love what you love

Donkey Love

After many weeks talking about finding my horse while riding a donkey, I realized something: Donkeys are cute!  Not only are they intelligent and sure-footed, they are also rational and calm.  Who wants a horse when you can have a donkey?  Especially after you get a gander of these shaggy haired cutie-pies.  There are generations of farmers who dedicate their lives to ensuring that these once endangered Baudet du Poitou (Poitou donkeys) make their comeback.  Their shaggy haired gene is so strong that even a beast with 1/8 Poitou blood will show this characteristic.  Did there ever exist a shaggy beast cuter than this?

On Wednesday, I was offered a job at a naturopath/L.Ac.'s office as her medical support.  By the thoroughness of the interviews (three in total) and the fact they called all three of my references, you'd think I was being hired into the CIA or something really fancy.  But noooo. I'm ordering medicinary, medical assisting, and keeping her successful medical practice running.  Strangely, I recall emailing my new boss three months ago about this position and then emailing her again a month ago to find out that it was still open.  What do I make of this?  I dream into the three month time period and imagine many scenarios my favorite being the one where Dr. Rollo is extremely picky and was just waiting for someone of my esteemed caliber to come along and sweep her off her feet.  That must be what happened.  Donkey in the house.  Recognize.

So now what?  I re-join the ranks of the employed?  It has been a rough journey these past three months.  I sank to new lows people.  New lows.  I didn't realize how identified I am with my occupation.  Which makes sense because for three months I had no "occupation."  And that's what I felt like...like a big nothing.  No identity.  For three months, I had to figure out how to fill my days with exercise, books, internet trolling, walking the dog, and hanging out with friends.  Sounds like fun, right?  But you know what?  There is only so much time one can spend on the internet, walking the dog, biking, eating, getting coffee, and reading books before it all becomes meaningless.  Without structure or goals, days mix into one another and I started wondering who the hell I was anymore.  It was utterly depressing. 

And suddenly, the tides shifted.  I got hired for a job in my field with room for growth and career promotion, I began learning a new allergy clearing technique which has the potential of helping countless numbers of people, making loads of money, building my confidence as a new practitioner, and building my practice. How did this happen?  It was like things in my life hit a kind of critical mass then everything started flowing. What the bleepologists would say that it was there all along and I was attracting it to myself the whole time.  That doesn't really make sense.  I think on a quantum level I really didn't know what the hell I wanted.  Therefore nothing was showing up. As I worked slowly on what the hell was my logical next step, then the possibilities I imagined came to life.

So Monday begins the next chapter of my life.  It's on like Donkey Kong.

It is 3 in the morning

It is 3:17 am.  I can't remember the last time I couldn't sleep like this.  Usually I can sleep any damn place no matter if it's filthy, loud, uncomfortable, or unfamiliar.  Where I am is none of those things.  This morning I decided to take a 10 hour drive down to the Bay Area.  It only registered that I was almost at my destination of Myriam's (short story: I met Myriam at the Process Work Intensive. Two and a half weeks into it, the girl busts a move that is impossible to resist, we start getting to know each other, two weeks more she returns back to her life, we text like mad, talk on the phone, I visit her four weeks later in Oakland after which I have a meltdown borne out of not communicating my feelings with her, then a week later we meet each other in Ashland which is a magical 48 hour trip and another month (within this month, the pressure of being unemployed begins to fray my edges building up into a week of unwittingly taking my frustration out on our long-distance-what-are-we-doing relationship) later (aka this morning), I decide to drive down to her house) house as I exited I-5. Five minutes later, I pulled up to her front door.

Seeing her after weeks of not seeing her is usually shocking.  I get this fear that I have forgotten what she looks like or she has forgotten what I look like and that suddenly we won't recognize each other. Totally normal.  Well, this time we recognized each other again, could I ever forget that gorgeous curly dark brown hair, brown eyes flecked with sunflowers, tan skin on a slim, strong body, her face a perfect mix of her French and South Asian Indian heritages?  Seeing her after a few weeks is always surreal.  Being in her presence again is always unfathomable and always a surprise even though I drove directly to her house and I had 10 hours to prepare.  She greets me with a huge smile and I am instantly shy and there is a happiness that effervesces out of her uncontrollably but maybe more furiously like it sparkles out of her pores when she sees me.  We hug in the hallway, murmur sweet things into each others' necks, and attempt to act like seeing each other is totally normal. It never is.

On the drive down I had a lot of time to think.  The sun was out and gorgeous.  The scenery that lines I-5 is lush this time of year.  Mt. Shasta was still covered in snow and lovely in the sun.  I thought about my life.  I thought about going back to the plasma center after months of going in circles in my mind of what am I doing with my life?  The truth of it comes down to wanting to do something useful with my expertise and the reality is that until I can figure out how to best utilize my expertise, I won't attract anyone who can benefit from it and consequently I won't make money until I figure out my focus meaning in the meantime to make ends meet, I have to get a job that pays.  Mark Lee told me this ancient Chinese saying today (very loosely translated), "At least when you're riding a donkey, you can look for a horse." Those damn Chinese have a saying for everything!

And in this case, it makes it all better somehow.  Having a change of heart can really open some doors.  Before I knew it, I packed the dog into the car and drove 10 hours to a place where not only I could start looking for my horse but also visit a beautiful and amazing woman.

So I'm up at 5 in the morning.  The morning birds are starting to chirp.  Curse you, soy latte from Ashland with Coke chaser from Yreka!   

Signing off, Friends?

Hello friends,

Perhaps you have noticed the absence of posting on this blog.  Yes, indeed.  I have lost inspiration to continue with Love What You Love for the time being.  I sit at my dining table sipping fenugreek seed tea listening to Beth Orton and wonder if this will be my last blog post ever or just the beginning of a long blogging hiatus. 

I have a career to tend. My dog is old. I don't stretch enough. I am seeing a beautiful and amazing woman who lives in Oakland.  I am both busy and not busy enough being a doctor without patients.  I don't know what I am doing with myself at the moment and somehow this is ok.  I mailed off my taxes and the return I am getting will cover mortgage next month.  I am squeaking along. Barely.  I am going to make something of myself, it is just not clear how I am going to do this. And somehow I feel too busy to blog.  For now.

Please remember to love what you love. Really well.

Take care and be good to one another. 
Peace, love, and light. 
livia

Under Construction

Hello Friends.  Sorry for the hella long hiatus.  I have been undergoing many changes mostly in quitting the job and starting a very intense and aptly named program called the Process Work Intensive.  It is a 5 week, 9 to 6, Monday through Friday marathon of self-growth, spiritual grounding, paradigm shifting program aimed at people interested in things from therapy to global change to becoming more self expressive in their art.  In short, I am exhausted.

Today marks the end of my second week.  There are 38 course participants from 18 countries, only 8 of which are from the United States.  I love the internationality of the process work community.  Since the 38 of us have been together now for 2 weeks, things are starting to get a little tense and process work teaches amazing ways of working with conflict.  The paradigm is absolutely gorgeous and based on deep democracy which just means that equal creedence is given to any opinion, thought, movement, political action, speech, etc., since we have all parts of everything inside us yet we tend to disavow parts of us that are not accepted within our culture, micro-culture, society, family structure, etc. 

The entire first week I spent in utter social anxiety the depths of which I have felt no equal.  For those of you who have not experienced social anxiety, be very glad.  It is not for the faint of heart.  I was a wreck inside trying to be accepted and appear smart and well spoken while cringing at every damn thing that came out of my stupid mouth.  The final effect was that I became a smiling dolt who just plain agreed with everything everyone said.  I hate losing my mind like that.

The second week has been much better.  We had a dance last Saturday at which point crystallization occurred and I saw everyone as being part of a shared whole.  We were dancing, breathing, laughing, eating, and relaxing as one living being and then my anxiety dropped away as I noticed myself dancing with everyone else.  That moment was wonderful.  So as the theory has begun to sunk in, now the personalities are starting to become irritating and we are all a little less polite than we were last week.  Things are heating up and I like this because that means we are becoming real and we're about to embark on some real processes. 

I am not sure when I will write again as I have 3 more weeks of the Intensive but for people who have not given up on me, thank you for checking back once in a while.

14 more days

Two weeks ago I gave notice at work.  I have done a lot of delving into the deeper reasons of why I had been unable to do this until that moment two weeks ago.  What I figured out was cathartic and lovely.  The next day I was able to gently approach my bosses and tell them that I was having a hard time getting myself to fit in there.  They nodded in agreement and having essentially given them a script to follow, my boss Brandy said, "Yeah, this place is not for everybody."  We were BFF by the end of the conversation and they were wishing me well with my life endeavors and everything.  It was great.

I have 14 more days of work.  This breaks down into 1 1/2 weeks on, 1 week off, and 2 final weeks on.  My last day is January 20 and on the 21st, I begin a 5 week intensive course at the Process Work Center.  Life just gets better and better.  Process work (also known as process-oriented psychology) is this amazing approach to individual and global change integrating psychology, group dynamics, spirituality, dreams, physical symptomology, addiction, marginalization, body work, and creative expression all rolled into one delicious paradigm.  Ooh, don't get me started, now I'm getting hot and bothered.

Another reason why I love process work is that it is an internationally studied paradigm.  As such, I am housing a woman from Australia during this intensive.  Basically, I will be sleeping, eating, journalling, crying, meditating, singing, breathing, talking, dancing, and pooing process work for 5 weeks.  Then after each day, I'll have someone to decompress it with at home.   Non-stop excitement around here.

Every day that passes brings me closer and closer to leaving the plasma center and diving into a whole new beautiful way of being.  Since giving notice, I have begun to recognize myself again and it is wonderful.  Every day that comes to a close brings with it a lightness that I have not felt in a long time.

14 more days.

 

Final Written Warning

I was written up for the first time today at my plasma job.  First let me remind everyone that I really hate my job.  It is a soul-less and ethically misaligned place run first and foremost by greed.  What reasons I have that keep me there elude me.  The one reason that I can understand why I stay is that if I work there 4 days a week, I can pay my bills and have a little extra left over for fun.  This I think is the only remaining reason why I stay at that joysucking place while I build my practice. 

Here is what happened:  Wednesday nights I am the closer.  Medical staff must stay until the last needle is pulled from the last donor.  We close our doors at 6 pm and I have rarely left after 8:15pm.  At seven o'clock this Wednesday, there were 30 people still waiting to be bled which meant that I'd be there until past 9 pm if I were to stay.  Over the past year of closing Wednesday nights, I have developed a reasonable expectation of leaving at about 8:15 pm.  On this past Wednesday, I realized that this company does not work under reasonable circumstances; if 20 donors were to walk in at 5:55pm, the company policy says that we cannot turn them away.  This is unreasonable to me.  It is unreasonable because the company while they will force us to work 10 hours a day, they will then enforce longer lunches spread out over the next few days to avoid paying overtime.  This chaps my hide.

At 7pm, I informed my boss that as I was only scheduled until 8:30 that evening, and since I had rarely worked past 8:15pm, I had made plans that I could not break at 9pm.  He was visibly unhappy with me. 

Today he called me into the office to discuss what happened.  I apologized to him for not giving him any recourse Wednesday night.  I told him that had I known there was a possibility that we were going to be open past 8pm, I would have told him sooner so that he could find coverage.   What I am realizing about the company is that there is no reasonable hour we can expect to be out of there.  If we agree to close, we agree to stay until the very end.  This is not acceptable to me.  I will not give any extra to a job that does not treat me with respect nor compensate me adequately for hard work. 

My supervisor then handed me a paper documenting what had happened.  At the top the box "Final Written Warning" was checked.  "What does that mean?" I asked.  He said that that means that I cannot ever walk out again (without immediate termination was what he didn't finish saying).  I noticed there were two other boxes he could have checked, "First verbal counsel in writing" and "Second verbal counsel in writing".  I had rocked it straight to the top!  "I feel that is pretty steep and I don't agree with the verbage, Scott, do I get in trouble if I don't sign it?" I asked.  He said that if I didn't agree with it, I didn't have to sign it but that I couldn't ever walk out again.  "It sounds like I can't ever walk out whether I sign it or not," I said.

Perhaps I have turned the plasma center into a metaphor for the world run by greed and exploiting the poor.  There would be no plasma industry if there were no poor people desperate for $20 a pop.  The employees are also part of the exploitative machinery.  The problem with running a business based on a value system that pushes production without regard to the human effort behind the production is that there will be very little morale and a lot of unhappiness and consequently poor production.  Hence, the business plan behind ZLB Plasma Services perfectly described.   

It is so absolutely clear to me that I am long overdue to leave that place.   And yet mysteriously, I persevere.  There must be a reason why I am still there because otherwise I wouldn't be. 

I can't wait to find out what it is.

Thanksgiving 2006

I liked today.  I didn't get out of bed until 9:30 then transferred myself to the couch until noon.  My friends who have been literally all over the world for the last 9 months called and we caught up.  Then my neighbor informed me that she'd been picking my rosemary plant for the last year and then told me she owns an Italian restaurant in the Clinton area and offered me a free pizza.  This pizza will probably have rosemary essence picked from my side yard.  To think my rosemary plant has been feeding people for the last year makes me happy. 

I went to the office to work for about an hour then meditated up in the sanctuary upstairs from my office.  I drove around for fresh chicken for the dog to find that all the good stores were closed.  Then I came home and cooked a feast for Dusty and I finishing just in time to join Katie's family for dessert at her house.  Upon entering her house, Katie's mom Paula told me that I'd never believe what they were doing..I felt a twinge of excitement and waited to hear.  They were watching bull riding which didn't seem too surprising at all for some reason.  Not that they're a family of bullriders nor even rodeo people, it just seemed like something cute that they'd be doing after Thanksgiving dinner.  The desserts were delicious; a chocolate pecan pie to die for balanced by a pumpkin pie made with black strap molasses (for good health) also divine. 

I came home to kick it with the dog some more and to begin the tremendous task of de-cluttering my house of a decade's worth of papers and crap that I have been lugging around with me since college.  The easy part is recycling all the old notes that I will never use again.  The hard part is creating and organizational system for the stuff I want to keep.  Eventually these things will also be thrown away, I am just not ready to do it.  I worked on it for about an hour then watched an annoying episode of Grey's Anatomy.  I swear, Christina Yang is annoying.  Sister has got to represent and grow a backbone so that she's not so co-dependent with her unappreciative (yet so hot!) boyfriend Burke.  The episode was awful because this secret tore a lot of people apart.

So I wanted today to be a day to be thankful for and it has been.  I have wonderful friends, a delightful neighborhood, a career that is about to go off, people that care about me and people that I am crazy about, a roof over my head, clothes on my back, dreams that are coming true, and the most amazing dog in the entire universe.  She has been the most solid, most loyal, most reliable, and most loving presence in my life. 

I am truly blessed.

Fuck You Fucking Fuckheads

I had therapy today.  I have a fantastic therapist.  She has what I call a great "doctor" face meaning I can bust out with the most shocking and crass thing and she keeps her composure as if hearing about dreams of rabbits giving each other blowjobs is the most normal thing in the world.  "What's it like to be a rabbit, Livia?  Go ahead and be one."  Therapy is definitely not a place for the faint of heart.  Where else in my life do I go to a place and willingly talk about my most vulnerable spots and then pay someone for it?  At one point in the session I told my therapist that I feel like I should be mad at my parents for their indiscretions and she said, "Tell me what that would sound like."  "What do you mean?" I asked.  "Like 'Fuck you fucking fuckheads,' " she replied, "or something like that?"  This is why my therapist is the best because how did she come up with that?  That's exactly the thing I want to say to my parents, or should have said to them growing up.  Fuck you, fucking fuckheads.  I love how that sentence doesn't say anything yet perfectly describes 15 year old angst at the same time.  Don't get me wrong, I love my parents but some people just aren't ready to be parents because they themselves haven't taken the time to take care of themselves and figure out how it works for them.  If my parents had been taken care of themselves as children and so could impart a safe and tender environment for their children, or had entered parenthood with awareness of what is ok to expose a child to and what is not ok, would I have turned out the same?  Who knows?  I'm not super mad at them anymore, I have done a ton of work and I have moved forward with my life and strive to be as present with myself as possible.

Still, if the angry 15 year old Livia ever turns up in all her 15 year old wisdom, those magic words will come out of her mouth with fierceness and a smile.

"Fuck you fucking fuckheads."

That'll show them.

 

I Drank Three Cokes

Hi.  I drank 3 cokes today.  Three! I don't know what happens to me when I leave Portland.  Maybe all hell breaks loose and I go on a food/drink rampage of filth.  My first coke was on the flight down to Burbank.  My second coke accompained a Big N' Tasty meal deal from McDonald's (McDonalds!!).  And my third coke I ordered with my delicious Chinese food dinner. 

I am going to hell.

An Earthquake in Stumptown

The news just reported the preliminary magnitude of the earthquake to be 2.7.  That's teensy!  The news guy showed the viewers the seismograph and the tiny disturbance that was our earthquake.   First rain and then un temblorito.  Wee.