It's all a journey.

Novelist Kathy Holmes (Real Women Wear Red) has a wonderful series of posts on her blog about the process of going home. In Kathy's case, home is Oregon, the state she moved to at 16.

With the exception of a few years as a transient Air Force brat, I've never lived anywhere but Denver, but Kathy's essays still resonated. I realized why today.

Home can be something other than a physical place. For those of us making an emotional journey, home can be the state of being where we're finally comfortable in our own skin. Perhaps it's reclaiming the wonder and joy we had as children. Perhaps it's achieving the self-acceptance we always wanted and were, often unknowingly, traveling toward.

Whether the home you're searching for is geographic or spiritual, I encourage you to visit Kathy's site. It's great!

Playing on iTunes: Silver Thunderbird by Marc Cohn.

Last week's Quote of the Week

"During midlife it is natural for psychic energy to be redirected to our inner world to do reflective inner work. Lethargy comes upon us for no apparent reason. Things that once interested us no longer hold our attention. These are inner taps on the shoulder for us to go within, to find our Self, and to search out new meaning to our lives."
-- Robyn Vickers-Willis, from Navigating Midlife: Women Becoming Themselves

The things we do to torture ourselves...

I love Sharper Image. Really. But sometimes even I have to admit that its products can be a little...bizarre.

A few weeks ago, my husband (aka: Spouse Unit Hubby Man, aka: SUHM) and I were trolling through SI's personal care section. SUHM picked up a nifty, little device and studied it.

"What the heck is this?" he asked.

I scanned the label. "Home electrolysis kit."

"You mean electrocution."

"Nooo," I said patiently. "I mean e-lec-trol-y-sis. Sis. Sisssss."

SUHM, a chemist by training and organizational safety specialist by trade, didn't get it. He held up a flat, white pad (upper lip size). The pad was tethered to something that looked like a joystick by a thin, pale wire.

"Conduction mechanism. Current source," SUHM said. "E-lec-tro-cu-tion. Zzzzap!" He poked me. "Remember that other thing you got here? The Hair Ripper?"

I shuddered. The device he mentioned was like a little, personal lawnmower for unwanted hair. Manufactures promised it would glide easily over the skin, plucking hair strand by strand, and would be no more painful than an eyebrow tweeze.

SUHM laughed. "Remember when you tried to give yourself a bikini..."

I elbowed him. Of course I remembered! Everyone in a six-mile radius of our home probably remembered. That &@#$! Hair Ripper hurt!

Behind us, a man snorted. A nearby sales clerk sighed. Clearly, the mini-home electrolysis kit was not going home with me.

Well...at least not tonight.

Playing on iTunes: Imagine Me by Kirk Franklin.

Last week's Quote of the Week

"I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned the hard way that some poems don't rhyme and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it...without knowing what's going to happen next."
-- Gilda Radner

Calling all writers!

Having a little trouble staying motivated? Author Tayari Jones has a great idea. She recommends creating a word-o-meter to keep track of your progress.

Tayari's tracking her word count on her blog, and I'm tracking mine here. Join the fun!

What I'm listening to right now: Silent Treatment by Michael Palmer, narrated by the wonderful George Guidall

Take a breath...

"We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up...discovering we have the strength to stare it down."

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

Wise woman. Wise words.

As a responsible blogger, I must say...

I will not write about Paris Hilton! I will not write about Paris Hilton! I will not write about Paris Hilton -- but, OMG! After seven mini-days in prison (where 15 minutes equals 24 hours according to her lawyers), she's shed her vanity, reclaimed her intellect, found religion and promised to dedicate the remainder of her life to helping people less fortunate than herself, which, financially speaking, is, um, everybody.

I don't want to be cynical or snarky, but...it's sooooo hard not to.

So, I'll go back to my mantra: I will not write about Paris Hilton! I will not write about Paris Hilton! I will not write about Paris Hilton!

Playing on iTunes: How Little We Know by Linda Eder. She sounds a lot like a young Barbra Streisand.

Free, year-long writing seminar.

Attention writers: If you're looking for a way to improve your writing but lack either the time or the money for an MFA, check out the 2007 He Wrote/She Wrote Back online writing workshop. Jenny Crusie and Bob Mayer, co-authors of Don't Look Down and the upcoming Agnes and the Hitman, are conducting a year-long writing program on their website. You'll find an online syllabus, weekly mini-lectures and an active message board.

Cost? Zip. Nada. Zilch.

Playing on iTunes: Decoder Ring Theater podcast presenting The Red Panda Adventures. If you like old-time radio or harmless, silly fun, you'll love this series.

Information comes when you need it.

An old friend contacted me today. We haven't spoken for years but, as the old saying goes, within a few minutes we were talking as though we never lost touch.

We worked together in the 80s and what I remember most is that no one -- and I mean no one -- ever had a bad thing to say about her. She went out of her way to make everyone happy. I entered the workforce wired the same way, but I gotta' tell you, she was a mentor for me. She'd elevated good girliness to an art form, and she taught me well.

We laughed about those days for a while...then she stopped laughing. "To be honest," she said, "the good ol' days weren't all that good."

She left the company in the early 90s, took another job and got downsized, got another job and was merged out, got another job and was laid off, and finally decided to go into business herself. In her 40s.

"It was horrible," she said. "I had no idea how to make decisions or how to state my opinion. I only knew how to make people happy."

She said she almost went broke because she never charged enough. (People liked her better because she was cheap.) She ran herself into the ground because she never challenged deadlines. (People liked her because she never asked for more time.) She got an ulcer because she never rocked the boat. (People liked her because she didn't complain.)

None of this surprised me because she was, after all, the Supreme Goddess of Good Girldom. But I have to admit, I was kinda' curious. So I asked her, as one good girl to another, how she turned things around.

"Badly," she said.

She wasn't joking. The woman with a Rolodex of friends now has one or two to her name. ("But they're real," she said. "I don't have kiss butt for them to like me.") She lost a lot of clients, and it wasn't easy to find more. She had to work hard to rebuild her reputation.

She's still an entrepreneur, but she changed businesses twice before settling on what she wanted to do.

"I had to learn a whole new language," she said. "I was like a baby -- or a stroke victim -- I had to learn to talk again, to walk again. I kept bumping into things and falling down and skinning my knee."

She's happier now. She said the journey was worth it. And when I told her about this blog, she offered advice for those, like me, who are trying to change.

"The scary part isn't when you start. Then the world is full of possibilities. You have a glorious idea of where you're going, and you have no idea how many will go wrong," she said. "And the scary part isn't when you're finished because then you've evolved. You've conquered something. You can look back on what you've done and feel really, really proud.

"The scary part is in the middle, when everything's a mess and you're all unsettled, when people say you're screwing up and nobody likes you and they say you're becoming a royal pain in the ass. That's when you have to remember that no one came into this world perfect. You have accept the fact that, yeah, you probably are screwing up, and a lot of people really don't like you, and you probably are a major pain in the ass.

"And that's okay. Tomorrow you'll do a little better. The key is to just keep keeping on."

Playing on iTunes: Again by Donnie McClurkin. Amazing song; amazing voice.

3 weeks/24 weeks

I found an interesting article on CNN.com today. According to this account, it takes approximately three weeks to form a new, positive habit and as many as six months to get rid of a bad habit.

Well that explains a lot, doesn't it?

I've decided to put this theory to the test. For 28 consecutive days (starting, um, tomorrow) I'm going to do some sort of physical exercise: take the dog for a walk, ride my bike, work out, yoga, what have you. We'll see if this little experiment hard-wires the love of exercise into my brain.

Of course, the flip side is that I need to find some habit I'm willing to give up for 24 weeks. Hmmm. A bad habit I need to give up....Surprisingly, the list is staggering. (Just kidding. It's long -- okay, really, really long -- but it's not, like, outrageous...exactly.)

It may be cheating, but I think I'll just extend this little TV hiatus another 22 weeks and see what happens. Of course, that means a total of 24 consecutive weeks of no television. That could be...hard.

Fortunately, it's almost summer. And there's never anything good on television during the summer.

Right?

What I'm listening to right now: Crisis, by Robin Cook. Narrated by George Guidall. If you're a fan of books on CD, you've probably heard Guidall read. He is fantastic!

A flower on the web.

Sometimes you discover wonderful writing in unexpected places -- words so clear and feelings so accessible that it yanks your mind from wherever it may have wandered and focuses your thoughts, for just a moment perhaps, on what someone else wanted to share.

You'll find an example of such writing at the My Tango Year blog. Look for the entry dated Friday, June 1, 2007.

What I'm reading: I haven't started Write. 10 Days to Overcome Writer's Block. Period. Why? Because I write for a living...and I've been writing. For work. Not on my novel. Drat! I did pick up Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. It's a debut novel about corporate layoffs. I've had it for months and never made much progress, but it's turning out to be an enjoyable bedtime read. Besides, finishing it helps with that Get Organized goal!