WHY THE MIRROR DOESN'T LIE. Unless it does.

Even if you have never heard of Snow White and the 7 Dwarves (???) there is no way you have never heard the line, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”  This seems like an okay question to ask a mirror, I think.  I mean, a mirror gets a LOT of customers and MUST have some kind of opinion, right?  But the trouble comes, at least for Snow White, when the mirror tells the truth.  Instead of kissing the Queen’s ass, the mirror offers an honest assessment that hey actually, her stepdaughter is edging her out in the looks department.  And Snow White IS pretty cute!  But would it have killed the mirror to be a little nicer about it?  The Queen isn’t exactly someone to sneeze at, and it would have saved Snow White AND the Queen herself a world of hurt if the mirror could have told what amounts to a little “snow white” lie, see?  So what gives?

I personally enjoy playing a  game I call good mirror/bad mirror.  Whenever I look in any mirror anywhere, I form an opinion of ITS worthiness based on how I look in it.  I turn the tables on the mirror, if you will.  If the mirror doesn’t make me look like the fairest (or slimmest) of them all, then I proclaim it a “bad mirror”.  But if I look pretty good if I do say so myself, then that is a “good mirror”.  See, it’s the mirror’s fault!  And all those “bad” mirrors are clearly just bald faced liars looking for a rumble.  Too bad about the fluorescent lighting and the extra slice of pizza, mirror!  I look puffy and washed out and it’s ALL YOUR FAULT!!!  BWAH HA HA HA HA!  That was my evil Disney Queen laugh, btw.

Have you ever looked at yourself in a fun house mirror?  The ones that can make your legs look two feet long and your torso unending, or give you a giant head and tiny body, or make you hugely fat or disgustingly skinny?  It’s funny, right?  Sometimes you stand and kick those little short legs and laugh, or wag a super long finger in front of your elongated nose.  We enjoy the bizarre images because we KNOW they are not the “truth”…we know we don’t actually look like a space alien, but instead like a denizen of planet earth.  So now I have a challenge for you:  can you decide that ALL mirrors are fun house mirrors?  That what you see reflected back is quite unlike what anyone else sees when they look at you?

I have had days when I leave the house feeling great about myself, only to catch a glimpse of my reflection in a car window that turns my mood upside down…how can I look like THAT???  I looked so good in my bathroom mirror (GOOD MIRROR!) but I look so bad in the car window (BAD MIRROR!).  And I let it spoil my mojo.  Instead of feeling confident, like I did only seconds before, I feel self-conscious.  Self-loathing.  I want to fix my hair, get some botox, change my clothes.  I want to change how I look to change how I feel.  But a) that is always a temporary and transient fix, because another bad mirror could lurk around the next corner and b) do I even have any idea how I look, really?  Do ANY of us?

I was cuddling my son before bed one night and I asked him, “Why are you so beautiful?” and he answered, without a moment of hesitation, “Because I came out of YOU.  You have no idea how beautiful you are.”  Now, I could rationalize this and say, “Well, he’s my baby, of course he thinks I’m beautiful”, or I could generalize this and walk out into the world with a new perspective.  A new perspective that says, “I have no idea how beautiful I am, and NEITHER DO OTHERS REALIZE HOW BEAUTIFUL THEY ARE.”  We have all experienced this with teenagers, when they wear that self-conscious misery on their sleeves and you just want to shake them by the shoulders and yell, “You are so fresh, young and lovely!  BE HAPPY, GODDAMMIT!”  But we have also had a super model friend tell us how “fat” she feels, a handsome and charming man bemoan his balding pate, a woman with a radiant complexion flip out over an imperceivable blemish.  Be happy, goddamit.  All of us.

Photoshop, stop messing with everybody.  "They give those nice bright colors, give us the greens of summers, make us think all the world's a sunny day"...but hey, I've actually met you, and you don't actually look like that picture you are so proud of; you look like you.  I love your crooked teeth, I love your sparkling eyes, I love that little hitch in your walk that you don't notice but allows me to recognize you at 100 paces.  You are more beautiful than you know.  The mirror can't properly reflect that, and neither can a picture.  It can only be seen in another person's eyes.  It can only be known deep in your soul.  You have no idea how beautiful you are, but the time has come to learn.  Even if it feels like a lie at first, remind yourself that the "truth" did not work out so well for the Queen.  Would it kill you to be a little nicer to yourself?  And to the mirrors of the world:  how about you take your opinion and shove it?  The view in here is just fine, thank you very much.

 

 

Why You Are Never Finished

You are never finished.  This may sound scary, stressful and tiring, but it is actually very, very exciting news.  We are such a goal driven society, reaching for accomplishments, milestones, rewards, MORE, and that does leave us feeling exhausted and ironically, empty.  But I am talking about something quite different here…I am not talking prizes, acquisitions or accolades; I am talking about YOU.  The amazing and endless human creature that you are.  YOU are never finished.  You are an ever expanding circle of light, abundant and curious and joyful.  You are inclusive of all things, dark and light, good and bad, high and low.  There is always MORE of you to be discovered, to be experienced.  And make no mistake, it is a discovery, not an invention.  You are all there, all the time, and all you are doing is constantly remembering and re-remembering that.

The best and most effective way we do this is through relationships.  People think of marriage as a fusing of sorts, a uniting of two people into a whole; I say that is not unique to the marriage relationship in the least.   When we connect with another human being we are fused for life, whether we ever see each other again physically (or these days, virtually) or not.  Relationships change us immediately and irrevocably.  Once I have met you, I can never again experience anything in the world as if I had not, and the longer the relationship lasts, the more and more and more I include you.  I am no longer myself without you.  You have become a filter through which I see the world, so I can never see the world the exact same way again.

Consider your parents; this is an obvious choice, as you actually are a fusion of them and you have internalized them in both a literal and figurative embodiment.  But who among us does not carry the voices of our parents (or whoever raised us) around in our heads ALL the time?  So many of our choices have been guided by them, both consciously and unconsciously.  I know people who seem to have lived their whole lives as a reaction AGAINST their parents, and I know people who have lived their whole lives as homage to them.  Parents are with us in every moment, as they are the people who, well…PROGRAMMED us, for lack of a better word.  Hopefully in mostly good ways.  They taught us to walk, talk, tie our shoelaces, ride our bikes; they engendered a love of reading or sports or nature or maybe all of the above.  They are as much a part of us as water is part of the ocean.  We are swirled together forever.

Now think about your friends…the musician you reference when you listen to a song, the doctor you call when you are sure you have a tumor, the teacher whose stories make you feel so much, much better about your own kids.  Or not.  But whoever they are, and whatever they do, they play into how you think, how you approach the world, how you perceive different situations.  The unique perspective they have shared with you has transformed your own; you can never eat a salad without thinking about what your gardener buddy has told you about pesticides or growing heirloom tomatoes.  Every time you read a book a friend recommended, you read it with them; why did they like it?  What clues to their personality are hidden in the story?  Every time you go to a restaurant you went to with your chums, you are there with them again…every time you drive down his street, hear that song or remember her story.  We carry our loved ones around with us all the time.

They say white is the color we see when all colors on the spectrum are present simultaneously; I say this is a good definition of God.  When all things are present simultaneously, the slate is completely clean.  When we include all things, we know God.  And that is what our relationships are for, even (and possibly especially) our challenging ones.  As we incorporate more and more and more of others into ourselves, we become more and more and more inclusive…closer to the entire spectrum, closer to God.  Even your cantankerous old uncle with the appalling political beliefs (or religious beliefs, or prejudices) that you have to kiss on the cheek every Thanksgiving is bringing you closer to knowing wholeness.  We are all necessary, we are all in this together and we are all helping each other every minute of every day whether we are trying (or want to) or not.  So keep on loving (or hating) every single person you meet.  That feeling you have for them means you are carrying them with you.  You are becoming more complete.  But wonderfully, you will never be finished.  Because someone and something new awaits you around each and every corner.

WHY GODZILLA NEEDS A LITTLE MORE R-E-S-P-E-C-T

I just saw Godzilla.  Maybe you are thinking about going to see it too?  Giant monster destroying cities, what is not to love, am I right???  Well, just in case it is on your bucket list, you can go ahead and stop reading this.  Stop reading now.  Unless you want a total blow-by-blow breakdown of why it TOTALLY SUCKED. Or blew, your choice.

Not the monster itself, of course.  The monster was great!!!  And in a neat twist on the old Godzilla premise, he is actually one of the good guys!  “WHAT?????” you say?  "Godzilla is a GOOD GUY????  Doesn’t that make him TOTALLY UNSCARY????"  In a word, YES.  Yes, it does.  But he was still great.  Lovely to look at, and all that.

Not so lovely to look at was Bryan Cranston’s wig.  Wtf was that?  They drop 100 million dollars and can’t manage to scrounge up a convincing hairpiece?  Seriously, it was a good thing he (spoiler alert) DIED so early in the film without resolving any of his open ended plot points because all I could think about when he was onscreen was the hedgehog on his head.  And let’s address the “15 years later” moment when we all breathed a sigh of relief, thinking this MUST be the explanation for the bad rug, because “15 years later” he will be losing his hair and look like a normal person again.  But wait a minute…wait a fucking minute here…”15 years later” after living through a nuclear incident, the devastating loss of his wife and the stress of trying to discover the truth behind what really happened, the man is still in full follicle.  That ridiculous thing is still in residence on his scalp.  Did I say wtf yet?

So the lead of the movie, after several red herrings with talented stars we recognize, was some kid I’ve never seen before.  Now, that does not mean he is not a star; he may very well be.  But I don’t have a clue in the universe who he is and after watching him for 2+ hours, I don’t care to know.  Were the charismatic leads all booked?  Or did they get a load of the FUCKING AWFUL script and allow the best boy’s nephew to take over the role?  I didn’t care if this kid lived or died, and that would have been fun if he had actually gotten eaten or something good like that.  But he managed to survive being 5 minutes away from a nuclear blast that would have made Hiroshima “look like a firecracker” completely unscathed.  Darn the luck!  And the writing.

He was also briefly teamed up with a nameless Asian child for no discernable reason.  No point to it, making it seem both vaguely racist and also from some previous version of the script.  Maybe this was a tip of the hat to “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom”?  Maybe the name “Ford” was a tip of the hat to Harrison?  Maybe I don’t care in the least.  Actually, there was a LOT of hat tipping, from “Jaws” to “Jurassic Park” (hmmm, perhaps this was meant as homage to Spielberg?) but sadly all it did was remind me that this was not “Jaws” or “Jurassic Park” and it was a damn crying shame, too.  My kingdom for a “Smile, you son-of-a-bitch” moment!  This movie was more akin to “Airplane” than any of the classic creature features, mainly because I could not stop thinking to myself, “I guess I picked the wrong day to quit sniffing glue!”

And how about the other monsters?  I know, I know, GODZILLA is monster enough for ANYBODY…except these particular film makers, who thought they would throw in a little CGI lameness to spice up the proceedings and give Godzilla a formidable foe or two.  You know, I could watch Godzilla take down the Golden Gate Bridge all day long, folks!  Godzilla wreaking havoc with his giant Godzilla-ness would have been good enough for me, especially if there were a little heart and characters I felt for…but NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!  They had to throw in this interminable plot about the other (much faker, much less interesting) monsters.  I would like right now to offer some kudos to Ken Watanabe, who seemed as bored and frustrated as I was.  Thanks, Ken, I appreciate your empathy!!!  Next time don’t trick me into seeing a shitty movie with your respectable name!  Double that to YOU, Mr. David Straithairn!!!

I recently saw “Sharknado” and was amazed at how sharks flying out of the sky and swallowing people whole could seem dull.  But “Sharknado” was Mardi Gras compared to this thing.  Godzilla, Hollywood has DONE YOU WRONG.  You didn’t deserve it in the least, ESPECIALLY now that we know you are actually one of the GOOD GUYS.  Hey buddy, whadda you say you wreak a little havoc in tinsel town, see if you can’t scare up some decent scripts and actors with a little self-respect.  And charisma, while you are at it.  For all your good intentions, you are still a pretty intimidating character, after all.  Don’t be shy, go ahead and ask for what you want, which at the end of the day is just a little respect, am I right?  For your fans and moviegoers, too.

WHY IT'S NOT EASY BEING GREEN (but it's okay)

When I was in the 6^th grade, someone called me a frog.  Don’t get me wrong; although this was clearly a lowlight of that year, I remember 6^th grade as generally being the deepest depths of adolescent misery, so being compared to an amphibian was simply adding insult to injury.  In defense of the (mean!) person who (actually implied) this, I was not a pretty thing to look at.  I was starting puberty and my lanky body was quite suddenly lumpy.  The glasses I wore “for distance” abruptly became the glasses I wore “all the time”.  And I had braces.  And for some reason, I decided this was the perfect time to cut my long blonde hair short.  It was an awkward stage, to put it mildly.  To make matters worse, we had just moved to a new town and a new school and I had all the wrong clothes and an (understandably) terrible attitude.  Ah, youth!

So my parents enrolled me in Wednesday night CCD classes at our church, as if things weren’t bad enough.  You’d have to know my parents to understand why they thought this would be a good place for me to make friends and integrate into our new community; you’d have to know me to understand why it was not.  The night “it” happened, the teachers challenged us to be more like Jesus…music to a preteen’s ears!  Ha.  Their suggestion for how to do this was to “kiss a frog”.  You know, like in the frog prince.  Just because someone isn’t good looking, doesn’t have the right clothes and isn’t cool doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy of attention and possibly even affection.  Even a frog might have some kind of value.  So after class, as I was waiting for my parents to pick me up, one of the most beautiful and popular girls in my school came over and said “hi” to me.  And I said “hi” back.  But inside, I was sick.  Because I fully understood what had just happened…that beautiful and popular girl had just kissed a frog.

I’m not popular.  I’ve never been popular.  By the time I was in 8th grade I had contacts, the braces came off, my hair grew in and my body normalized back to lanky.  I had a lot of wonderful friends, many of whom still bless my life today.  Even the beautiful and popular girl who had wounded me so badly and I were on good terms.  But I still wasn’t popular. Because being popular (at least in the “popular” sense of the word) is not about being well liked and socially accepted; popular is a state of being.  Because being popular, (contrary to “popular” opinion), is not so much about beauty, brains, clothes, cars, fads or trends…it’s about the place you sit in your soul and how you move in this world.  If you are popular, you can’t disguise it, not even in a Wal-Mart leotard.  You’re wearing it?  That automatically makes it COOL.

The same goes for being a nerd.  If you are a nerd, you have nerdism in your very soul.  Sorry about that.  You can try to dress that shit up, but it still smells, looks, tastes and feels nerdy.  All those “geek to chic” movies are selling you a bill of goods.  You ARE a NERD, to the very core of your being, and ain’t nothing going to change that.  Nothing you can add to your outside, anyway.  And I like nerds!  I am personally more of a geek than a nerd, but I still have a soft spot in my heart for any teenager who carries a briefcase or wears a pocket protector.  We need you nerds!  Never change!  And let’s face it, you probably couldn’t even if you wanted to…psych!

We are all, to some degree or another, playing with the hand we got dealt; some of us are traditionally beautiful, but most of us, not so much.  A few people are truly brilliant, some really smart and then…there’s the rest of the planet.  There are athletes and mathletes, freaks and geeks (no, not the same thing), Gingers and Mariannes, Studs and Duds, frogs and princes, Hillarys and…Kardashians.  That’s what makes a horse race, friends!  And there is the degree to which we self-identify and accept who we are, and then there is the degree to which we struggle against our own nature our whole lives.  Because we have been appraised of the differences and which ones are deemed “good” and which ones are deemed “bad” and we all want to be ALL GOOD, ALL the TIME.  At least in other people’s opinions, if not our own. 

But you know what?  I AM A GEEK.  I get ridiculously excited watching “Sherlock” on PBS, I still kind of love the Monkees, the 70’s were my favorite decade to date and Stephen King (the MASTER of ALL GEEKS) is my most preferred living author.  Ha ha ha!  See???  GEEK CITY.  And I have learned to love that about myself, why not? I’ll never be interested in fashion (Zzzzz), I am ALWAYS going to be WAY behind on any hot trends (because wtf???), and I am never going to care about the kind of car you drive or how much money you make.  I am only impressed or pleased by WHO YOU ARE, not anything you added on to yourself.  The great news?  I’ve found that “who most people are” is pretty damned endearing and often very interesting.  I really do genuinely like the vast majority of people I meet.  Total geek thing to say, I know.

See, that is the real message of the frog prince…it is always about what is going on inside of you, not outside, that really counts.  If you can live up to your own standards and let people have their own without (too much) judgment, then you are going to be a pretty happy person.  If you go to bed at night knowing you did alright by your inner geek or freak or nerd or diva or Type-A or FROG or whatever you truly are, then you are going to be content.  Trying to twist yourself into a format you were never meant to live by will bring you nothing but confusion and frustration.  Figure out who you REALLY are (you already know, come on!!!) and go there.  Go there without concern for what others will think because it doesn’t matter.  If they want to spoil their day thinking about how much they disapprove of you, that is their loss.

WHY YOUR INNER "DISNEY PRINCESS" ROCKS!!!

Years ago when we were all still single, a girlfriend of mine developed a humorous theory that women follow a dating template based on their favorite Disney movie relationship.  Girls who loved Cinderella were hardworking optimists who were not opposed to being swept off their feet.  Girls who loved Little Mermaid might change who they are to suit their man.  Girls who loved Belle from Beauty and the Beast were fiercely intelligent, brave and willing to take on a challenge.  Ladies who loved tramps…well, you know who you are. 

She had a lot of fun questioning all of us about our favorite film without revealing her premise until AFTER we had explained the attachment.  And you know what?  In her small case study, women did pretty consistently conform to their favorite Disney heroine’s path.  At least, until she asked me.

You want to know what my favorite Disney movie was growing up?  The Sword and the Stone. 

When I made this response to her inquiry, I saw real concern develop in her brow.  “But why?” she asked, genuinely perplexed, “I mean, what is it that appeals to you so much?”  I answered with complete enthusiasm, “It’s about a kid who lives with his Uncle and his cousin and they treat him like a servant and call him Wart but then MERLIN teaches him magic and he pulls the sword out of the stone and becomes the KING OF ENGLAND!!!” 

Now, if you don’t know me, you might think this blows her theory totally out of the water.  But while I will not speak for any of my ex-boyfriends, I am pretty sure my husband thinks not only that I might have some magical powers, but also that he is, in fact, married to the King of England.  Ha.

Albert Einstein once said, “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”  The stories that resonate with us as children are the stories that speak to our souls, to who-we-really-are, and to who we hope to become. 

As a Mom I have had the pleasure of re-reading some of my favorite childhood books with my son and it has been a powerful and moving experience to be sure.  I loved “The Wind in the Willows” as a child, but as an adult I am going to posit that it may be the greatest children’s book ever written.  It hits all of the right notes, from self-acceptance and self-expression to cooperation, sharing, taking risks, knowing God as all-encompassing…but to a child, it is a charming adventure of animals living on a riverbank.  I was in awe reading it again as to how it spoke to my life path and the many relationships and other “adventures” I have experienced.

I will tell you what got me thinking about all of this: the post “How Disney Sabotaged Our Love Lives” on the HuffPo.   It compelled me to write this as some kind of rebuttal.  First of all, other than the title, there is barely a mention of Disney, per se, and how can one blame an institution for high divorce rates and then provide such scant evidence?  The real title of this article should have been “How the notion of a soul mate sabotaged our love lives” and I say PHOOEY ON THAT!

Soul mates rock!!!!  And most of us have a plethora of them, not just that antiquated notion of a one-true-love.  Soul mates are people you recognize instantly; you have that shock of “Oh, there you are!” with a total stranger.  And it is not only NOT exclusively a romantic attachment, it is USUALLY not…most of my best friends in the world are people with whom I had an instant click, a sense of home, of belonging.  The notion that hoping to marry a soul mate is somehow destructive to your romantic dreams is kind of mean-spirited, IMHO.

A thing that speaks to your soul, whether it be a book, movie, song, painting or person…these are the things that matter most in this world.  Without them, we are lost.  These are talisman, markers on our path that tell us we are headed in the right direction, that keep us on course, that remind us to hope for the best but also know we have the resources to handle the worst. 

Your soul is that most amazing and resilient piece of you, both highly individualized and yet connected to every living thing on earth.  When it is activated by anything…your work, your play, your relationships, your religion…this is a very, very good thing, the best possible thing in fact.  Disney does not sabotage us any more than any other piece of art, if it resonates with us. 

Just, as I am living proof of, not all girls are destined to be princesses.  Some of us are kings.

WHY A GIANT ZIT CAN RUIN YOUR DAY

Damn, I have a giant zit.  I have had it for three days now and it does not appear to be getting any smaller.  If it were any bigger, in fact, it could declare for secession.  And I would welcome that, because it is disgusting, disfiguring and all I can see when I look in the mirror.  Plus a little tender, you know?   I am no teenager and I declare this zit to be “off sides”.  I cannot be dealing with middle-aged neck and acne at the same time!  It is causing a rip in the space/time continuum of my life and nothing will feel quite right again until it is completely gone.

HA HA HA HA, you probably think I am joking, but sadly…I am not.  I can be pretty Zen and wise when my skin is clear, but WHOO!  This blemish has put my spiritual evolution on the backburner, you know?  So the question is, WHY IS THAT?  Why do we day after day and week after week deal with crisis after crisis—illness, death, divorce, job loss, money problems, natural disasters, unnatural disasters—and we keep our feet on the ground, our eye on the ball and persevere?  But a broken dish, a dropped call, a GIANT ZIT…these can derail us and send us into a tailspin.  Does any of this sound familiar yet?  You get through a giant presentation with flying colors, and then snap at your kid for spilling cheerios?  Because stress is stress is stress and stress will OUT ITSELF, whether we like it or not.  Sometimes in the form of a GIANT ZIT.

We all have coping mechanisms and crisis modes, ways in which we get through those things we absolutely, crucially have to get through…and we all have ways which we retreat, lick our wounds, duck and cover.  In general, this is a GOOD thing, and part and parcel of the grand charade we call “being human”.  But I recently read about a study that was done which concluded, in part, that we humans have a somewhat limited supply of what we would call “self-discipline” and that is why the containment of one addiction often leads to the blossoming of another.  We are simply not hard-wired for a monkish existence.  We need to get our FREAK ON, one way or another.  So I say, this applies to stress as well.  There is only so much we can take before something’s gotta give.  In my case, it is the integrity of my pores.

So the next time you are absolutely jonesing for a piece of chocolate cake, remember the 400 things you did NOT let yourself have and the 400 ways you exercised self-discipline and realize—one piece of cake isn’t going to kill you.  And next time a broken shoelace reduces you to tears, remember all the times you were strong for the people you loved when they needed you to be and go ahead, have a good cry.  And the next time you have a GIANT ZIT and want to obsess over it, remember how many things—hurt feelings, broken dreams, irreparable relationships--you have had to let go over the years, and hang on.  Hang on to that stupid zit for dear life.  Because if we are going to manage all of the big stuff that gets thrown at us every day, we sometimes need a good old-fashioned distraction.  Like a giant zit.  But I highly recommend a great book or movie, if that will work instead.  Less disfiguring, you know?

Why My Life is HORRIFYING!

What makes a person LOVE being horrified?  What makes a person CRAVE the experience of FEAR?  Why do I cackle with glee when a horny teenager is impaled through the throat with a corkscrew, when others would visibly wince and look away with disgust?  These are probably good questions for a trained clinical psychologist, but screw all of that fancy schooling, I am going to go ahead and take a “stab” at what makes a true horror buff:  courage.  The deep seated need to be brave in the face of all that revulses, repulses, revolts and reviles.  Horror buffs are armed (metaphorically speaking in most cases, thank God) and dangerous (again.)  There is something that speaks to our very souls in looking the worst possible case scenario in the face and…laughing.  Crazy.  Sick.  I know what you are thinking.  Unless you are just like me.

I trace my love of fear to my earliest childhood memories.  When I was a toddler, my family lived in a house that had the misfortune of having a stream in the backyard.  My actual memories of said stream are nil, but my actual memories of my sibling’s tales about the stream are crystal clear.  This being the 70’s, and me being a baby, my Mom did very little actual supervision of my activities.  HA HA HA HA, just kidding Mom!  By today’s standards, I mean.  So instilling a healthy fear of the stream was wisely delegated to my older siblings.  Who were older enough to be a) kind of twisted and b) very accurate in guessing what exactly would keep my berth from said body of water as wide as possible.  They told me a monster lived in it.  Yup, they went Scotland on my ass, and I bought the tale hook, line and sinker.  Older siblings suck, but often in an incredibly useful way.

So there I am,  at the full and ripe old age of three, terrified of the backyard.  One of my most vivid memories of childhood is being “out there” with my older sister who, in her defense, was 13 and clearly hormonal.  She received a “very important” phone call and left me alone for what was probably minutes but felt like hours.  Hours and hours.  Hours and hours of standing, scanning the horizon for signs that the monster had in fact emerged from it’s lair, ready to feast on a plump and rosy little blonde.  Who was left waiting, a sitting duck for sure.  I shudder to remember those moments, my eyes splitting time between the back door (from which my sister might emerge at any moment to rescue me) and the back yard (clearly a haven for beasts from beyond).  Good times!  Childhood is such a lark, right???

But that was not the only way in which I was traumatized by my siblings.  My brother, only ten at the time, felt it was highest hilarity to deliberately lure me into compromising situations…involving the TV.  Being a toddler as I was, I harbored a great love for “Underdog”; being a toddler as I was, I also harbored a tremendous fear of the monster who emerged from behind buildings to grip Underdog in its sweaty palm during the opening credits.  My solution was to hide behind the green chair in the living room until the credits were over.  My mistake was allowing my brother to coax me out from behind the green chair…just in time to see the monster grip Underdog in its sweaty palm.  I don’t know what it is about being three that makes one so gullible, but my recollection is that I fell for this "prank" on an embarrassing number of occasions.  My brother has a great innocent looking face, and when he told me the monster was finished, I too frequently believed him.  And LOOK AT ME NOW.

I was primed for fear.  Primed to be afraid.  I suffer from a total recall of my cousin George repeatedly informing me on April Fool’s Day that I had a spider on my back.  I was in preschool, so each time he said it, I believed it.  A dozen times over the course of one day.  Damn, little kids are dumb, am I right?  But I was plugged into fear.  In those same years, my brother was a fan of the serial “Dark Shadows”.  I remember being both attracted and repulsed by it, hiding behind the same green chair, peeking out for moments and hiding my eyes and plugging my ears for others.  For whatever the reason, fear was my guide and my mentor.  Remember Kevin McAllister in “Home Alone”, with his (totally rational, imho) fear of the basement and his creepy neighbor?  Well, put the kid on steroids and you have me, from my very earliest memories and recollections.

I could go on and on about this but for now  I would simply like to say that my life has been HORRIFYING.  And I like it like that.  Would you know what to do if the inevitable zombie apocalypse were to suddenly occur?  I WOULD.  Would you be able to handle the very delicate real estate dilemma if say, a vampire moved in next door?  I WOULD.  Would you have a clue as to how to effectively alert the authorities if the madman you had been supervising in a high security mental facility were to escape?  I WOULD.  I am prepared, people!  When I hear a strange noise in the basement, do I cower under the covers and hope it is nothing?  NO WAY!!!  I make lots of noise myself, turn on lots of lights and go to confront said noise because I already have my escape route carefully mapped out.  Being  afraid can be fun sometimes, but also empowering.  So next time you enjoy the sensation of your stomach in your throat on a rollercoaster, just realize this:  you are I aren’t as different as you think.