks, how it changes me - and I want to keep doing the activity which does that for me.  The gifts from weight lifting are innumerable.

I’m happy to be back in the bodybuilding lifestyle, in those old familiar feelings - and I know too that this is where I need to be for the rest of my life.  Maintaining fitness is much easier and less time consuming than rebuilding fitness.  I’m glad I’ve had this experience because I think it will make me a better trainer than if I’d just been fit all my life.

Other healthy changes are that a few months ago I stopped using shampoo.  About once a week I use regular liquid castille soap on my hair and scalp and the rest of the week (about every other day) I just ”wash” with a good conditioner.  The results have been amazing.  Not only does my hair look better than it ever has (thicker, fuller, more manageable - no more fly-away hair), but my hair is growing like crazy.  Like CRAZY.  It’s growing so fast that I have very visible roots in just a couple of weeks.  It’s been hard to keep up.

Who knew?  I was doing some research on the internet about something else and happened to stumble on information about hair and how some of the problems people associate with normal hair were actually the by-products of the harsh chemicals in shampoo.  This is apparently by design so that we are always looking for the magic bullet in shampoos and conditioners that seems to make our hair look like we want it to.

My next hair adventure will be forsaking dyes (and their nasty PPD chemicals) and moving over to the henna camp.  Henna does wonderful things for the hair like increasing thickness and sealing the hair shaft.  I figure I’ll go back to the Auburn color I’ve worn most of my adult life, which just happens to be the more natural shade of henna, so I won’t have to deal with too many henna additives.  I just have to research how long I need to wait since my last coloring to henna my hair.

I just ordered stuff for a bentonite clay and psyllium bowel cleanse, so I’ll be doing that as soon as it gets here - probably within the week.  They say “death begins in the colon”, so I’m going to be proactive and do do a bowel cleanse 2x a year from here on out.  This will be my first.  I’ve done some minor detoxing that involved the bowel, but never have I done a full on bowel cleanse.  This’ll be interesting.  I’ve heard some stories!

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