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In Awe of Ourselves: Goddesses. Queens. Priestesses

It would seem as though the world is in absolute awe of a beautiful girl, one who has the youthful spirit, who is unscathed by the ugliness of the world, who is still taut in appearance. Beautiful girls are a dime a dozen, but women are sculpted by time, experience and knowledge. This one is for us, the women whose hands rock the cradle, rule the world and keep everything at a harmonious hum.

All the world loves a princess because the Queen is too hardened by time and experience. We would, in all our top-layer adoration, prefer to have the princess rule the world, but if we let her rule the world, we end up having a party all the time and no one there to take responsibility for the things that lil’ Miss Thang doesn’t have the slightest clue about.

The princess seems to have it all…looks, lots of boyfriends, loads and loads and loads of great, cute clothes. On the outside it would seem that she has it all. No worries, no kids, no husband, no hang ups other than those which make the Princess have to decide what she likes better – Pilates or Yoga, Latte’ or Cappucino, Pink or Magenta…Never in her young, young life has the princess ever had to deal with anything, because she has her many things to keep her happy. It is not often that the Princess relates to the things that Goddesses, Queens and Priestesses do.

For those of you whose lives include soccer games, mortgages, heart ailing spouses, and back aches and things marked down for clearance, this is for you, my dear, fellow Goddesses, Queens and Priestesses…

When you think about all the things that you have been through, and you want to believe that somehow the gods are having a laugh at your expense, think about the fact that you have made it this far in life, without the aid of someone who you couldn’t trust being there for you, and better, without it being assumed that you will have to do something ungoldy and unwholesome in order to be taken care of. You are a woman of substance, in all your matronly glory and your shining examples of things that no one younger than you by too many years will ever know.

Even with her degrees, and her pedigrees, and everything else she seems to have, the princess is never going to be as smart as you are. Age and time will not allow it. She might have everything you used to have, but you have one thing that she will never have – the wisdom of the ages, and with this wisdom comes the knowledge and the rest which comes with age and knowing. You have the answers to seemingly silly questions like “How do you feed five people with one whole 3 pound chicken?” and you smirk as you watch the princess writhe because she doesn’t realize that the five people in question are children. You see, the princess, even in all her outward beauty does not possess the timeless knowledge that it takes to sit and ponder such silliness and cannot believe that children are people, too.

Though you waited until now to get a better education, your knowledge of things trivial to both the men who love to gawk at the princess and the princesses of the world are far and above what it is that any one professor could conjure to be right – he is too busy staring at the princess to see that you are the star of the show, no matter what anyone else thinks. It is easy to wow people with a great show, not so much after the fact, back in the hum drumness of reality and here in the land where Goddesses rule, queens command and Priestesses conquer the world with one wave of her magical hand.

Age is nothing to be ashamed of, and for the princess it is the only thing that she has besides those temporary curves, the temporary smarts, the temporary everything. It takes so little energy to be that cute, so little energy to see that there are different people on the planet and so little knowledge just to be …yuck…cute.

So, ladies, the next time you look in the mirror and see an old woman, glorify in the lines in your forehead, the crows feet, the tiredness in your eyes where once the light of innocence once was. You have earned them all. You did not gain weight- you’ve earned your stripes. You have not lost your waistline, you have earned your curves. The Princesses of the world might look like they can do what it is that the guys want, but the truth is that anything they think they know one of us invented.

The next time you are standing next to a princess, know now what you will then – the princess might be cute, but the queen, she is powerful. Her little waist and her little convertible has not even the smallest amount of power that your lumbering SUV does.

Princesses depend on their looks, but Goddesses, Queens and Priestesses depend on their wit, their wisdom and their mightiness.

When you see the princess, don’t fret over her fit physique, her ability to draw men like flies, her simple mystique. Hers is the hand that begs for what it is that you know, while yours is the one that rocks the cradle and rules the world. The princess must ask permission, but a Goddess needs no permission, the Queen makes the rules, and a Priestess changes her world to suit her.

It’s fun being princess, but never forget one thing – Always here are the QUEEN’S ways!!!

Now go on out there and glorify in your curves, your age and your Wisdom….

MAPU

Childhood – Where a Kid should be a Kid

Our children are brilliant, but there comes a time in life when we must allow them to be children and not little versions of what we think they should be.

There is an epidemic in this country of pushing our kids right out of their childhood. They start school everyday way earlier than we did. They have way more homework than we did. They are pushed to the limit in every way that I can think of. They seem not to enjoy this treasure called childhood, and it is not because they are not happy with their lives but rather because the small part that they have to enjoy it we are pushing them to do better, do more, and stop believing what they hear about childhood being fun.

As I write this, I am sitting here perplexed as to why it is that any 10 year old needs to write a massive report about a state that she has never been to and will likely never visit. When is she going to be a contestant on Jeopardy or Millionaire, and why is it so damned important that raising super intelligent kids in a world that just continues to change intellectually? Kids are sleeping less, easting worse, dying for the kind of attention that folks my age didn’t pine for. Science has made it a fact that teens sleep a lot but not because they are lazy, because (ready?) they need to sleep. When I was a kid, school did not start at 7:40 A.M. for anyone UNLESS they were in a zero period.

Children are being stripped of the right and the privilege of dreaming and deprived of their imaginations unless both lead to something more productive. Kids who pretend like children are supposed to are sent to a doctor to be fixed because they are not reading full newspapers at the age of 4, are not understanding the things happening on the CNN business report, are not allowed to be children. Childhood is a gift, not an ailment, and we adults keep on robbing them of what is theirs. We believe that pushing them will do more for them than will asking them what it is that they want for themselves. I ask my 4 year old everyday what he wants to be when he grows up, and one day he will say a fireman, another he will say a race car driver, and yet another he tells me he wants to be a Pokemon character.

When my oldest was his brother’s age, he was not bothering with what my adult brain had hoped he would. He was not interested in reading like I was, and he was not interested in watching sports (except for golf) and he could not have cared less about much more than when he could have another cookie and if there were anymore juice boxes left because he was “firsty.” My only daughter only recently grew out of playing with her Barbies, started paying attention to what her Bratz dolls wore, and only last year decided that she would do hair and make up and then go to design school because she has always considered herself as being “fashionable,” and yes, that was her first big word.

My parents did not push and push and push the three of us to be what we were not, and though I might have complained about it when I was a child that my parents wanted a genius, I know that what they wanted out of me was what I could do well, be my best at and be happy doing. They did not push me into doing something that they wanted, that they’d envisioned me doing, that they felt was best for me. School had some sort of fun time involved, and we were not punished for being dreamy teenagers, for expressing ourselves in our manner of dress, in who we hung out with. It was not a time when political correctness and succeeding – not for ourselves but instead for the adults in our lives – was something we strived for instead of it being a requirement to be loved.

These days anymore, we want brilliant children, but we do not want them to be brilliant for themselves, we want them to be brilliant for Us, and our reasons for this brilliance are not for more than vanity reasons – we want to be able to go to whatever social functions we go to and we want to say that our kid is the best football player, the best golfer, the best academically. We don’t care about the cute things that 4 year olds do anymore – we want results. We bless the day that their SAT scores are bigger and more important than her having her heart broken, and we don’t care that the oldest son is a magnificent game inventor – we wanted a lawyer, and dammit, that is what we are getting, even if it kills him.

This is the length to which we will push our children just so that we can have security in our own damned selfish selves, and we have no remorse about the emotional and spiritual damage we do to our kids when we decide that since he is a gamer and not a quarterback, he must be sick or lazy or trying to make us mad. Since she did not want to become the family’s first doctor, instead pursuing a more domestic existence raising children, keeping house and caring for her family, she must be stupid or something. We decided that since our kids did not live up to what we wanted out of them other than their satisfaction and their happiness with their lives, there must be something wrong with them.

How sad is it when society has decided that childhood is a time when we are supposed to be working on the vanilla plainness of life for our kids when instead life is supposed to be in technicolor? When I was a child, I did as a child did, and when I became an adult, I did what an adult did, but I never forgot about the child. I wrote when I was a child, and I read when I was a child, but there was a part of me that dreamed of being a rock star, of being famous for the things that I did for the rest of the world, even if those things were the mere words which spill from my fingertips. I was allowed to be what I wanted to be, and though I would have loved a little more freedom, the one thing freedom I did not ever go without was the freedom that all children have to simply be children.

Too often in life we adults forget that we were once children, and if memory serves me well, there were times when I recall that I had a guardian angel who watched me when my mother couldn’t. I had the benefit of a then-typical school day which, for me, began at 9 A.M. Although I know that this was an hour later than the typical school kid did, it was still way better than the times that they are required to be in school these days.

It all starts with the idea that our children are going to be better than we were, and there are several ways that this can turn out. There are a lot of people – parental people – who would disagree with me, who would say that I am the one who needs to check into reality once in awhile. Well, I used to live smack dab in the middle of reality, and though it was a nice place to be, I did not arrive there until I was well over the age of never wanting to miss an episode of my favorite cartoon shows on Saturday, came after I was old enough to vote and go to jail, did not end up as part of my life until I found myself biting my tongue in front of a mad, mad woman who was somehow allowed the privilege of teaching kids, but who should not be teaching because her actions and her spirit told the world that she hated kids.

This is the mentality that we are faced with in this day and age. We want perrfection, not excellence, and we want little adults from the moment that they can spell the word “‘cat.” We want perfection and we want little versions of what we wanted to be when our parents were telling us what we wanted to be. We are robbing kids of their ability to see with their own spiritual eyes, and we are telling them that we know better than they do about what it is that they are able to do. I believe that there lives greatness in every child.

I also believe that this greatness is made small by small adults.

MAPU

Education for all, no questions asked…

Trying like hell to be nice to everyone is getting harder. I say this because I was listening to the Bill Handel show on KFI this morning and the 7:00 hour was dedicated to his letting us know that when it comes to educating children of illegal immigrants, we, the people, have no choice. We can take it to the highest court in the land and still be told, essentially, that we – all of us- are responsible for educating kids from ANYWHERE in the world.

I am not aware of the rules or how we come about ending up in the crapper that we have found ourselves in, but if the powers that be have their way like usually they do, we end up with really bad ideas. One really bad idea is educating kids from out of this country for free. This has been happening for so long now that the parents and the families and special interest groups no longer just fight and protest for the rights of their illegally born children to get a free American education that we, the people, pay through the nose for. They demand it, and whether we like it or not, these people end up getting the same treatment that we get.

These people protest and sue school districts, city government, the state and individual educators because they want to be taught but they want to be taught in their own language AND they want us to just take it because they know that no matter what, the feds are not going to do anything to them. Nope, they will instead screw the rest of us to the wall by making it so that we end up footing the bill for these kids from ANYWHERE in the world to get an education so that they can have an edge in the working world.

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAATT????!!!

Yes, you read it right, folks. We are spending money on people whose children are receiving a free education in our public schools and we are also footing the bill for them to learn in their language, and we are footing the bill for them to take us to court so that our American judges can tell us that we don’t have the right to bitch about what happens to the money that we are paying to educate OUR AMERICAN BORN CHILDREN.

People like to say horrible things about teachers and about how greedy they are and that they do not do a great job so why should we pay them what they are worth? They deserve to be paid well, because they spent money to go to college, to test, to get credentialed, and always they are the ones who are blamed for the crappy SAT scores that our kids are producing.  It never occurs to anyone that it might not be that the teachers are poorly trained but that the kids they have to teach do not understand what it is that they are being taught because the lessons are taught in the mother tongue of this country – English. We are expected to learn whatever language is predominant in a particular area so that we can accommodate the major general population of that area, but what the hell happened to the idea that you come to this country to assimilate to OUR ways instead of us paying for everything you guys need and then you decide to kick us in our proverbial American guavas by telling us that we have to – or else ? We are being held hostage by idiot rules and our freedoms are being stretched to the limit because people want to have the upper hand in this country.

I am sorry, but as Mr. Handle said this morning, we would never be entitled to anything that ALL illegal immigrants are given in ours. We could never go to Mexico, China, Korea - ANYWHERE- and demand that we get what we feel is ours because we are an underprivileged minority who cannot speak the language but we want to and because we want what your country offers the best and most freedoms, you have to give it to us. Period. We would never be able to do this at all. We would be laughed out of whatever office of department of immigration is in these countries. Ours is the ONLY country in the world that allows this foolishness. They get away with it all the time – they will get away with it and Obama will allow it, and they got away with it because Bush allowed it. There was no court in the country that turned these people into what they really are – criminals. Yes, even the children.

We need to right this wrong. I guess that the message of this writing is that we are in the middle of a severe recession. Heck, let’s just call it what it is – a depression, and during the Great Depression hearing things like this was completely, well, unheard of. We did not have the money to support all the children and their education. Back then it was expected that people, both born here and otherwise, were to work for what they wanted and rarely did they demand anything. Back then it was still a sin to be black, a sin to be a working mom, a sin to expect that we were beholden to any sort of demands made on a populace by someone or a group of someones from someplace else.

Time to stop being a buncha pansy-asses and start saying NO…

“NO”…it’s a universal term that is the same in many, many languages. Perhaps now would be the best time to start testing that theory, huh guys?

MAPU

The Earth, She Cries…

Call it channeling, or getting messages, or just a silly hunch. Whatever the case may be, the Earth is crying out for us to save us all, and we keep ignoring her. We can no longer afford this backward way of thinking. What we can afford, though, is a little bit of Love Mana, some Aloha, to breathe life back into the home and the Mother Whom we all Love so much.

We have convinced ourselves that we are the most important people in the world. We have convinced ourselves that what we do singly has so little impact on the way that things work in the Universe, so much so that what we are not seeing is the physical travesties that we are setting out onto the planet. Our minds are crying out for more things, but the fact is that we have enough. More only makes us what we are – greedy with empty souls. Our minds are convinced that we must have more stuff to satisfy our innate and inborn sense of not running out of stuff. What we are running out of is time. Time, as you all well know, is something that none of us can ever have back.

Home is under attack, and we are sitting here thinking that there are scientists and environmentalists of the mouthy sort who will be the ones responsible for saving the planet. This is BAD and WRONG, because we all live here, and we all wreck here, and we all are just as guilty as anyone else is. We must be vigilant in our battle for our home, and we must remember that we came from the earth and not the other way around. We are so aloof in the idea that we are not going to be here anyway, so why should we care?

We should care because our children will be here, and we should care because no one wants to see the messes that people leave everywhere, literally and proverbially. We need to care because no one else is going to, and the consequences of not caring are major, life altering and permanent. Many people will end up losing more than only their homeland. Many will be lost because many are so lost now. Greed is the factor, and greed brings with it dependency, selfishness, hatred, adversity. Much has been lost already to the spirit of want, of filling a hole in the soul with things that are finite instead of filling it with Love, Honor, self respect, respect for the earth, respect for each other, and it is in such dire straights now that doing nothing hastens the demise, not of one, but of entire populations. Mine is a dying breed – there are no blood Hawaiians enough to repopulate our place in the Sun. There are none but those whose lives mirror the message of Aloha, mirror and send out the message that Love heals all, will save all, will be all, eventually. Yet that will not happen until we have heard the message loud and clear. We cannot sit idly waiting for someone else to do what it is that we have been gifted by God to do, not only for ourselves, but also for our Ohana.

It is not expected of any of us to do without the niceties that have been brought to us by technological advances. It should be our mana’o to no longer be of mind and heart that we do not care enough about life and earth that we will simply just do nothing. The Earth cries for us to go back to what we were, to what we all inherently know, what we are all capable of, and it is not being able to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together. We have forgotten how to care, and we have forgotten that before we were each here in this life, there was the earth. We have taken on the face of hatreds, and these hatreds have likened us to thinking that we are somehow above working together, for anything, but especially, for us to care, not only about the ground that we walk on, but those with whom we walk. We have been so worried about who is going to take what from us, that in kind we have decided that it is better to take than to ask, and it is better to worry than to try.

There is an entire population of people on those beaches in Hawaii. Tent cities stretch for miles and miles of shoreline, and no one seems to care about the impact that this has. What these people have forgotten is that they hate so much, so deeply, so…eternally…that they have taken that self hatred and turned it onto the land, the ‘Aina. Because of this, the ‘Aina is answering that call. The problem is that when the ‘Aina answers, the people will not hear because the people will no longer be. This is not only true to the Hawaiian islands, but everywhere.

The Earth, She Cries, and She does so loudly, clearly, and without pause. ” ‘Auwe,” says She, crying and gnashing her teeth as once they did in the times of ancient Hawaii, when mourning meant that we should cut off our hair, break out our teeth, and wail like the ancients did when it was that they discovered a profound loss, a loss so deep, that there was nothing more to do than cry about it.

Be active, steadfast in your part in the healing, your part in the strengthening of the Mana which will be the thing – the only thing- which will give rise to the idea that this is our fault, not someone else’s, and it is time that we should clean up our own damned mess. We are all crying about money, about houses, about jobs, about stuff, but we seem to be fine that the thing we need to most to sustain ourselves is dying at an incredible pace. We have been witness to much dying just in the last few weeks, and we have mourned our losses en masse. The time has come to stop crying and start doing something about this all, otherwise the crying we are doing now will seem like nothing in comparison to the crying we will be doing while we amass our losses.

Pray for health to our mother, and pray that those who do not care start to have a turn and change of heart. We are so limited in our thinking that “it won’t happen to us, ” that we have lulled ourselves into believing like a wayward child does – mother won’t turn on us. She’s our mother. She has to love us. And she does, but even loving mothers have a tendency toward anger. When Mama cries, everyone knows it, because it is a deep and mournful cry. It is a cry that is sent out across the Universe, and one that resonates with every ripple on the tainted waters of the oceans, echoes through the places where tall forests once stood but were replaced by high rises, condominiums, sings that read “Keep Out.” This travesty is history long, and it will continue unless something so magnificent in magnitude happens that we will never be able to turn back that which has happened.

Moms cry all the time, but some of those tears we cry are those of attrition and anger, of feeling like ours was the last thing on the list to do because everyone else needed us for something that they could have done themselves. Today is the day that we should be taking care of our ailing Mother, because she cries a mournful cry, a cry of warning, an angry cry which can be heard across the boundaries of time.

The last thing anyone wants to do more of is cry.
The last thing anyone wants to do less than cry, is to watch their mother cry.

The Earth…She Cries…

Do something. Do anything. Doing nothing is not acceptable.

MAPU

Let the Boy wear his blues

He will fight  to protect the freedoms we all enjoy taking for granted, but the El Paso, Texas school board in his town will not allow him to walk in his graduation ceremony wearing his Dress Blues. This is ridiculous to think about that what matters most to a school board is that someone follow a fashion rule but is not allowed to follow his pride and walk his last walk as a child dressed like a man.

I should be writing about something a little more pressing, but this just caught me while I was perusing for something to blog about this morning.

Pfc. Garret Miles-McCarthy is what I am sure many military moms hope that their boys will want to be when they graduate out of high school – be so proud that he is a part of something bigger than himself, something that lends to the value and the safety of a nation, that his life is so wrapped around his military life, that he would even want badly to wear his dress blues to graduate with his senior class. I would like to know what the problem is? I am not a military mom – I am a golf mom. I am proud and glad when my son (who should practice more than he does) drives the ball as far as his father can, birdies the ball, fixes a divot. Seems silly, but at my house, we are militantly “golf.” Yet in many homes across the nation, they are proudly military.

I have a very good, very close childhood friend who for as long and as far back as I can remember, she has been a military wife, even before she was married to a Marine. Heidi knew that she was on a mission to be part of a tradition that certainly not all women can deal with. It was her mission in life to raise kids who are militarily proud, which she has done. It was her lot in life to be able to deal with the rigors of military life. She would tell you that it is not an easy path nor one for the faint of heart. She would also tell you that it is a very proud, ver noble one. To raise children to walk in their parents’ footsteps is something that we should all strive to do.  When it comes to military families, I have found that one thing is true – they are proudly, proudly military. They are the ones who are placed on this earth to serve and to protect us, our freedoms and our culture. When you kneel and pray to God, when you protest in the streets, and when you loudly bellow in a drunken manner, thank an enlisted person, because they have put their lives on the line for all of us to retain the right to do all these things.

Imagine then what it must have been like for Pfc. McCarthy to be told that he cannot walk with his class while wearing his Military Dress Blues. This is a kid who has given up the parties, the lazy summer days, the luxury of being able to be a teenager and do all those teenager things in exchange for protecting the lives and the freedoms of those who would tell him that no, he may not wear his military dress blues, because that is school policy.

Now, I am one for following rules right on the fringe of not following the rules, and yes, I am familiar with dress code and all that stuff, but this kid is not asking to streak naked through the graduation, is not wearing a protest shirt in defense of animals raised as food, is not planning to do anything out of the ordinary. I think that it would be a great honor for the school to have this young man not only representing his school, but also representing his values and his honor as someone who is chosen as a warrior, to protect and to serve, proudly marching with his class in his dress blues.

It is not often that we are given the chance to see someone – especially someone only 18 years old- wanting to wear the colors which do not run. He wants to share his pride in who he is with the people who he has spent the majority of his time with for the last four years, and I find it amusing that these people who sit on the board cannot see fit to allow this brave soul to proudly march before he proudly marches. If I were his mother, I would protest this action.

And I would have my son to thank for the freedom to protest a very silly requirement.

The school board in El Paso, Texas decided unanimously that McCarthy is required to join his class in wearing the traditional cap and gown. Though I know that rules must be followed, this request is one that I believe needs to be thought about a bit longer. I believe that anyone wanting to sport their military pride on graduation day should be the exception to the rule, because the next day they are the epitome of going from a kid to an adult, literally overnight. I say let the kids wear their pride on their sleeve. By deciding to enlist, they have earned the right to. It will be those people whose decisions are made behind the doors of sumptuously decorated offices, NOT whose offices are appointed with desert sand for miles and miles, who will be the ones to make such decisions based mainly on the idea of keeping things fair for the rest of the kids because they don’t want to give the impression that everyone should be allowed to do as Pfc McCarthy would like to do and show the world their pride in who they are.

Good Lord – God forbid that a kid should have anything to be proud of, especially if said kid has risen to the task of protecting our freedoms.

MAPU

Religiously Stupid: The Joe Biden Puppy Saga

Vice President Joe Biden bought a German Shepard puppy from a breeder, and as the lady who has been scorned for what she thought was an honor has said, never again does she plan to sell another dog to another high profile client.

High profile clients tend to bring out the worst in groups that protect the rights and the lives of animals in shelters, but the problem with these types of people who protest such things is that they are concentrating on the people who are buying th animals rather than on the real culprits – the people who do not alter their animals so as not to add to the problem of over population of certain animals.

I won’t go on with how silly  the feds can be, about how silly some of these special groups who fight for the rights of animals can get, and I won’t bother with how much money was wasted on the four inspections that the breeder was treated to. Instead I will concentrate on what those groups who vilify this woman did not – the people who forget that “fixing” their pets is the most humane thing that a person can do for their animals.  I will not lie – my beloved Pomeranian, Kimo the wonder dog, is a pet who I purchased from a woman in Phelan, California, and when the time was right and he started behaving in a less than pedigreed manner, I had the vet alter him. He is still the same dog. The difference is that he is not a dog who has made me responsible for irresponsible ownership. Kimo was never meant to be a breeder, and I had no intentions of turning him into a show animal. One activity is doggie prostitution and the other is something that the people who gave the poor woman who sold the Vice President his dog should be bugging – NOT someone who is trying to pay her bills. There is no law against being a dog breeder, but there are laws that make irresponsible pet ownership a crime – and not a cheap one at that.

Instead of bugging that nice lady, those people should be going after those guys in Las Vegas who cage wild animals for shows, and they should be going after those people who overfish the oceans, who fell entire forests for the purposes of development. Pet ownership is a gift from God, one which measures the validity of the theory that animals are without a soul, are not smart, do not show measures of intelligence. I know this is wrong because over the years I have loved a black cat named Murdoch (RIP, buddy ) who was smart enough to understand the command “Murdoch get the hell off the counter,” another cat named Princess (Run, girl Run) who knew what I meant when I told her to go potty, a big stupid dog named Baby Girl who was dumb as a rock but better protection than a .45 callibur handgun, and a smart cat named Spike who should be in movies. All of them were altered, and not one of them ever really cared about much more than being fed, being safe, and being loved.

Then there is Kimo, my fuzzy, caramel colored Pomeranian who is a AKC registered, who possesses a personality that most humans cannot even begin to know how to foster, and who we refuse to tell  he is not a Pitbull. My dog is probably one of the smartest mammals known to the small circle of people I know and love, and though I would have loved to see what a herd of little Kimos would have looked like, I couldn’t do it because sometimes even the cute little fuzzy dogs cannot be placed in homes. The pull of responsible pet ownership was stronger than the desire to turn a fuzzy little dog who likes to take rides in the car into a stud.

Besides, he is already a stud in his own mind!

BE kind to your animals and have them altered- the animal activists in your life will understand as soon as you explain to them that you are performing acts of animal control without the threat of euthanization.

MAPU

Even one is too many – some words about drinking and driving

Nick Adenhart died needlessly. Adenhart was a rookie pitcher for the Anaheim Angels. I will not lie to you – I am not a baseball fan, had no clue of who this young man was and he truth is that I probably would have no idea of who he was unless I was not watching the news this morning.  This is a sad loss, not for the talent but for the life that was yet not lived. Mr. Adenhart made it to where many of us only dream of making it – quite literally, to the big leagues. I cannot post numbers and I cannot tell you who he played against last night. All I can say is that in Anaheim right now there is probably a certain pallor over the city because as history has shown, those who live in Anaheim LOVE their Angels. (Yeah, I know, there is something about the city of angels in the title of the team now, but I will always and only think of them as The California Angels because that is just how it is…)  The sadness is mixed with anger and rage and a profound sense of loss.

Drinking and driving is not cool. Many lives have been lost to the simplest and most avoidable method of mortality.  I have lost too many friends on many highways, freeways and city streets to the carelessness of a drunken driver. I have a rule. If I know that I am going to be drinking – even one- I also know that I will not be driving. I should not be the one who risks the lives of others simply because I think I can handle it. Lots of people believe that they are totally hot attractive when they have a few drinks in them, and many more are the ones who have the constant mindset of “it won’t happen to me.” These are the people who I have the biggest problem with. You are not above the law when it comes to taking consideration for the lives and the loved ones of those whose lives you endanger when you climb behind the wheel of a motorized vehicle and decide to drive. You are not as good as you think you are, and I liken those of you who do think this way to being not more or above that of an animal.

We are all born with the ability to reason, even though we have to be taught the difference between right and wrong. We are the only species on the planet who can avoid certain situations. One such situation is the act of drinking while impaired. I am not sure what was more unappealing to me – the idea of having to sit in a jail cell because I was swerving while driving, or the idea that I could end up killing a carload of people- innocent people – only because I thought that I could handle it. People, folks, you SO cannot handle it, and it is about time that you all owned up to the idea that you cannot walk on water, so therefore that means that you also cannot drive when drinking.

There have been a few times when, while living at Silver Lakes, I noticed that people driving their golf carts on the town’s streets were doing so with a beer in hand. This is drinking while driving, and it, too, regardless if you are on the course, captaining a boat, an off-road vehicle, a bicycle, you are breaking not just a law, but the unspoken rule of etiquette that silently screams how not cool it is that you are operating a moving vehicle while my kids are outside playing. Period.

Drinking and driving is one of those things that people who have little regard for life in general do. I can sit here, smug and thinking these thoughts about people who do this, because there has only been one time in my life that I drank, got twisted nasty drunk, and drove home to Covina from Duarte on the 210 freeway. I had NO clue as to how I made it there other than that indeed God does love me, otherwise I would be dead right now. I would be dead because of my own stupidity, my own carelessness and my own thinking that I am not one of those people who drinks and drives and kills people because that kind of thing just does not happen to me.

WRONG!

If you are one of those people who goes to the bar and then gets into the car and drives, I hope that the next time you do this you are too drunk to realize that the guy you are about to run into is a cop, and that that guy is ready and willing to take your sorry ass  to jail for endangering his life, my life, an especially, your life. A person has to have very little regard for life if he or she is willing to drive after partying. It sounds silly but there is something about the phrase “Party Responsibly,” even though it spilled out of some of the most unlikeliest mouths in all of the land of RockTopia. (You know, that planet where Vince Neal is still cool, where Lane Staley still lives and breathes, where Steven Tyler’s weird manner of dress and big ol juju lips are still…cool…) People do not care about each other enough to not drink and drive.

Young lives are taken everyday as a result of carelessness or callousness on the part of other people. People like Mr. Adenhart, people whose lives could have meaning other than the message that drinking and driving affects everyone. We only hear about the lives of the young in terms of dying when it comes to drive-by shootings, stabbings, gang murders, and when it is the child of a Hollywood celebrity. Yet when it is that a talent that has done what he could to get where he did is suddenly not there for any of us to witness, to see grow and become and realize its own greatness, there is that gnawing at the middle of my gut that says that this is an avoidable pain that we are all experiencing right now. The pain of loss is unexplainable, but the loss of someone who could have climbed that mountain we all hope to even see, let alone climb, that…that is a pain that has no words, no colors, no feelings outside of the one that screams in the darkness of dreams crushed and potential never realized.

Please, don’t drink and drive. My  mother is on her way  home from work, my sister is on her way to school, my husband is on his way to the golf course, my son is on his way to the mall and my daughter, nieces and my baby boy are outside playing and I don’t want you to kill them.

MAPU

It’s not what you cannot do, but what you can do that matters most

I have learned over the last few months that what you are not capable of does not matter unless it literally matters. What I mean by this is that unless the job you hold requires you to do something that you are not capable of, whatever it is that you are not capable of is of no importance and neither should it be. I will be the first person to tell you that no matter what people tell you, no matter what people – even people related to you- think of what you do or more, what you do not do, believe is true or false about you, those things do not matter.

Too often in life we are told that in order to get where we want to get we have to do this, that and the other without realizing that perhaps what it is that we want is something that maybe the rest of the world believes is the right thing for everything because “everyone is doing it, so it must be the right way. If it wasn’t, why are so many people convinced that it is?”

So many people are doing things that are not in tune or in line with who they are, but over the course of their lives they have been told that things are done this way because “everyone does it this way.”

We all need to ask ourselves a very important question, and that question is who is living your life, you or everyone else?  I used to believe that in order to get anywhere in life that we all need to be good to one another, do right by one another, do for each other, and that in return God would see to it that I would be taken care of.

I am still alive, and I eat daily, have someplace to live, my kids are healthy and my husband survived a major heart attack. OK, so technically my needs were met, but that is not what this is about. Everyday the needs of everyone you know are seen to, but how many of them are satisfied? How many people do you know who are truly an really satisfied with their lives? Probably not too many, and yes, I am part of the thinking that I deserve more.  The problem that I think is most prevalent is not that we do not know what we can do, but that we are so focused on trying to fix what we cannot do that we end up never trying the obvious of what we can do. What we can do may very well be the thing that is needed for a given situation, but if we are caught up in focusing on what is not there, on what can’t do for a particular situation, it should be of very little wonder then the reasons that we are seemingly failing everywhere in our lives.

Every single one of us is so tuned into our inabilities that we forget that we have other things that we are fabulous at. I am not great at fixing computer programs, not great a figuring out math, I am not that great at driving the golf ball further than I can watch it roll to the nearest spot in the very near-to-me grass at the range. There are, however, things that I am outrageouslt fabulous at and sometimes my prowess with those activities even amazes me. There are things that we are all really great at doing, which are the things which we should always be focused on. If we continue to focus on the things that we are not that great at, guess what is going to continue to be the thing that we are completely focused on?

If you are great at fixing cars, you are not going to be a make-up artist, right? The same thing can and is said of all those things and activities that seem pointless to us. What we never realize is that those things that seem mundane to us are of great importance in the eyes of others because they may not be able to do those particular things.  There are a lot of people who ask me to teach them how to dance hula, and though I am pretty good at it, there is nothing that I would rather do than write. I am a great hula teacher, but I am an amazing writer, a darned good public speaker, and as I said in a previous post, a rock star in my own mind. We should all be so inclined to think of ourselves as rock stars in our own minds. Even my kids have referred to me as their “rock star mom,” and it was not because of my wild long hair, nor was it because I have a certain affinity for Led Zeppelin.

It is because I am good at being their mother, which makes me a rock star in my own mind. Just like there are great Avon ladies, awesome math teachers, culinary wonders who could make Emeril cry like a baby for wanting to be just like you, we are all good at one thing. There is one thing that God loves you most for when you are doing it. For me, it is writing.

What you cannot do does not matter. We are so gathered in the head about what we cannot do that we strive and try hard to learn what we cannot do that we neglect what it is that we can do.

Instead of trying to figure out how you are going to do what you cannot do, change what you cannot change, be who you cannot be, why not try, instead, doing what you can, changing what you can change, and being who you are?

Crawl out from the rock of conformity. Rock stars do not conform. That is why they are rock stars.

Yes, even the men who wear way too much make up.

MAPU

We’re actually born with two meal tickets – which one is yours?

(04/05/2009)

My grandfather, Bill Namahoe, Sr., used to tell people that women are born with a meal ticket. I think I was maybe 10 years old  the first time I heard him say it. I was 16 when I understood what he meant by it. God bless my mother for trying hard to keep what he was talking about from me. Thank God more for my dad’s Auntie Elsie who lived in Hollister for telling me the truth about what he meant.

Understand that my grandparents, and probably the majority of people reading this right now – their grandparents, too – were born in an era when women were not yet allowed a voice, even though women of that time had been given the right to vote, to work and to be equal to the guys. That this happened was one thing, but it was quite another thing before the glass lid to the glass coffin was broken. There was no ceiling. Women were entombed in a air-tight coffin of conformity, and if women wanted anything done, well, that was just too bad.

Some things just do not change, and this would include the meal ticket theory. I pondered the statement that my grandfather was fond of saying, and to an extent, it is the truth. Yet the meal ticket to which he referred and the one to which I give reference and also alms to is the other, lesser glorified one.  “A man is a man is a man is a man, ” is what my mother is fond of saying, and this is something that she rather enjoys following with ” …and there is not  a man alive who is not scared of a woman who has been scorned. A woman can always eat, always have a place to stay. Like your grandfather used to say – a woman is born with a meal ticket…”

Lordy, Lordy…what was he thinking? What the hell is my mother thinking about?

Oops, never mind, I really don’t want to know your answer. I already know your answer.

We are actually born with two meal tickets. One is the easier of the two to employ. It takes practically nothing to use it to get what you want in life, what you need in life, what your heart’s desires are. The other one, though, takes times to deploy. It is our secret weapon, one which throughout history we have been, until recently, like the 1960’s recently, discouraged from using. And it was not an outright discouragement that we were treated to, but an ongoing, covert one that took many years to plant the seeds of female doubt in our female heads.

Then along came a spider called feminism, and this spider ate the flies of male dominance.

Yet even now there still is the air that men are superior to women, that no matter what it is that nature set out for us to do, we are never going to rank as high as the guys because we are missing that ever-popular third leg. However, because we are able to replicate life, we have something a little more important than that third leg – we have that sixth sense. Call it women’s intuition, call it that thing that drives men crazy. I call it the akamai.

The akamai tells us that it is ok that we are women, tells us that we are done whining, crying, walking five steps behind the guys, that we are even finished roaring because we don’t need to make that damned much noise anymore. We are the noise, we are the thing that makes the world continue to thrive, because even though it takes a man to plant the seed, you still need the land in which the seed will grow. Yet unlike real estate, we are not property, cannot be owned. You see, that other meal ticket is not something that we can do and is nothing if left in the hands of a man. I have been married for the bulk of my adult life, and no matter who says what of me, of my girlfriends, of anything that we as women are supposed to be in need of from the guys, I tell you what, folks – there is one thing that is my meal ticket, now and forever…

There is more to be had between the ears than there is between the mammaries. A smart woman knows that she can have anything she wants – all she needs is a little bit of cleavage, a giggle and a walk that has more swish than did a Michael Jordan free throw. A brilliant woman though, she knows all this and the reasons why those things work. She knows that there is much to the male psyche that would entice the men in her life to bend to her will, but she also knows that all these physical attributes are nothing without the attribute of knowing that she is far more than what she looks like, far more than what biology and primal urges give to her cause.

Women can have anything they want, and they don’t need any man to get it for them. The other meal ticket is the one that allows us the freedom to choose, because having the freedom to choose is what true feminism is really all about. It has little to do with the rights to our reproductive abilities and organs and more to do with what we choose to do with them. It has little to do with the idea that we can marry, depend on a man to be our chivalrous knight in shining armor, be his little princess at home, and more to do with the idea that even the princess graduates to full on queendom eventually. We can continue to be what they say we are, or we can be all that and way more.

Grandpa was right – we are born with a meal ticket.

The trick is figuring out which meal ticket you eat with, because ultimately the one used to feed you is the one which defines you.

I was once given the opportunity to think about what I would choose if I were given the choice between the only two jobs left on the planet ; would I choose to be a prostitute, or would I choose to be a drug dealer?

It was a very easy decision to make -dope dealer, of course. I would rather keep my dignity, do my time if I get caught, redeem myself in the eyes of society, come out of the pokey educated and on a mission, because the alternative is not that great. You can sit there and tell me that you might choose prostitution because in some states it is legal, and because in all states, being a dope dealer is against the law, and that I would be a felon for the rest of my life, and that it would mar my societal status.

Yet this would not be enough to sway me, because I would know one thing for sure and that one thing for sure is the thing that people would never forget about me. Just because something is legal does not mean it is right.

I would sooner be known as an ex-felon, an ex-poison pusher, a bad, bad girl…because I would always be able to redeem myself from that. I can be an ex-felon all day long, and Sundays, too.

The one thing that I could never be, though, is the alternative, because being a dope dealer is not something that is forever, but once you are labeled a whore, you are always and for the rest of your life, a whore. These days anymore, this is probably not such a bad thing. I would liken it to doing what you have to do in order to eat.

And even with such a choice, at least the person who made the choice to employ what the good Lord gave her, made a choice. She chose to use what she was born with. It’s just that what she was born with is not as high up the ladder as is the other meal ticket. You can do what you will all day long with that one meal ticket that we are all born with. With the other one, you can ponder the reason and weigh your options as to why you would want to do such a thing.

Your meal ticket is the thing that gets you by in life. It should not define who you are. Unfortunately it does.  Employing one meal ticket does not negate the other.

When it came to shaking my money maker I did real well.  It kind of brings a whole new meaning to the term “headbanger”, doesn’t it?

MAPU