When I grow up
I want to be Elf.
|
.: posted by Vera 
|
|
If you want a new experience
Try masturbating with your non-dominant hand.
|
.: posted by Vera
|
|
Song of the week
Iris - Wait Move On
I have been listening to the Awakening album by Iris for a few days straight. I love it I love it I love it. It stirs feelings up inside me that I haven't felt in a long time. I can only describe them as the feelings of being "in love."
|
.: posted by Vera
|
|
The moment I started trying too hard
The boy I most recently broke my heart on said to me that I was trying too hard. He was right.
I have not been enjoying myself very much since we broke up. Today I asked myself "When did boys stop being fun?" And I knew the answer right away: It was in 7th grade after I had written a letter to Daniel.
Up to that point all my crushes had been nothing but exciting. They had all been alive only from a distance and were never consummated physically. In 6th grade I had written long love letters to Markus. They were gushing and honest. Markus liked them. Angela had a crush on him too. He said to me "I like your letters better, but I like Angela better." And I didn't even really mind. As long as I could keep expressing my truth in letters, which I did.
In 7th grade I had a crush on Daniel. I had never talked to him. But somehow he had found out that I had a crush on him, and he now wanted me to write him a letter. I was super excited at the opportunity to express myself to him. But I put a lot of pressure on myself. I wanted to write him the best letter ever. So instead of being honest and expressing how I feel and who I am, I tried to sound super cool in the letter. I used exaggerated, boisterous and offensive language and even put down one of his friends. I wanted him to think I was cool. I tried way too hard.
And it totally back-fired. I got the letter back with comments from people in Daniel's class scribbled onto it. I remember the most painful one, from Arndt, which said "How cool you are." He was being sarcastic.
And that's when boys stopped being fun. And it's because I had started trying too hard. And it took me only 19 years to figure that out!
|
.: posted by Vera
|
|
The day before my birthday
I meant to post this the day before my birthday but somehow I forgot.
This is the story about the day before my birthday in 1989. For those of you who are good at math, that was the day before my 13th birthday. I was in 7th grade. It was May. The days were long. I was spending most of my free time skateboarding with all the neighborhood kids. My friend Mone and I were the only girls skating. I was very proud to be such a rare bird. It made me feel special and different.
That day we had been skating as well, and now we were hanging out on some grass. It must have been about 8 or 9pm. The sun was just about to start setting. I'm pretty sure that the people present were me, Mone, Tobi, Kai and Matthias. Ingo might have been there too but I don't remember him specifically. Somebody decided it was a good idea to pluck some grass from the ground and stuff it into somebody else's pants. Then somebody decided to do the same thing with somebody's shirt. Then the boys got really excited about stuffing some plucked grass up a girl's shirt. Soon two of the boys were pinning me down while another boy lifted my shirt to put some grass up it. "I saw them! I saw them," he announced afterwards. I giggled.
That night I went home happy and excited. Wrestling with boys was as close to sex as my prepubescent self was getting, and I had enjoyed the grass action immensely.
|
.: posted by Vera
|
|
Snippet from a conversation with my friend Julia
J: Sometimes I wonder if it's possible to fall in love with me.
Me: I'm in love with you. So it's definitely possible.
J: I'm in love with you too. Have been for years. Decades.
Note: The actual original conversation took place in German.
|
.: posted by Vera
|
|
The environment called me
And I finally listened. Yesterday was my first day driving a Green Cab. Read about it here.
|
.: posted by Vera
|
|
Spring cleaning
I wrote a letter to my old friend Mone yesterday. I love her dearly and always have. We lived on the same street growing up and had known each other since we were 3 or so. I wrote it in German, but here is the English version:
I would like to share something with you that I have been wanting to get off my chest for a while. I had wanted to bring it up when I was visiting recently but U was with us, and that made it inappropriate. So here it is:
I have regretted for a long time that our friendship fell apart many years ago. You might see the timing and the events differently but the way I see it, it fell apart in the fall of 1989 when I was in 8th grade and you were in 7th grade*. At that time there was this group that met regularly in the afternoons after school. TU was there and KV and M and B, S probably too, NR, etc. Somehow it came out that T or K (or both) didn't like you at the time. I don't know if you knew that but I definitely knew it. And that's when I recognized my ugly chance and took it. I said to myself "I am more popular than Mone! Somebody doesn't like Mone, but likes me!" That feeling was totally new to me. Up to then it had always been the other way around. There had been several people who rejected me but who liked you (for instance BS, MS, SR). That had always hurt me a lot. I was jealous that everybody seemed to like you, but not me. I could totally see why everybody liked you (I liked you a lot too!) but it was hard for me that I wasn't always that popular.
And when I was now noticing that there was a group of people in which I was more popular than you (at least at that point in time or among individual people), I liked the feel of that. That's why I didn't do anything to defend you or to include you in the group. I remember very clearly one time where it seemed that you felt very uncomfortable in the group, and I didn't do anything about it, and instead I got pleasure out of it. And shortly thereafter you stopped coming, and ever since then you and I have never hung out on a regular basis again. That's how far my jealousy and my insecurity had driven me.
From my point of view, what happened is still keeping us apart. I would say that I covertly betrayed you back then, and I think that that is one of the reasons why we were never able to be close again. There may be other reasons on your side why our relationship was never the same again. But I take full responsibility for my jealousy and the damage it did to our friendship.
Why am I telling you all of this now? Firstly, because these days it is really important to me to be honest and to not hold anything in. Secondly, because I'm in the process of "cleaning up" a lot of relationships, old and new. It is very liberating to talk to people about unsaid, even if often uncomfortable, things. And thirdly, because I believe in reincarnation. I am certain that you and I have known each other in many past lives and that we will continue to meet again in future lives. And the clearer and more positive we make our relationship in this life, the clearer and more positive our future encounters will be. If I were to just leave this ugly thing here, karma may get us over and over again with betrayal and jealousy. I would prefer honesty and sincerity, and that's why I am starting with that now.
I hope my coming clean doesn't shock you too much. I just had to confess to you that I feel that I was being an asshole back then. I was being an asshole because I kept feeling that you were a lot cooler than me, and just once I wanted to be cooler than you. And ironically that's how I lost a really cool friend and a really cool friendship, and I am still sad about that even now, over 15 years later.** I wanted you to know that.
It felt really good writing it but I also had my insecurities about it. Was I crazy to bring something up from so long ago? Was it going to alienate us further rather than bring us closer? Was it too much information? Was I silly to share something so personal with someone I don't talk to much anymore?
But later on the day I wrote it, two things happened that really validated for me that I did the right thing. The first one was in the afternoon. I was in line for the bathroom at Ritual, and one of the girls who work there was standing next to me. I had small-talked with her a couple of times but didn't even know her name. I turned to her and said "So I just wrote a letter to my oldest friend and apologized for something I did in 1989." She said wow. Then she told me that she had had a lot of similar conversations but not recently because she had done all of her cleaning up a while ago. Now she just cleaned up after herself as she went through life. It felt good to know that she didn't think it was crazy to clean up the past.
That night I was in my Landmark seminar, and the seminar leader said something very profound. He said something along the lines of
As long as there are still brothers or sisters who can't talk to each other, or a mother and a child who can't talk to each other, we will always have wars.
So it occurred to me that by writing letters like the one I just did, I am contributing to world peace.
*We were actually the same age but she had repeated the 6th grade.
**That's when I started crying.
|
.: posted by Vera
|
|
Sometimes my days are like this
The alarm goes off at 6am. I take a shower, get dressed, read emails, eat cereal. I arrive at the taxi lot around 7:30. I am not scheduled but hope to get a car to drive. I sit and wait and read in my book or talk to loved ones in Germany on the phone. Around 9am they tell me that there is no taxi for me to drive and send me home.
I step out into the sunshine and have the whole day to do whatever I want.
For a moment I consider being annoyed that I "wasted" time getting up so early for "nothing" but then decide not to because this is a small price to pay for the ability to go with the flow.
|
.: posted by Vera
|
|
Birthday ham
I love being the center of attention, especially on my birthday. My starved-for-attention little self got what it wanted this weekend!
Friday night Jason hosted a little dinner and hot tub party for me and seven guests. It was No Pants Day, and Jason declared that his house was a safe zone for observing this special holiday. So I did. I love lounging around in my boy shorts. I would wear them everyday and always if I knew that it was safe to do so. After dinner, several of us took off even our underwear and soaked in Jason's and Jiwon's recently finished and amazing hot tub. Also, thanks to Amy and Jay, there was cake! I love cake with my name on it.
I ended up spending the night at Jason's and Jiwon's, which wasn't planned. But I was so tired and so comfortable at their beautiful place in the Berkeley hills with the beautiful view of the city that I couldn't resist their offer. I woke up on my birthday morning feeling happy, safe and loved.
Saturday night (on my actual birthday) I celebrated with another large group of friends at Cafe Gratitude. Together, we consumed about ten pieces of raw dessert after dinner. We were a very eclectic group of people. There were some former co-workers from Macromedia, some knitting, painting, dancing, hooping and yoga buddies, some people I had camped with at Burning Man 2004 and Burning Man 2006, a former roommate, and one of my oldest American friends (since 1996). Most of them had never met. I used to judge myself for not fitting into one clearly defined social circle (and sometimes I still do), but I have come to realize that my community is made up of the people who mean the most to me, and they all happen to be very different because I myself consist of many different parts. We went around the table, and everybody introduced themselves and shared how and since when they know me. With every passing moment I got more and more hyper because oh! This is all about me! I love when things are about me.
After dessert, Marilyn and I went to the grand opening of Missing Piece. I bought myself a turquoise birthday present. Everybody who bought a certain dollar amount of stuff got to have a photoshoot with one of the Missing Piece photographers. So I did a photoshoot with Loren and my new turquoise dress, and that was a nice birthday treat in and of itself.
On Sunday I took myself and my new turquoise birthday dress to the How Weird Street Faire, where I hooped and danced, saw the super cuties Loveschock and Clovurr again, whom I had fallen in love with a few weeks ago, and bought myself some more birthday presents. I got an awesome funky-tribal hip belt (coming soon to a Flickr page near you) and a wedding ring. Why a wedding ring? Because Marilyn and I went to ritual at Grace Cathedral recently where we married ourselves. (Note that that doesn't mean that we married each other; we married ourselves, i.e. Marilyn married her self, and I married my self.) So now I got myself a wedding ring.
At How Weird I also got another fantastic birthday present in the form of a compliment. I ran into this guy Dennis I know because he owns this cafe I often stop in for a bagel during my cab shift. He asked me how I was doing, and I told him that I was great, and that the day before had been my birthday. I told him that I turned thirty-one-derful. He said "Thirty-one? You're thirty-one?" He couldn't believe it. I asked him "Why, how old are you?" He said 24. He told me that he hopes to be as hot as I am when he is 31 and that I inspire him. I am hot and inspiring! Sweet!
So that's the story of how I turned thirty-one-derful.
|
.: posted by Vera
|
|
Thirty-one-derful
It's my birthday! I am thirty-one-derful! It's going to be a wonderful year!
|
.: posted by Vera
|
|
All kinds of good news
Finally, some real validation: I was at a yoga and creativity retreat near Santa Cruz over the weekend. I offered free half-hour psychic readings at the retreat. There was an overwhelming response to the offer. I did seven readings and had to turn away at least four additional people for lack of time. Several of the people who received readings mentioned them in our closing circle on Sunday afternoon. One guy even showed us his artwork that contained all the imagery from our reading. It made me very happy to get so much interest and positive response.
Green Cab update: Towards the end of my taxi shift yesterday, I saw a Green Cab parked in the Richmond in front of a Toyota dealership. I wanted to stop and talk to the driver, but then a fare flagged me down and I took her. But later that afternoon I had my first conversation with Green Cab. It turns out that the Green Cab driver had been shopping for another Prius to be turned into a Green Cab at the Toyota dealership earlier! I think the conversation went well, and I have a feeling I am going to start driving for Green Cab soon.
IRS letter update: When I got back from Germany in March, I received a very scary letter from the IRS. It suggested that I owe $12,000 in taxes and penalties for 2005. Twelve THOUSAND dollars! One sleepless night later I looked at the letter and at my 2005 tax forms and decided that there was an explanation and that I didn't actually owe anything. I sent that explanation and some additional documentation to the IRS and hoped for the best. And yesterday I got the best letter you could ever get from the IRS. Here is a quote from it:
Thank you for providing us with additional information about the issue we recently wrote to you about. We are pleased to tell you that, with your help, we were able to clear up the differences between your records and your payers' records.
Case closed!
|
.: posted by Vera
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
