Is it really mid-May already? When last we left off, it was the end of February. So much for my New Year’s Resolution of maintaining this blog.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t write in an online journal in April at all, but to check in a couple of times. I took a month off from all of that, and writing in a paper journal, just to rest and see if I could regain some semblance of motivation for anything as things had become a relentless grind since January. Get up, log on, work, log off, eat, watch TV, sleep, rinse, repeat.
I’m still a bit stuck, but have concluded that I’m in that weird place Carl Jung talked about when he described how people lose motivation after their awakening, enantiodromia. I’ve stopped chasing, stopped worrying about to-do lists, stopped caring about hustle, proving myself, and achieving—all the things that keep Washington, the institution running—and now find myself thinking “How much of this really matters?”
Part of it is that I’ve made some time to refocus on Zen and Stoicism. The first “rule” of both of them is to concern yourself only with what you can control: your actions, reactions, thoughts, and perceptions. The second “rule” is to let go of what you cannot control, and oofta, there’s a LOT of stuff I cannot control, like other people’s behavior and reactions, the evil in the world, and what happens around me.
When I stopped to think of all the things I can’t control, I started bowing out.
I will not engage in political discussions beyond agreeing with strangers’ social media posts. Someone wants to think I’m wrong? Okay.
Someone didn’t respond to a text? Okay.
Someone doesn’t have time to get together? Okay.
Someone doesn’t want to reschedule after breaking plans? Okay.
Someone didn’t respond to an email or call at work? Okay.
Someone gets angry after asking me to do something for them and I set a boundary and say no? Okay.
Traffic? Okay.
Bad weather? Okay.
Number I didn’t want to see on the scale? Okay.
No one wants to join me in something I’m doing or going where I’m going? Okay.
I’m not chasing. I’m not forcing. I’m not striving to make any points, get people to agree, impress, perform, or bring people into my sphere who don’t want to be there. I welcome those who are with me, let go of those who aren’t.
At any rate, that’s why I haven’t been around. I’m in what the video below describes as the Hermit stage, the phase between death and rebirth, and it’s all swirling around with rising detachment in the Zen sense. But I’m still floundering around a bit. Although I’ve begun to say no to things that don’t resonate, I’m still learning to let go of wanting things to be the way I want them to be rather than how they are. I just have to trust the process.
Time for a Saturday 9. Hey, it’s still Saturday in California! Here’s the song:
We’re beginning the year with a song about new beginnings. What is something new you’d like to try in 2025?
That’s actually a pretty challenging question. I’ll most likely try a few new recipes. Maybe a few new restaurants. I have a set of PanPastels that I’d like to use in my coloring. I did sign up for a coloring meet-up at a local establishment for later in the month, so that will be nice. Wouldn’t mind meeting some new people who share a hobby.
The lyrics recall what was said “in the mist of the midnight hour.” Where were you when the new year dawned?
I was coming out of the Metro. It made me a little bit sad actually. The station closest to my home is also a major bus stop so it’s very well lit and there are a lot of homeless people there. One of them, a woman, was greeting people with a soft, almost childlike “Happy New Year, everyone!” I thought of how a post of mine went viral, one about an encounter with a homeless woman whom I tried to help but couldn’t, and how one person who was once homeless said “You saw her. That right there means so much.” I waited for the woman to see me and I smiled and wished her a happy new year, too, though I don’t know how it came off because seeing her there was putting tears in my eyes. All I could think was “Here this woman is, with nothing but the possessions in her cart, wishing everyone a happy new year because that’s all she has to give, and no one is acknowledging her. She’s offering something and no one will accept it.” It hurt my heart.
The Axwell of Axwell and Ingrosso is Axel Hedfors. He began as a drummer and moved on to experimenting musically on the computer, eventually mastering music sequencer software. Do you consider yourself more a technophile like Axwell, who loves technology and digital devices, or more a technophobe, anxious about learning new programs?
I love technology—when it works.
His musical partner is Sebastian Ingrosso. Sebastian became interested in dance music when he accompanied his father, a choreographer, to the studio. When you were young, did you ever go to work with either of your parents?
I was 9 or 10 and I went to work with my father, who at the time worked for an ad agency in Manhattan. It was St. Patrick’s Day so after working in the morning, he took the afternoon off and took me to the St. Patrick’s Day parade. I wish I could say it was a good experience, but it wasn’t. There was a vendor selling buttons and pins that said things like “Kiss Me, I’m Irish,” but that being New York, there were a few other pins for other ethnicities. My father winked at me and bought one that said “Italian Power.” Well, some drunk Irish-Americans saw him and began hurling slurs and epithets for Italian-Americans at us. We never went to another parade in Manhattan after that.
That feud between Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans ran deep. My father, a member of the WWII generation, grew up in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn. He had two fistfights as a kid, and one was with an Irish-American boy Danny who made it a point to antagonize him to the point where one day he dared my father to meet him outside after school. This stupid kid didn’t think my father would do it, but not only was my father already out there when Danny came out of the school, he chased Danny home and right into Danny’s own living room, where he proceeded to beat the snot out of him until Danny’s mother pulled him off.
So Danny’s mother went marching down to the school the next day complaining to the principal about this “Italian brute” who beat up her precious angel and the principal called my father down to the office. My father had to wait in the hallway while she spoke her piece, and then when she came out with her little brat in tow, it was my father’s turn to go into the office. With just my father in the room, the principal asked a few questions.
“Did you beat up Danny?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He kept calling me a guinea wop.”
“I see. Well, you’re not in trouble. Us Jews and Italians need to stick together.”
He let my father leave, and as my father walked down the hallway, he heard the principal bellow, “DANNY, GET IN HERE. No, Mrs. O’Brien. JUST DANNY.”
I suspect this was not the first time darling Danny said bigoted things to the other kids, because he got suspended and when he came back he had to stay after school every day helping teachers clean blackboards—for the rest of the school year.
Nyahh.
But that was 1930s Brooklyn for you.
Axwell & Ingrosso gave their premiere performance at the 2014 Governors Ball Music Festival in New York City and their last concert at the 2017 Ultra Music Fest in Miami. Looking back on 2024, did you attend any outdoor music or theater performances?
Freaks on Parade! I finally got to see Filter. They’re one of my favorite bands. But also Ministry, Alice Cooper, and Rob Zombie. It was awesome!
In 2017, when “Something New” was released, we lost the TV star who could “turn the world on with her smile.” Without looking it up, do you know who that is?
Absolutely. And it was a spinoff, Lou Grant, that first gave me the idea as a kid to become a journalist if I ended up not being a doctor. Well, tenth-grade biochemistry made me reconsider the whole doctor thing, but I was still fascinated with the human body so here I am, a medical journalist.
There was also that dalliance with guitar, where my instructor said I had a lot of promise and my style reminded her of Ace Frehley’s, but like Curly himself, I absolutely HATED sheet music and just wanted to do it my way, which wasn’t doing me any favors academically. And unlike Curly himself, I lacked discipline. Plus I was a girl and a pretty straight-laced one at that, so no rock-and-roll for me. At least not that way. I’ll travel halfway around the world to ride a rail, though. See, blonde center stage gawking up at Olli Tukiainen and Jaska Makinen of Poets of the Fall in a club in Warsaw, below.
Image: Glen Loit
Come to think of it, I’ve managed to interview a few rock stars in my career, too. The most famous one is Bret Michaels of Poison. I wrote a profile about him 18 years ago. Me and my stupid sense of journalistic ethics didn’t take him up on tickets to a show for his solo tour, though. It would have been fun to meet him. He seemed like a super sweet guy during the interview.
Also in 2017, Today Show anchor Hoda Kotb announced she had adopted her first child. Do you know anyone who is adding to their family in 2025?
Not that I know of. Some may be adding pets, though.
Have you made any New Year’s resolutions for 2025?
What was the first thing to make you laugh in 2025?
The wankpanzer burning in front of the Manchurian Cantaloupe’s hotel in Vegas. This was before I knew there was someone in the vehicle and he died by suicide before the explosion. Now it’s not so funny.
I’d better post this before it’s only Saturday in Hawaii.
Went to see John Oliver tonight. He was GREAT! He really drove home the point of understanding history, not so you can feel great about your country, but so you can understand why some things are they way they are, to learn from them, and to make better choices going forward. See also, for the love of all that is holy, can people who are NOT experts stop thinking they ARE on everything? It’s like I always say, getting a C in high school biology and watching a few YouTube videos do not mean you know more than the hive of PhDs and MDs who devote their careers to understanding something.
But the U.S. is just chock full of people who embody the Dunning-Kruger effect, and it is our undoing.
This leads me to my resolutions for 2025.
Ignore the ignorant. Whether it’s mansplainers who want to tell me about things I’ve covered extensively as a medical journalist as though they are imparting new knowledge, dudebros online who think women can “hold in” their periods, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, omnivores who ask where I get my protein, people who natter on about critical race theory but when you ask them what it is they cannot tell you, cryptoboys, Musk bronies and other bootlickers of billionaires, or D.C. political pontificators, they’re getting muted, restricted, blocked, walked away from, and otherwise banished from my sphere without warning or response.
I’ve already started doing this in that I removed from my friends list a particularly annoying acquaintance who tried to lecture me on how Virginia “has been Blue for over 40 years” when discussing the last presidential election. Uh, yeah, with the exception of 1964, Virginia was Red from 1952 until 2008, when the Commonwealth went Blue for Barack Obama. 2024 – 2008 = 16, not 40. It wasn’t the first time he tried to mansplain something he was wrong about to me, and I just don’t have time for that kind of nonsense.
Work on my fitness. The exercise part will be easy enough. I happen to like exercise and tracking exercise in my planner. I liked last year’s planner so much, I got a similar one by the same company this year.
It’s the nutrition part that will require discipline. Fortunately, I have roughly eleventy billion empty journals and pretty notebooks of all different sizes. The only thing that has ever worked for me is to use measuring cups and spoons and write down everything I put into my maw. Otherwise, I’ll blow it on pasta, cereal, nuts, beans, and spreads. Some stuff, I just cannot eyeball.
Resume my tarot practice. Again. I really fell off of that last year. I do love it, though. It helps me think things through and I love the cards themselves. They’re little works of art you can hold in your hand. Plus, I’m fairly good at it. My brain loves to find patterns.
Write some prose other than articles, blogs, and journal entries. I’m thinking maybe creative nonfiction, timed fiction, flash fiction, personal essays, or even some short stories. I may end up doing it on long weekends or staycations, but so be it. Whether I share it publicly is another story.
Renew my travel resolution. Again. Back in 2020, I set a few rules for myself. First, I had to travel at least three times a year. Second, one of those places had to be somewhere I’d never been before. Third, one of those places could not be for work. Fourth, Baltimore is too close to count as travel. Unfortunately the pandemic and then the heart attack kept me from sticking to this, but I WILL do it this year, so help me.
And that’s a wrap for Holidailies, kids! Hang onto your hats like Frosty here, because I sense 2025 is going to be a wild and windy one! Oh, and if you’re reading on WordPress, please do subscribe. I bombed the November writing project because I had to travel for work, but I think 2025 is going to provide a good bit of blog fodder. Stick around!
zenzalei 