Big Mouth

I spend most of my time acting like I'm the smartest person in the room.

It isn't hard.

Most of the people I hang around with don't provide a whole lot of competition when it comes to high levels of intelligence.

The truth is that I'm not all that smart.
I just have a lot of opinions and a really big mouth.

There are times when I wish I knew the true value of knowing when to just shut up.
Knowing that I have the knack for saying too much too often, I decided that I should make it one of the things that I work on during the course of the whole re-invention of Heather.

Insert subliminal mother dialogue:
"Just because you're thinking it Heather doesn't mean you should say it out loud."

Yes mom, I know. Lips closed. Tongue bitten. Point taken.

I try not to come off as one of those busy-body-know-it-all types. I don't always offer my opinion. Sometimes I do wait for people to ask for it before I go off on a long winded diatribe about my own life experience or my own theories or my own personal views.
Sometimes.
Not very often.

What I have come to realize, however, is that my own life experience isn't necessarily going to help someone else. What I've come to understand is that my own theories are only relevant to me because I have gone about the tedious process of testing them to see if they hold water or sink like a stone. What I've come to appreciate is that my own personal views are not the same as those of other people, nor would I want them to be.

Essentially, what I've learned is that it's generally a good idea for me to just keep my mouth shut.

Sometimes knowing what you should do - and actually being able to do it - are two totally different things.

For instance:
I know that smoking is bad for me, yet I still smoke more than a pack of cigarettes a day.
I know that I should get more exercise, yet I still insist on sitting at my computer.
I know that I should eat healthy, yet it's impossible to resist peanut M&M's, I don't care who you are.

Knowing that I should learn when to keep my mouth shut doesn't mean that I'll actually do it.

It just gives me something else to work on.

Dusting Off

There's a problem that comes along with re-inventing yourself into the person you want to be.

How do you know which parts of the old you to leave behind, and which parts to carry forward?

I pondered that very question as I lay in bed last night.
If I were going to be successful at my re-invention, then I couldn't go back to doing the same things the same way I had always done them before. I would have to make a lot of changes, some small, some not so small, in order to reach the point that I wanted to be.

I thought of it as packing up to move across the country. As you stand in the middle of your living room, surrounded by a lifetime worth of crap that you've managed to collect, which things do you choose to take with you?

At first glance my life appeared to be nothing more than a giant pile of crap. On any given day I would tell you that I was literally disgusted with every aspect of my life. What I slowly started to realize was that not everything was horrible, but somehow the good stuff had managed to get tarnished with the crap stuff that had slowly taken over.

If I were going to go about the process of deciding what to take with me, and what to leave behind, then I would have to make sure to give everything a thorough cleaning first just to make sure that I wasn't accidentally throwing out something good.

The voice of my mother infiltrated my thoughts:

"What if we painted it and glued it back together?"

"Why would I want to do that mother? I can get a new one for $19.99."

"But we can fix this up and make it work."

"But by the time I buy the paint and the glue and then sweat over it for hours it will still be the same old piece of crap with a fresh coat of paint, and I'll have spent $23.50."

It was the mock argument with my mother that left me to fall asleep with a smile on my face. As I continue the process of re-invention, I will take the parts of me that make me the person I am, the best parts of me, and leave behind the rest.

Nothing to paint or glue.
Nothing to fix.
Just plenty of dusting off to do.

Effortlessly Happy

I decided that I would put myself through a bit of an experiment.

Nothing crazy, I'm not into shock therapy or anything, but I was interested in testing some general theories.

I had gotten to a point where I was waking up every morning, dragging myself out of bed, forcing myself to take a shower and then bribing myself to get in the car to go to work. My life, as I saw it, was nothing more than the drudgery of day-to-day. There was no excitement, there was no spark, there was nothing that made my eyes widen with wonderment or glee.

Then, one ordinary evening as I sat at my desk lamenting about the electric bill being due while I simultaneously tried to come up with something semi-original for dinner, I glanced over at my nephew who was busily engaged in excavating a 12 car pile up in the middle of the family room floor.

"Don't worry," he said in a deepened voice, "I'll save you!"

He worked frantically to sort the heap of cars in the middle of the floor and lined them up neatly in a row, only to reenact the mock crash scene all over again.

"Now that kid," I thought to myself, "has one serious imagination."

My four year old nephew didn't have a single thing in his life that even came close to resembling drudgery. Every moment, every action, every event was something new and exciting. It was his simple outlook on life that allowed his imagination to run wild, one minute creating mock crash scenes in the family room, the next minute saving whales from the depths of the bathtub. His mind ran free with every possibility he could dream up.

Most of all, as I watched him playing in the middle of the floor, I realized that he was happy.

Effortlessly happy.

That's when my new theory was born.

If we have X amount of energy per day, and we spend Y amount being negative and miserable then we are left with Z amount to be imaginative.

So then I wondered....

If we have X amount of energy per day, and we spend Y amount being positive and optimistic then what would the difference be for the Z amount?

Now in my original theory - the equation looked exactly the same: X-Y=Z

But after putting the theory into actual practice, what I've discovered is that the equation changes completely.

By changing my outlook from being negative and miserable to being positive and optimistic I don't subtract away from my allotted amount of energy in a day - I increase it - which makes my new equation look like this: X+Y=Z

I won't go so far as to say that it's been easy. My old habits still push me in the direction of being negative and cynical about the simplest of things, but I'm hopeful that with a little practice I'll be able to find that it's just as easy to be positive.

It's all just a part of my process to re-invent myself into a person who is happy.

Effortlessly happy.

Words of Wisdom

There are moments when one of my children will say something to utterly and completely brilliant that I find myself basking in the sunlight of pride.

It was my teenage son that stood next to me this evening and informed me that he had posted a blog, his first ever, on his myspace page. Initially I would have to say that I was shocked.

My son?
Choosing to express his views and opinions by way of the written word?
Who was this child that stood before me and what had the girl done to him?

He muttered on a bit longer about his post until finally I could contain myself no longer. I whirled around in my chair and quickly pulled up my own myspace account and clicked the link to his page. There it was, clear as day, a blog post written by my oldest child.

I'd put a direct link to the post here, but considering the fact that his page is listed as private, I figured I would just copy and paste the post so that you all could experience the same words of wisdom that I did:

GUYS oh were dumb..............

So over time I have learned that anytime a person of the male persuasion decides to talk to someone of the female persuasion 99.9% of the time the guy is gonna be WRONG about something in that conversation it doesn't matter if we think we are right we never are so STOP trying to win........its real easy to just tell that person of the female persuasion that she is right then arguing about it just to ultimately get proven wrong anyway LOL. To all the guys that read this I hate to tell ya but most girls are just down right smarter because they use there brains and we simply don't most of the time, not are faults just how we are and just how it will be. Oh and girl logic don't try and think you know what a person of the female persuasion is thinking because guys don't! Our logic is different therefore don't try to use it to figure what a girl is thinking because it is WRONG!!!!! lol oh I could probably go on for all I know I prolly left some out but ill get to fixing it up some time lol

Okay, so maybe he needs a few lessons in grammar, and perhaps someone should teach him the importance of line breaks, but the meaning is still very much there.

I read his post the first time, and after recovering from the run-on sentence headache that it induced, I reread it for a second time.

That's my boy.

Some men spend their entire lives trying to figure out the very things that my son has managed to figure out in only 18 years. What a bright kid.

Right now, I'm the proudest mother in the entire world.

Lessons in Time

Back in elementary school they passed out these little paper disks with numbers all the way around them 1 - 12.

The teacher would then instruct that you punch out two hands, one short and one long, and fasten them to the center of the disk.

"Now class," she would announce, "we're going to learn how to tell time."

That was the easy part.

As you grow beyond your elementary school years you find ways to cut corners when it comes to telling the time. You buy yourself a handy digital clock, and make sure it's one of those fancy kind that syncs itself with the master universal clock so you always have it set to the correct time. You set alarms on your PDA or your cell phone so that not only do you always know what time it is, but you always know when you're supposed to do something important.

We manipulate time twice every year with daylight savings time, and trick ourselves into waking up early by setting the alarm clock by our nightstands 30 minutes fast (unless you have one of those universal sync clocks...and then you're just screwed.)

We are masters of telling time, so why the hell is it so hard to learn how to MANAGE it?

I spent the entire weekend looking at the clock on my computer only to find that entire hours had disappeared. "Where is the time going?" I wrote in my high grade artificial black leather bound journal. I had no clue, only that one moment it was still morning, then in a flash it was time to make dinner, an instant past that it was time to go to bed.

When we lose track of time, we often lose track of the things we had intended to get done.

"Ahh crap, I ran out of time," becomes our patent excuse for all of the things we didn't get finished.

The real truth is that we didn't actually run out of time, we just didn't use the time we had properly. So then how do we learn to make better use of the 24 hours in each day that we are given?

Well, if you're particularly anal then you would follow the teachings of Franklin Covey and buy yourself some over-priced planner that forces you to write down your comings and goings in 15 minute intervals.

If you're not quite to that level of rectal retention then you'll get yourself some fancy personal organizer that allows you to track your most important appointments or meetings with a tiny plastic pencil and then sync it up with the software on your computer so it will send you emails to remind you of the reminder that you'll be receiving when the alarm on your PDA goes off.

If you're one of those people who insists that they have their entire schedule "in their head" then you'll find yourself constantly running late to every place you're expected to be, and going to bed completely exhausted because you spent the day running your ass in circles only to remember the 5 things you wanted to get done but didn't. At which point you'll say "Ahh crap, I ran out of time," right before you drift off into a restless sleep.

Ahh time.
That pesky reminder of all the things we didn't do.
That troublesome foe that gauges how old we are from one passing year to the next.
That unstoppable force that marches forward at regular 60 second intervals for every minute in 60 minute intervals for every hour for every 24 hours of each day for each 365 days of each year of our lives.

As much as we may try to manipulate it and manage it and organize it; it will forever be the one thing which we have no real control.

I could go on and on....
But it seems that for tonight, I've simply run out of time.

First Dates

He stood in the hallway nervously trying to decide what to wear.

"How about this shirt?"

He held up the same t-shirt that he wore every Wednesday to school.

"I think it's fine honey," I answered.

"How much money do you think I'll need?"

He was trying hard not to smile, not wanting to appear to excited about preparing for his first official date with the girl he'd been smitten with for the last six months, but he was doing a really poor job of it. His hand quickly came to his face to cover the broad grin and he desperately tried to fake a yawn.

"Go with $50, that should give you plenty of money in case you decide to stop to get something to eat."

"This could get expensive," he mumbled, "but it's worth it."

My heart grew large in my chest as I watched the young man in front of me. Only yesterday he had been a little boy playing with action figures in the bay window, now he was playing his first round at being Casanova. It was one of those moments that makes a mother proud, and sad, all at the same time.

"Just have a good time," I reached out and touched his cheek. No longer was it smooth and sleek as it had been when he was a child, instead it was the artificial smoothness of a man who had just finished shaving.

He smiled back at me, his large brown eyes full of hope and excitement, and I realized that the good man I had hoped to raise was now standing right in front of me.

She's a very lucky girl to have him.

In the beginning...

Life is defined by the limitless number of possibilities we have to start over. This is my attempt at doing just that.

For a great number of years my life was defined by the decisions that I had already made.
Now, almost 18 years later, I've reached a point where I want my life to be defined by the decisions I'm going to be making.

As we reach those milestones where we need to take a look at ourselves and redefine who we are, its necessary to start fresh and new.

Welcome to the beginning of what will eventually become a brand new me.