I’m looking out the window of Cellar Door, a local coffee house in Southeast. The latte was exceptional and went down way too quickly. If you’re in the vicinity of SE 11th and Harrison I recommend you drop in and try the espresso, maybe even buy a bag of beans for the road. While you caffeinate, sit in the window and watch people pause before entering the A-1 Food Market across the street. For some reason they all reemerge with nothing in their hands.

Thanksgiving. That’s today. We’re excited about it. That’s the royal “we”, man. A lot of people aren’t, though. There’s a certain dread a lot of folks feel around the holidays. I know because I talk to a lot of people and most of them have horror stories ready for the sharing. On the surface, folks spin yarns to entertain, but it’s all deeply rooted in emotions and personal truths. We laugh, wave a hand and utter cheerful exclamations. Then we sigh and think while we sip our beverage, waiting for someone else to tell a chuckler. And we’ve all got ‘em. But that’s not the important part of this paragraph. The important part is the thinking.

In between the stories and the laughs I’ll think about that letter; about the journey to which that letter vaguely refers, and to the ending that it signifies. And I will be thankful for it, among many, many other things.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

What sound does an elephant make? I mean, what do you CALL it?

Trumpet. Oh. Who picks these anyway?

And who thought it would be a good idea to have a mouse coerce a baby elephant to funnel beer through his nose and blow bubbles? And put it in a kid’s movie, no less.

First keg stand on record. Only it was a bucket. And the subject was on his feet.

It’s a wonder parents are flabbergasted at the behavior of today’s college student.

Seriously. If I could blow bubbles with my nose after a few glasses of booze I’d have everything I need for a fun time at home.

It’s easily been 15 year since I’ve seen Dumbo. After viewing this clip, I get the trumpet thing. You win this time, science. Er, beer.

Not me. The elephant. It’s a freakin’ weeknight! What do you take me for?

A guy just sat down next to me at Barista. He spoke to me, then looked at my wedding ring. He’s not talking to me anymore.

Yeah, I know. This is shaping up to be disjointed and distracted. I like shiny things.

I’m not going to talk about 2009 in any particular order, because that would require cross-referencing. I don’t have a whole lot of spare time. The reason why I get to sit, sipping a latte, anywhere besides my office at 3pm is because I went to work at 7am. And I didn’t take a lunch break.

There are ZERO shrieking babies at work. There are two of them here. You can’t exactly teach a brand new baby the meaning of quiet, and these babies aren’t screaming because they’re mad.

It’s all swirling around now. The events, the fights, the joys, the losses and gains. So much to say and a lot that needs to be left alone. This isn’t the place to air out the laundry soaked with stinky drama–I want to celebrate the year of massive change and thank the people who rode shotgun through it with me.

Mounted police just trotted by. In 2009 I decided that I would never name my child after a month, a city, or a deity. However, it’s completely okay to give an animal a human name. I wonder what police name their horses?

When I went back to work in January, I was ready. So ready. I wanted an office chair and a computer with a big monitor and good benefits. What came with those items I couldn’t have known to request. I got a big fat lesson in what it means to take care of myself. And I learned a lot about what this “self” thing is.

Look, a story!

Previously, I worked retail. To be good at retail, you have to be what the customer in front of you needs you to be. Doing that for three years, I gradually came to believe that it was my job to be everyone’s mother. When I got back into the office environment I frustrated myself to tears over the fact that no one was taking care of ME as much as I felt I should take care of them. Inside, I pouted, “Don’t I deserve to be treated the way I am treating YOU?”

Then, one of my genius coworkers told me to sit down at a picnic.

“You must expect great things of great people. When you do not treat them like great people, you send the message that you believe they are mediocre people. Are they mediocre people? If not, why do you feel you need to do so much for them?”

YES. Great. People. Don’t. Need. Me. To. Stress. Over. What. I. Perceive. To. Be. Their. Every. Need.

Perceive is the key word there. I was addicted to people relying on me. Stuck on the feeling that they might roll over and DIE without me. Who will remember that ONE thing or BE there to help with that OTHER thing? If not me, then I’ve failed miserably! MUST be me. It can ONLY be me.

Thanks to my genius coworker, in 2009 I became a recovering coddler. In 2009 I stopped expecting to be coddled back. So much pressure lifted. And I got a good start at being a better–GREAT, even–person. Who doesn’t need every little need taken care of, because I’m not mediocre. And who now can trust that other people can be great on their OWN. It took me how many years to realize that? Bailiff, there’s Exhibit B.

I’m the sum of consecutive integers.

For the next three and a half months I’ll be two years older than my sister.

It’s my birthday today.

Since my father turned 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+5 I’ve been asking the birthday boys and girls to share the most valuable piece of knowledge they’ve gained so far in their life. The idea is that every year their insights will change. I’ll never forget Dad’s first answer: “I would have taken better care of my teeth,” he said. Because of that, he gets partial credit for the fact that I’ve managed to keep two baby teeth up to this point. And, for the record, Dad has very nice looking teeth.

So, you know what’s coming now. Here are my words of wisdom for the world:

“The answer is inside you.”

And here’s the obligatory explanation:

People will try to give you advice because they care about you, because they want you to make a good decision, because they are invested in that which you are deciding upon, because they want to lighten your load or speed you up, because it’s what we all are inclined to do when we notice that a person is stuck. But! If you are in the habit of receiving advice and then spending a lot of energy trying to align yourself with it, you aren’t giving your own smart self a chance to have a say. And! It’s pretty likely that you won’t be “bought in” to your own decision because you weren’t the original author, as it were. So before you act, slow way down and look inside yourself. Believe that no matter how confused, naive, taken aback or freaked out you feel, there is an answer in there. Sure, listen to what others have to say, as their thoughts might help guide your search. Try hard! Commit to seek and work until you reach bedrock or fall over from exhaustion. If you don’t give up, you will find the best answer of all inside your naturally creative, resourceful and whole self.

Here’s to another trip around the sun.

It was the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities before it became an actual school. At age 15 I qualified for the then-summer program because I wrote a short story about how a boy who lived in the plains got into trouble because he let the wind into the house. Made a big mess, he did. Sand everywhere. Anyway, I don’t know why George thought I belonged in the program. Maybe he actually got the extended metaphor I was weaving with the whole wind thing. Or maybe I just made that up when he asked me about the story. Neither one of us knew that at the time. I still don’t know. Can’t find the original copy.

So I went for about a month and a half (the duration). Wrote some good stuff. Wrote some awful stuff. The stuff that George called awful wasn’t too unlike the plot line of Grindhouse or Transformers, though. Maybe I was ahead of my time? Didn’t matter. Those blue eyes and that stubbly chin reduced me to tears on more than one occasion. In the end, I walked away from George Singleton a disillusioned pencil hater with an armful of short story books written by guest authors. For years I didn’t write a single thing besides messages in ICQ and a haiku on the first iteration of Zeldman.com. Anyone remember the martini haiku contest? I’d love to know.

Today I still don’t write like I did 13 years ago. Sure, I do blog stuff and try to be witty on Twitter, but that’s different stuff, much in the way a sonnet is different from a limerick. I got to thinking about George because I was itching to close the laptop, and I happen to still have all of those books I mentioned before. So I re-read These People Are Us one afternoon. And it got me to thinking about what a waste of time that summer was. I was an unfertilized plant, so to speak. Nothing to build a good story upon when you’re from a tiny southern town, and your only friends were people who feared eternal damnation for going to a party where there might be beer. I was a green, stiff, slightly dry little twig. Couldn’t do a thing with me, so he snapped me in half.

So how to get juicy and colorful and perhaps aromatic? Hell if I know. I’m out of practice. But here’s my guess v1.0 (for all you 15 year old aspiring writers out there): Be reckless. Fail miserably. Let people into your heart and allow them to ransack the place. Triumph. Travel. Forgive. Maybe be slightly mentally ill. Think in long sentences. Note I didn’t say “think in long sentences and use big words”–Big words are intimidating and impressive but they don’t do shit for telling a good story. And the best stories are short ones, in my opinion. We live life in episodes of varying lengths and each has its own theme. Divide into chunks, analyze, add to the mixture or toss in the compost bin so they can become something else. It’s really tough to make a point with just a few pages of text. George Singleton can, and he’s amazing at it.

Ah, George. This is how it works, eh? In my overly dramatic teenage mind you were stabbing me to death with a butter knife. Now I want that knife for my bread.

I wonder what he’d think of my blog?

And no, the Aveda Institute’s stupid sales stuff didn’t run me out of beauty school. You see, I’m grateful for learning that hair is really about products. I now can do some cool stuff with pomade and hair spray. But! I didn’t want to pervert my purpose, which was only about the art of giving a good hair cut. Being “just a good hair cutter” won’t sustain you in the beauty business, though. No, it’s product sales. And up-selling. That deep penetrating hair treatment that costs $120 in the salon? It will wash out in 48 hours and you’ll be back to looking like a frizzy mess. Worse yet? You’ll feel disappointed and misled. Take it from me: You’ll get greater satisfaction out of that money if you book yourself an amazing massage with a huge-handed guy named Sven.

I couldn’t keep lying to people in order to make money off of them. It’s wrong. I had to get out of hair sales before I ended up like Willy Loman. Worrying about what people thought of me and having to constantly watch my back was literally driving me crazy.

After about three months I withdrew from the Aveda Institute/Aveda Product Sales Machine and had myself a good old-fashioned summer vacation (those of you who know me personally are probably saying, “Whew!” because there is truth here that I am withholding because the Internet doesn’t get to know everything about my life). Thought I’d sworn off hair. Truly, I swore off sales.

When I go back and read the journal I kept during that period of time I see a lot of conflict between giving a good haircut and asking for money. I walked all over town and sweated and drank coffee and read books and contemplated selling my hair-doing kit. People, I have a golden curling iron. It’s ridiculous. I looked at it for weeks and said to myself, “Hair is so stupid. Look at this impressively shiny, yet poorly functioning piece of equipment.” That thing embodied everything I hated about hair school. It merely looked expensive. And I said to myself on a long walk from from NW 20th and Flanders to SE 50th and Hawthorne, “The only way I can do hair for people is if I don’t take money.” It was a breakthrough. A hot, caffeine-charged realization that freed me to pick up the scissors again.

“That’s right,” I thought, “I don’t want to do hair because I want to swim in cash. I want to do hair because it’s fun for me and helps people feel good about themselves.”

It’s all or nothing. I don’t want to ask for just a few bucks for a haircut, let alone a lot of bucks. When you put a dollar amount on something, an expectation is set. Nobody goes to Rudy’s expecting the most fantastic razored haircut ever. Why? Because Rudy’s is cheap and the people who work there want you cut, styled and paid up in as little time as possible. On the flipside, when you pay $80 for a smashing new style you expect better than smashing. You kinda hope that new ‘do will get you laid. In Nyco’s One-Woman Unlicensed Salon? I’m just honored that you asked me to do your hair. That’s it. If you want to make me cookies, cool. Otherwise, thanks for letting me do what I love, and do it for you.

You see, a pet’s survival is fairly uncomplicated. It needs to eat, excrete, and have something to do. So do we, right? Get a little deeper and we animals like a comfortable place to sleep, companionship, and to have some fun once in awhile. Beyond that we get into the “nice to have” kind of things like chairs and elevators, which animals use but wouldn’t necessarily want. I won’t go further because we’re all pretty good at calling to mind and naming off the “nice to have” human stuff. We know where to get it and how much it costs. But that simple stuff–The needs that involve our own minds and our own hearts… It gets forgotten. Our pets bring us back to–remind us of–what we essentially need.

…A little adventure without smart phones, city buses, squeezing through crowds, and explaining yourself to others. Smell fresh air, watch the birds, listen to the ocean, feel the sand and water as it dirties your feet, and cower at the mercy of the wind. Dig. Laugh. Run. Jump. To disconnect from all worry and care only about yourself. And your dog. Your human.

Welcome to my Blog.
(Thanks, Alexa, for the data.)

Public Service Announcement: Look, Something Shiny! is about the shiny new thing on my mind. Right now it’s Charlie. Don’t worry, soon I’ll start spouting off about something else. But for now let’s stick to the dog.

As of today we’ve had Charlie for about two weeks. Since bringing her home we’ve worked through involuntary urination, a tumor on her neck, resource guarding, numerous almost-dogfights, and four baths. As she’s gotten to know and begun to trust Jed and me, Charlie’s showing her more vulnerable side. And with that comes a laundry list of fears and phobias which so far includes:

Things That Cause Charlie to Tuck Tail and Run or Hide in the Bathtub

• The sounds and smells of cooking
• Rain storms
• When the blinds move in the breeze
• Those metal doors embedded in the sidewalks all over downtown
• Glass elevators (not when she’s in them, just when she sees them in operation)
• Our oscillating tower fan

She sounds like a total chicken, right? Well, get this:

Things That Every Other Dog in the World is Scared of, but Charlie Isn’t

• The vacuum (in fact, she runs up to “get” it)
• Getting taken into the back room at the vet’s office
• Being put into a bathtub full of water
• Emergency vehicle sirens
• Strangers who run up to touch her

Her veterinarian, with whom I’ve become all too familiar, agrees that she is a “weirdo”.

His words?

“Good luck with that.”

Click. Lamb.

Next up: Teaching an eight-year-old German Short-haired Lab how to fetch. Seriously.