Archive for the ‘Epiphanies & Revelations’ Category
Since I’ve been 18, I have made a habit out of picking the least appropriate guy I could possibly date, then sticking it out for approximately two years before calling the relationship DOA.
One of my biggest gaffes has been my consistent choice of men who don’t like to read. I had no idea that it bothered me until Ian announced on Monday that he felt like reading classic literature off Newsweek’s Top 100 Books.
Why? Here’s his post on his reasoning, but basically, he wanted to see if the books were better than he remembered from high school.
As he told me this, I looked down at my engagement ring and felt as though I had been handed the golden ticket to The Life of My Dreams. All those frustrating years, and it turns out all I needed was a hot nerd to make me happy for the rest of my days. Well played, Ian, well played.
Why are we so stupid about finding people who are a good fit for us? I do the same thing with client choices as I’ve done with relationships. Instead of focusing on finding people who appreciate and understand my mindset, I let myself get swept up in the “End of the month, gotta pay my rent!” panic and take on customers who aren’t capable of understanding the way I work.
I should work out a prescreening process for all potential friends and clients. It will start with a multiple choice test meant to determine geekiness, and only those with a score of “60% nerd” or higher may apply.
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I feel like I came back to life today. I don’t know if I’ve been depressed for the past month or so without realizing it, but I feel like an addict who just climbed back onto the wagon after a month of backsliding.
When I went down to Nashville for my singing trip, it was the culmination of months of preparation come to being. I had practiced my fingers into callused messes, sung my voice to perfection, and even let Gia dress and style me.
The trip itself was a fantastic success; I accomplished everything I had hope to accomplish, and even made two new great friends out of the deal. I recorded my new songs with my friend Jeff, I sang onstage at the Bluebird Café, and everything else was icing on the cake.
Then, it was all over, and I was home, and for all the preparation I had done for going to Nashville, I hadn’t done any preparation for coming back to my business life. I let the phone ring off the hook, let projects slide, and basically conducted my life fairly poorly – unheard of for me.
Earlier today I was attempting to do a little bit of filing, and stumbled across my calendar pages for the past few months.
They started out extremely full, and I am not exaggerating when I say that the last three weeks up until last week were 100% blank. It’s like I stopped living for a little while.
Regardless of the “why” behind my return to this world, I’m grateful to be back. It’s time for me to get my goals straight, figure out where I’m trying to go, and then map out the route to get there.
Because, as I have been known to say a time or two, I don’t have dreams, I have goals. Time to get crackin’.
My life is just like a video game. There are days when I just can’t believe the quality of the graphics, and I’m totally into whatever mission I’m assigned. There’s a big ol’ arrow showing me where to go, and I stumble into an area of the game where there is free money as well as bonus points. These days are the best.
Then, there are the other days.
Those are the days when you can’t beat the bad guy, you’re really confused about how to complete your assignment, and DAMN IT, you keep getting killed before the save point and have to go back and do the whole freaking level over again. Those days are the worst.
My recreation of a fantastic quote from my "Gratitude" iPhone app
I have an iPhone app called “Gratitude,” (the website is http://happytapper.com/ if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch) that displays quotes after you type in everything you’re grateful for that day, and this was one of the quotes that came up.
It spoke to me so strongly that I (ironically) spent several hours of a work day recreating the photo so I could keep it as a reminder. Hours later, I realized my iPhone has a “capture screen” function that would have done the same thing for me in about two seconds, but hey – now I know that I can recreate damn near anything from scratch when I put my mind to it.
I think we must spend half our lives doing things we don’t like to do. When I’m working on a song that speaks to me, I can have the entire song finished in an hour. In fact, that’s about how long it takes for me to get the bare bones of all my songs together. It’s easy for me because I love doing it, and therefore the creative juices flow, the words come to me, and (perhaps most importantly) I’m focused and driven to finish it.
When I’m at my office and I have to do projects, I find that projects for my friends are finished at roughly twice the speed of projects that drag out and require a million tweaks and revisions. I think the biggest reason for that is because, in all honesty, I don’t like redoing the same thing 1,000 times, and it stops being fun. Once it stops being fun, I start becoming easily distracted, and suddenly an hour-long project has taken all day and still isn’t finished.
I want to live an inspired life, one where I have fun doing things I like to do, and make people happy as a result. I’m incredibly excited that people are starting to read my blog every day; I’ve been holding back because I didn’t want to overwhelm readers with a slew of entries, and now I’ve got requests for more writing and pictures of Cooper. Who now has his own link on the sidebar for when people just want a gallery of his cuteness.
On a totally different note, I have just received my first piece of negative feedback on eBay. Without going into details about how this guy chose to behave like a churlish ass over a misunderstanding, I will say that I have been dreading this moment since 2002 when I first opened an account.
Now that it’s happened and my “score” is down from 100% to 90.9%, I just don’t care! I think that must be a life lesson: Feedback is just a number, you can’t satisfy everyone, and sometimes people are determined to be unhappy, no matter how much you try to please them.
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When a washer gets unbalanced, one side ends up full of wet, heavy, tangled clothes. The other side ends up empty. Which side gets all of your cursing and muttering while you try to get the damn thing running again?
There are days when I hate owning my business. There are days when I come into my office and feel so overwhelmed by the demand on my time that I sit in front of my computer and accomplish nothing over the course of eight hours. These are the days that get the attention, the days that make me question getting out of bed in the morning.
There is a reason I started my business. If nothing else, I love the freedom that owning my schedule gives me, and when I am able to manage my time somewhat effectively I am a productive and successful individual. In fact, a few hours spent with my favorite clients can make my day a fantastic one.
Lately, I’ve been letting myself get off track. Everyone around me is screaming about the economy, how the sky is falling and nothing will ever go back to HOW GOOD IT WAS the past few years. I’ve never been a subscriber to that mindset; what goes up has to go down, just like the sun. I’d personally be pretty pissed off if we had 24 hours worth of sunshine – imagine what the additional fuel, sunscreen, shades, and sun shelters for our plants, animals and automobiles would cost.
The sun obviously goes down, and then comes up, goes down, comes up and goes down again. Daily. For our entire lives. So does the economy, the housing market, the price of fuel, everything. And still, I’ve suddenly found myself at the receiving end of anger and panic, of clients who blame me when their newly designed business cards fail to make new clients appear out of midair.
The thing is, when my job is good – when my clients understand that my goal is to help them, not to wickedly sabotage their businesses with business cards and professional stock photography – I really enjoy it. It’s not my first love, I happen to be a whiz kid when it comes to Photoshop and photography, and I enjoy using those skills to help people become more successful.
The good things are the empty side of the unbalanced washing maching, and it’s the side that gets very little of my attention, and even less of my writing. It’s not fair, because that side – the great clients, the fun projects, the flexible schedule, making a difference in the way people can run their businesses – is why I started a business in the first place.
I’m excited that American Idol turned out the way it did, because I’ve recognized a few things from the experience. I need to end some client relationships that leave me feeling unhappy, and I need to get cracking with the blog because there are people telling me that my honesty helps them in their own lives. Most of all I need to remember that what goes up has to go down, and that if I hold on tightly enough when I’m on the bottom, I can ride that cycle right back up to the top.
I’ve got some fantastic people around me who love and care for me, and I can thank them by picking my mopey self up out of the gutter and getting back to my usual routine of seizing life one damn day at a time.
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For those who just want to know whether I made it without having to read, the answer is no, I am not going to be your next American Idol, and neither is Ian. For the people who want to know the story behind the outcome, keep reading.
The audition day was the easiest I’ve been to. The Crazies weren’t willing to stand in the rain for hours in costumes, so the other contestants were fun to talk to and the day was only 7 hours versus last time’s 16 hours.
The only Crazie I saw get a ticket was a kid wearing Tinkerbell wings, so keep an eye out for him and a man in full firefighter regalia.
Ian and I were well-liked by everyone. Well-liked to the point that the two producers auditioning us started talking to us, having a merry conversation about our engagement and impending wedding while the other two hopeful contestants next to us sweated bullets.
In fact, I truly believe that if Ian and I had been terrible, they would have put us right through for the sake of good television.
We, however, were not terrible, and did not make it through. On my end, I knew my mistake the moment I made it – I switched songs last-minute, and unlike the other two years when you had TEN SECONDS FLAT to sing, this year it had poured all day, turnout was light (for Idol, at least), and they were giving people tons of time.
The new song I had chosen was very strong in the chorus, and weak in the verse. I had them very interested through the first part, and when I realized they wanted me to keep singing past the normal ten second mark, I had to continue on with the song….I saw the moment I lost the male judge (who had been very intently watching me) and mentally kicked myself.
As surprising as it seems, I feel relieved I didn’t make it through. I hadn’t realized it, but the reason I was hoping to get through so badly was to not have to deal with my real life anymore – that’s not a good reason to do anything, no matter how exciting it may seem.
I haven’t realized just how low I’ve been feeling due to certain clients, impending bills, impossible-to-please customers, and the nagging feeling that I want to do something more with my life than what I’m doing now.
That more is this – I have something to say, and want a platform to say it from. I want to be an example to the 1 out of 4 kids who is abused in some way, and tell them that abuse does NOT define you, and that you can do and be anything you want, without ever being ashamed of what you’ve lived through.
I thought American Idol might be that platform I need, but Ian brought up a good point by saying that having my life dictated by FOX (and if you read the release forms you sign, dictated is the right word) is not going to give me that opportunity.
In the long run I am sad that it’s not going to be as easy as I was hoping, but I’m also glad to realize that I was viewing American Idol as the easy way out. I’ve learned that shortcuts come back to bite you in the ass WITHOUT FAIL, so I guess it’s time to get that machete and start hacking away again til I get where I’m trying to go.
Next on the agenda: I think it’s time to start that Muse cover band.
I thought this month was going to be all about music, between the trip to Nashville and taking a break from my BNI group. Instead, I haven’t picked up my guitar since getting back, and haven’t even done much singing.
I think I’m stuck. I’m trying to figure out what the next step is, and I’m drawing a blank. In a perfect world I would get together a band and start playing Muse and Paramore songs at great venues to get started. That keeps hitting a roadblock, though, much to my chagrin, and now I’m drumming my fingers against my chin trying to figure out a good move.
Much of my life has been lived in a state of vague frustration. If I’m not smashing against the status quo I am always fidgeting internally out of an impatience to go ahead and do something great already. I’ve wanted to be a rock star since the first time my uncle put a microphone in my hand around age 3 and introduced me to the wide world of STAGE FRIGHT. It’s very “Carlene” of me to want to do the thing that scares me most.
I’ve been taking my sweet time getting the “normal” stuff out of the way – high school, college, starting a business – and although I’ve tried many, many times to get the musical ball rolling, it’s always met a rather boring end, usually getting left behind in the wake of a relationship or in the face of too much homework and not enough time (which is really an excuse for not enough dedication).
And yet, it’s never died out. I thought when I moved from New York to New Hampshire that I had left the music behind me, and at first it was a relief to not have the nagging “You should be playing your guitar and writing a song” in the background at all times. Then, I had one, then two, then three people all mention to me that they missed watching and hearing me play music, and the nagging was back.
I’m not entirely sure how to integrate it into my life. I run a business, and that’s how I’m viewed by most of the people who know me – “Hi, this is Carlene, she’s a professional photographer and graphic designer. See, she made my business cards!”
Since coming home from Nashville I’ve been having a tough time adjusting. Being so unfettered and happy down there made me realize that my business is really getting me down at the moment. I’ve had a streak of clients who have really been taking a toll on me; it seems as though nothing I do is good enough, or they can’t understand why they can’t have $50,000 worth of work for $500, and it’s sucking the sunshine from my soul.
I was so full of joy everyday in Nashville. I was doing what I’ve wanted to do my entire life, and if we experienced any setbacks they were minor disappointments. Since I’ve been home, I’ve been bombarded by people who are taking their unhappiness out on me. I’d be a liar if I said it doesn’t affect me.
All I want to do with my life is bring people happiness. With my business, my entire goal was to help people look and feel more professional, and help them stand out with their businesses, not to go home and burst into tears from their nasty emails.
Being Carlene, I have found a silver lining to all this. I’m constantly being told how tough the music business is, but know what? The music business can’t criticize me anywhere near as harshly as my customers can. ”Her voice was off-pitch and the song was uninspiring,” or “She’s got cellulite and a lousy bikini body” is a hell of a lot easier for me to handle than “After taking hours and hours of your time so you could hold my hand and help me make a simple decision about the font on my business card, I hate everything we’ve done and when can I expect my refund?”
In my eyes, owning a small business has been the boot camp of the music industry. There’s nowhere to go from here but up.
I have a Twitter account that I keep (I’m RockstarCarlene), and one of the people I follow is Demi Lovato (ddlovato). This girl is a diamond in the rough, a rising star, Barbara Streisand in Funny Girl. I love watching her perform, and that means that as a 26-year-old I regularly tune in to the Disney Channel and download songs from Camp Rock onto my iTunes. That is more than mildly embarrassing, but when I set out to write a blog about myself, making myself look cool was not on the agenda.
Miss Lovato had a Twitter post a while ago that irked me (irked or not, I still think she’s fab). She posted that if she didn’t have to be a good role model for her fans, she would have tattoos and piercings. If I’m doing the math, that means that tattoos + piercings = bad role model. Going by that equation, and given that I currently display both tattoos and multiple piercings in my ears, the entire purpose of my blog is moot.
What is it about this type of self-expression that invites such criticism? I hear it from friends of mine all the time – “Tattoos are trashy,” “Well, your tattoos are okay but I normally hate them,” and even from my own husband-to-be, “I wish you didn’t have them, but I love you no matter what.”
My own personal tattoos are reminders of the hardest times of my life, a life that has survived everything from extreme poverty to sexual abuse, and all the normal tough stuff, too. They’re colorful. They have a good message. Yet, I feel like a shoplifter anytime I catch someone’s eyes flicking towards my wrist…guilty. As though my little cursive reminder to “Let it go,” a reminder that once jolted me from a downward spiral of self-mutilation, is a dirty thing.
“Hi, my name is Carlene. I am a girl with tattoos. I’m also a small business owner, a musician, and a wonderful person.” Can people look past the ink on my skin, the tiny earrings up my ears, and see that for themselves? If I put my brave front aside, the truth is that it hurts my feelings. It makes me want to hide behind long-sleeved shirts and long pants 12 months out of the year, makes me want to make excuses that I was 18 and stupid when I had them done.
I wasn’t 18 and stupid, I was 19 and knew exactly what I was doing. When I’m home by myself I love my tattoos – I love my guardian angel fairy on my ankle and the phoenix on my back that marks my father’s death. I love my reminder on my wrist that keeps me from ruining the relationships in my life by not fighting over foolish things.
So maybe the real truth is, “Hi, my name is Carlene. I am a girl with baggage who sometimes needs help remembering to be grateful for the small joys in life. I have trashy tattoos and overly pierced ears. I like that about myself, and I understand that maybe you don’t. I’m okay with that.” Criticism is okay; hiding who I am in the face of it is not.
Carlene song lyric of the day, from Scars (copyright 2009):
…and if you check her sleeve, her story is there for the world to see…
