BTW – I just created a new blogring… Angry Writers Unite!

What do I want to blog about today?

I feel like the more appropriate question is: What am I allowed to blog about today?  Whenever I arrive for a blogging session, I feel censored.  My husband, my best friend, my children, and a few of my other relatives read this stuff at least once in a while.  I’m not talking only to strangers here.  I have to be careful what I say, what I complain about, what I express.  I have to utilize tact and diplomacy and all that other bullshit.  It’s easier to keep quiet.

People love to talk to me.  Strangers, as well as friends and relatives.  The strangers are the strangest  – the person next to me in line, beside me on a bus, milling about in a crowd – they just open their mouths, start chatting, and next thing you know I have their entire life story.  While all I’ve done is nod my head pleasantly at them and wonder when the hell they’re going to shut up and why are they telling me all this anyway.

Oh, yes, I’m a great listener.  I’m the kind of listener who keeps her own mouth shut.  But the reason I’m not responding IS NOT because I am so completely enthralled by the other person’s story that I’m dumbstruck.  I don’t respond because I’ve learned that other people aren’t good listeners; they don’t want help or advice; they aren’t interested in what my experience has been; no matter what I say to them in return, they will say I’m wrong somehow; or they’ll simply not hear it and go on with their own agenda regardless.  So what’s the point?

It’s easier to keep quiet.

Today is a boxing drills day.  I need to beat someone up very badly.  I’ll do my talking with padded fists, thank you very much.

I’m a tolerant person, I think.  Sure I have opinions about stuff, some of which are not politically correct or otherwise popular, and my opinions of stupid people and old white men are the harshest… but at the same time, I wouldn’t deny anyone the right to live, to earn a living, or to have their own opinion (however wrong it is).

I often say that America is the country where people have the right to be as stupid as they want to be.  And I include myself, too, knowing that to some others, MY opinions may seem stupid.  Of course, those people are wrong, but they have that right.

Plus, although I’m all for honesty in communication, and I’m seldom both good and nice at the same time, I’m also not a mean, confrontational person.  I score high on the introversion scale and generally live and let live.

All this is a long preface for saying this:  I do not have to hang around with or continually do favors for people who do not appreciate my unique perspective or my friendship.  I do not have to expose myself to my every “flaw,” foible, quirk, and eccentricity being pointed out, especially when there are no balancing compliments or kindnesses or favors coming my direction.

I grew up around that sort of bullshit and had no choice about it.  I’ve learned better now and I do have a choice.  I don’t have to listen to how I’m always wrong.  I don’t have to endure constant verbal abuse, neglect, or the ignorance of those who don’t know what they’re talking about. 

What is particularly irritating is when people spend years pushing me away, telling me how I’m not needed, then suddenly begin berating me for not being there to make their lives easier.  Or when my only role in someone’s life is to reflect back what a good loveable person she is, while constantly being told that my own feelings, needs, wants, and conclusions are all wrong.

I’m not talking about any one person – I’m talking about several people with whom I’ve spent a lot of time over my (almost) 45 years of life.  Probably, I’m to blame for some of this – since to some extent we teach people how to treat us – but I claim ignorance.  I haven’t always understand everything I understand now.  Now that I know better, I hope to do better.

If someone doesn’t want my unique and valuable company, so be it.  More power to you.  Have a wonderful life.  Just have it somewhere where I’m not.

I haven’t beat anyone up lately and it’s starting to show.

It felt good to get back in the gym and lift heavy and sweat yesterday after several days of laziness while my husband and I were away for our 26th wedding anniversary.  We went down to Virginia Beach over the weekend and had a nice relaxing time.

To me, a nice relaxing time includes at least one trip to a bookstore.  And almost every trip to the bookstore involves buying a book or magazine related to art or writing.  Over the weekend, I got a couple magazines from Somerset Studios.  They’re all about mixed media, altered books and boxes, and collage, etc. 

So, after reading my magazines, while in the car for the drive home, I began thinking of an altered box collage thingie I could make – something simple and fun to get me started since I haven’t done much of that – despite loving the idea of it.  By the time I got home after the 4 hour car ride, my simple, fun collage had turned into a huge hulking triptych with pop-up elements and animatronics, fancy stuff that I don’t even know how to implement.

When I told Terri about this, she had the perfect analogy:
“Why build a battery if we can build a nuclear generator … never mind that we CAN’T build a nuclear generator, once we’ve got the idea, the battery has lost all it’s appeal.”

Yep.  That sums it up perfectly and explains why I haven’t started any mixed media collage thingies yet.

But I’ve got the dogs outside working on the foundation for that nuclear generator even as I type this.

When I was a kid, I watched wrestling on Saturday with my dad.  I’d wrestle with Rusty, the boy next door,  pretending we had a ring and audience.  Sometimes, we played Batman and Robin (tho’ I was forbidden to watch the TV show).  Sometimes, we played war, shooting at each other with plastic toy guns or even using sticks for rifles.

One day, Rusty brought over a book about karate.  The black and white pictures showed all the punches and moves, and we tried to practice them on each other.

This was the early 1970s, remember.  In rural Arkansas.  I was about 10 years old or thereabouts.

I asked my mother if I could take karate lessons.  No, she said.  We shouldn’t be fighting at all.  We should be kind and loving to each other, not always studying on how to hurt each other.

So all my adult life, I longed to take some version of martial arts training, but I had 3 small kids to raise, and I got fat, and we moved every few years (being in the Air Force), so I just never got to do that… I always put it off as a reward for when I lost the weight.  I assumed (wrongly) that I had to be fit first – that I would be turned away (or laughed at) showing up for karate class at 100 lbs overweight.

Anyway, cut to fall 2005 when I’m 42 years old.  I hire a personal trainer at the gym I just joined.  He happens to be a kickboxer.  So for part of our training together, he teaches me to punch the focus mitts, move around the room, and I love it.

“I just want to beat people up,” I tell him.  He laughs.  He enjoys my enthusiasm.

Cut to January 2008.  After attending BodyPump classes to get myself back into the exercise routine, I decide to hire my old trainer again, but this time doing only kickboxing. 

“I just want to beat people up,” I tell him again.  He’s still amused.

So for 12 1-hour sessions, he trains me in punching, footwork, defense, and I love it.  It gets my heartrate going as strong as the treadmill, but it’s way more fun.  I can pummel the dummy, get out all my aggression, then sit in the steam room or sauna afterwards, feeling wonderful.

My new trainer at a new gym is a karate black belt.  She’s a tiny little thing and she loves how strong I am, how much heavy iron I can lift, how hard I can punch.  I love it too.

I’m probably too old to ever be a contender for a title belt or go pro.  But who really knows what the future holds?  Right now, I’m just tickled to be beating up a rubber person until the sweat is pouring off me like rain.  It’s glorious.

I keep saying I’m going to blog more often, then I don’t.  Wazzup widdat?

Anyway, we all have issues.  We all have some degrees of hang-ups, dysfunction, eccentricities.  Even when we’ve spent a lifetime working on them, they never quite go away completely, just only hide below the surface ready to pop up like that mangy little critter in the Whack-a-Mole game – and you have to thump him a good one to get him back in line.

Only sometimes, it’s like we’re wearing special glasses that prevent us from seeing the mole that pops up in front of us, although it’s quite easy to see the moles popping up on other people’s games.

It’s that fish in the fishbowl thing.  Does the fish know he’s living in water?  No, the water is part of his normal environment.  It’s all he knows, and he doesn’t recognize that the water stops only inches in front of his gills.  That is, until he runs into the glass and gets a fat lip.

Lately, my mole is the old co-dependency issue.  Co-dependency covers a wide range of misery-making behaviors, from being an overachieving people-pleaser to being a know-it-all xenophobe.  Both sides of co-dependency coin like to focus on fixing others.  I tend toward the latter syndrome.  And it’s easy to try to fix someone else’s problem without even knowing that’s what I’m doing.  It’s easy to fall into the pattern of making life easier for that other person, offering endless suggestions and answers, without ever realizing that by doing so, I’m making myself miserable and resentful rather than taking care of my own needs in the first place.

I know where my moles come from.  I know what triggers them to pop up.  I know how to whack ‘em back down again.  And I’m much happier after giving them all a good thumping and getting on with the business of me.