Bailout Plan

This is my co-worker’s reply to an e-mail string about the bailout. I liked it so much, I decided to post it!

This is so lame. Those poor executives are in the same boat as the rest of us. Most of them have multiple huge houses, vacation homes, butlers, maids, chauffeurs, credit card wielding trophy partners, kids, mistresses and sycophants to support. They need obscene amounts of money to pay for all that and to bribe members of the government, ooops I mean “lobby” for their special interests. Have a heart for those guys. Sure they were giddy with power and greed and drove the economy into the ground; but so would any one of us if we had that amount of power and wealth at our disposal. Give ‘em a break. Vote bailout!

Today

Today I said “Bye” to a connection that was very precious and special to me. Its time was up… But how it hurts… I have been crying for the last 4 hours or, and it is yet to get any better. My tears are very salty tonight, and there are so many of them…

Pain is painful… It is dark waves swirl throughout the body, and occasionally its claws make it to the heart. Sometimes it cannot do much more than sink its claws into your heart, and quickly remove the claws; retreat away, only to repeat the maneuver again and again, but not for that long. Other times the pain grabs a hold of your heart, and while squeezing it tightly with one hand, it rakes your heart with the other hand.. For hours… Today it is the later for me….

Random Rambling

It is true that I write about pain often and a lot. I am intimately familiar with pain, many shades and layers of it. My pain has very disturbing images, bad memories, memory flashes that can come out nowhere. For me, pain isn’t an abstract idea, or an academical abstract to masturbate over. My pain is part of my core, and at times it makes me want to howl because there doesn’t seem to be any more space left inside my body to accommodate the pain.

At the same time, I am very upbeat person. And I am also a pretty resilient as well. I am inclined to believe that my basic nature is to be a clown; being silly comes very natural to me, it feels comfortable, and easy.

Rarely do my pain and my upbeat personality work together, instead they prefer to dominate me on their own, by taking turns. Sometimes they are nice about taking turns, and at times they aren’t. With me getting caught in a middle it can be pretty hilarious. Case in point, when I started writing this post, I had tears on my eyes. I am getting near the end of the post, and I am laughing…

Prayers For My Soul

I got a call from a dear friend of mine, whom I met at religious seminary for women back in Israel. My friend went from being a typical Jewish American kid with no Jewish identity whatsoever (all the while she is a deeply spiritual person, and her search for spirituality has led her to Buddhism, exploring India in search for a deeper meaning, and etc) to discovering Orthodox Judaism, and becoming a very Observant Jew today. And when I say she is Observant, I mean she went for the entire nine yards: ritual washing of hands when she gets up, saying prayers over everything (and I mean everything), keeping kosher, and going to sleep with a prayer on her lips. A very structured life… Believe you me, since I have lived that life myself!

During our conversation my friend wanted to know if I am even less Observant than when we spoke last time. Upon hearing my answer “Yes, I am not Observant at all nowadays”, she told me that she would pray for my soul every day. Naturally I had wanted to know why she thought that my soul needed prayers. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for prayers, if people want to pray for me, by all means, go for it! The answer I got went like this “Observant way of life is the absolute truth in the realm. Your soul must be suffering greatly when you choose to be non- Observant, and therefore I will pray so that you return to the true path.”

That answer made me mad; I was getting an image of myself with smoke coming out of my ears. The smoke does come out my ears when I am faced with such rigid statements. It is great that Observant lifestyle worked for my friend. I think it is absolutely amazing that she was finally able to find a place and structure that helps her to blossom. Yet that same structure almost destroyed me. I ballooned to 310 lbs while living that lifestyle, which essentially turned out to be something that holds very little meaning to me. Not all of my weight gain came from becoming dissolution with Observant world and way of life, but the weight gain was one of the voices of my inner world trying to tell me that I was unhappy, but couldn’t admit it for such a long time, and therefore relied on external to shut down the voice in my head.

At the end of our conversation I asked my friend if she recalled a particular lecture at our school that deals with an idea how external represents the internal. If my external was so unhealthy looking, while I was part of the “true” structure, why is that my external is getting slim and hot now when I said “good bye” to that true structure? Seriously, when did my soul needed prayers the most?

My Body

I am finally working up the nerve to write about my body. How I feel about now versus how I felt about it before. My relationship to my own body, my connection to it, or lack of. What I think of it, what do I want to do with it, how it affect my moods, how it is connected to my emotions and my spiritual, mental, inner and emotional worlds.

With me going through this major physical transformation, where I have gone from 310 lbs to current 215 lbs, working towards the final goal of 135 lbs, I find myself looking, touching, thinking about my body a lot! It is on my mind so much that I felt it is time to blog about it!

What Do I Want?

It isn’t really what do I want, it is more who do I want? I want a faithful friend in my life. Someone who is intense, yet laid back; cynical, but innocent; crazy, nevertheless sane. A friend to hold, hug, and do spontaneous things with… A two way street connection where we can laugh together, share secrets with each other, gossip, argue, dance, make fun of each other and the world, unload emotional baggage… Share a conversation that will just go on, and on, without beginning, without ending… Someone who can be real with me, and allow me to be real in return

Where are you, my friend?

Tears And Life On Tilt

I have been crying quite a lot lately. Tonight I am crying over the ugly and beautiful inside of me that has completely interwoven with one another. I am crying over the sad place I find myself in. I am crying because if I don’t cry tonight, I won’t be able to put on my bubble personality tomorrow. I am crying because right now I find my life on tilt. If I was playing a poker, I could just walk away from a game. How do I walk away from my life?

Confusions In My Life

Lately I have been finding myself in various states of confusion. There are events/interactions/meetings taking place that are leaving me puzzled. I am trying to just breathe and figure out what it is that I need for myself. I try to listen to what I feel, where I feel, and processes my emotions/feelings instead of acting out on them… which is what I often do… And while I can identify what I feel, that knowledge brings me no solutions…

A close friend of mine shuts me out without any warning because I deleted what I thought was a rude comment made about another friend of mine. And that is from someone whom I thought I had instant connection with. A year of shared memories, meals, pains, tears, giggles, laughter, secrets… all that down the drain in a moment of emotional acting out… No warning, no explanations, nothing, except shut doors in my face, just like that! What an ugly morning it was for me when I discovered that I have been thrown away and discarded like unneeded thing.

Then the same person sends me an apology letter, and is trying to reach out to me. But how can I reach back? The bond that I thought we shared, and took a year to grow, was destroyed in less than few minutes. I don’t know what to write back, what to say, how to open up again…

I want to ask that person “Couldn’t you just take a deep breath, and give yourself a chance to think, and perhaps that would give our friendship a chance to not be destroyed because of your anger?” And that anger wasn’t even justified! Did you think it was fair of you to put me in a position of having to pacify you and my other friend?

Life…

Life is so wonderfully confusing at times. And it can be oh so very generous with unexpected gifts of bringing strangers into our lives who touch the deepest parts of our souls with gentle fingers, and awaken painful beauty of deeply buried memories.

It leaves you breathless, spacey, warm, and you find yourself at a place which eludes you most of the times, and where you long to be the most… You find yourself at peace, and the chatter in your head has come to be still…