Sue Baiman's Blog, page 2

The Flame of Desire

When you’re single

And looking for that one someone

Or just in need of release

There are moments

When that need

That hunger

Becomes a kind of panic

That rises through you

Like a tide lapping at the shore

Gradually moving farther

And farther up the beach

The waves increasing in strength incrementally

So that you don’t notice the subtle changes

Until the waves are pounding

And threatening to pull you out to sea

Drowning you in your own desire

But when you have found

That special someone

Who lights a fire in your soul

And who just the thought of

Makes sparks dance in your eyes

And a smile creep over your countenance

Then that desire is a fire

Incapable of being doused by the tide

My Three Words for 2016

For me, the hard part about the three words exercise each year is finding individual words that apply to multiple aspects of my life without needing entire sentences for them to make sense to me three months down the road.

In previous years I’ve reflected on all of my previous words. If you want to read 2015, 2014, or 2013, click on the year. For some reason, I’m not in the mood to reflect today so I’m just going to dive into this year’s words.

My first word is PUSH. Push on. Push back. Push up. Push myself. Push others. I often let myself get way too lazy about things. Particularly physically, but also creatively. In order to attain a higher level of success, I need to work harder, work smarter; and I need to make sure I’m pushing myself and my co-conspirators to do that.

My second word is TRACK. I’ve set goals for myself and my writing partner and I have set goals for his work as well. We’re utilizing new tools and the only way we’re going to know if things are moving in the right direction is if we track our results in meaningful ways. We currently track word counts, sales, and income. This year we’re going to start tracking our time as well because that seems to be the commodity that is most precious and yet also most easily squandered.

My third word is ADAPT. I’ll be pushing myself and my friends to work harder and smarter this year and we’ll track our progress. But we then have to be able to adapt our approach as we go. Without this critical step, we run the risk of barreling down an ineffective path. This word encompasses underlying thoughts like analyze, reflect, compare, discuss, and decide. The important thing here is that we be proactive rather than reactive in the way we go about adapting our approach to better utilize habits and strategies that work for us, things within our control, rather than being reactive to forces outside of our purview.

Okay, I think I’ve got three words that will help me stay focused on the year ahead. I’m going to push myself and my partner to work harder and smarter, we’ll track our results, and adapt our approach as we find things that work for us. Yay!

Now, how about you. What are your three words for 2016?

No More Prayers

No More Prayers

The news comes in every day

The names and places change

But it’s always the same

Sure, some days are more brutal than others

But it’s still our sisters

Still our brothers

It’s in Africa, Asia, Europe, and here too

It’s villages and towns

Paris and Beirut

Beheadings and bombs

Machetes and guns

It’s hatred. That’s all.

Don’t let them bait us

To take the fall.

We can’t let the zealots win

I don’t care what their idea

Of sin might be

They don’t get to tell us

They don’t get to tell me

How we live our lives

And that’s what they want

But it’s not what they’re going to get

Their goal is to pit us

Against each other

To spread their hatred

By making us scared.

The way to fight back

Is love, not prayers.

Don’t pray for Paris

Don’t pray for peace

If prayers are all you’ve got

They’re fine in addition to

But not by themselves

We have to act, and act now

Not just words, but deeds

These are the things this fucked up world needs

We need to take in the refugees

Shelter and clothe them

Protect the innocent

Women and children

But most importantly

We need to stand shoulder to shoulder

Regardless of isms,

Like sisters and brothers

Because everyone is squishy on the inside

Everyone cut, bleeds

If we show love and compassion

Regardless of creed

If we hold tightly to each other

If everyone believes

Terrorists can’t win

If we’re not afraid

No more prayers for Paris

Feed someone starving instead

No more prayers for Beirut

Give a wandering child a bed

I know your prayers are well intentioned

And you think there’s nothing else

You can do for those so far away

That all you can do is pray

But it’s not just about Paris

The hatred is everywhere

It’s not just about religion

But about people being less than

If we could see all people as people

And combat hatred with love

Then no one would need to pray

To their God above.

Sue’s Slimdown, Establishing Healthy Habits

I turned 50 on August 6, 2015. I’m afraid I won’t be around to hit 60 if I keep gaining weight the way I have been.

I went through a crippling divorce in 2010 and during that time, I hit complete bottom and was even suicidal. As I clawed my way up from that abyss, I realized that if I was going to survive, I had to prioritize and compartmentalize my life. I have a wicked case of ADD, but I can laser focus on one thing at a time.

So, my first priority was my financial health. I was unemployed at the time, so finding a good job (with good benefits) and then working my way up and/or putting in enough overtime so that I could keep a roof over the head of myself and my kids was my first priority. I’ve done that.

My second priority was my emotional health. I keep starting the next sentence as, “I’ve learned…” but the truth is that this is an ongoing journey. I no longer have constant anxiety attacks. I no longer suffer from PTSD. My episodes of depression are much less frequent and much less severe. I’d like to think that I’m no longer passive aggressive but I’m not sure I’m qualified to judge myself on that issue. In short, I’m a much happier (and hopefully better adjusted) person than I was before.

My third priority is my physical health….and here I am. I got a fitbit and new scale for myself just before my birthday. My starting weight was 188.4 lbs. I started walking. I got down as low as 270.3 lbs. But that weight was a one-time fluke and even if it hadn’t been, the only real changes I had made were a slightly increased awareness of the caloric values of foods and a few extra steps a day.

On Monday, September 21, 2015 I fell off my feet and fractured my left ankle. It’s been almost 5 weeks and it’s healing nicely (for a fat woman in her 50s). But I’ve learned a lesson through this experience, and that is that just walking will not get me healthier if I’m still eating the same crap that got me to this point in the first place.

Back in April of this year, I saw an article on Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller) and how he lost 105 lbs in 100 days. I looked at some of the info on the Eat to Live diet by Dr. Joel Fuhrman and contemplated getting the book. But contemplation is as far as I got.

Then, recently, one of my best friends decided to try the Eat to Live approach to nutrition and health and I watched to see how it went for him. (I got the idea to keep a separate page for this type of stuff from him as well). Today he posted his 6 week weigh-in and he’s lost 24.4 lbs in that time. Sign me up!

So I’m reading the book now, have ordered food for the next 4 days (I’m ordering online and picking up on the way home from work due to the ankle at the moment), and I started a Facebook page devoted to these efforts. The picture of me there was taken a month ago but pretty accurately reflects my size. It’s one of the before pictures from when I cut off all my hair (shaved down to .25″) so I thought it would be cool to use the pic of my hair long and then I’ll get to see it growing out back to what it was while hopefully watching the rest of me get smaller.

Most of the posts on the page from here on out will be weigh-ins, or about food choices, or exercise, or other related stuff, so I created it to keep this info in one place and out of my regular feed. So if this isn’t your thing, no worries.

If you want to join me, I’d be glad for the company.

You can find it here. 

Designs for writers

I’ve had a store on Zazzle for a while now and recently made some designs (and an entire category) for things for writers. My favorite thing to tell writers is, “Just. Keep. Writing.” so you can find that on a macbook cover, a mug, and on the front of my promotional shirts for this site.  Additionally, some of my author friends are members of the Cliffhangering Bastard Club. “Official” shirts for the club can be found there as well.  If you, or your fans, consider you to be a member of the CBC, pick one up. To get there from here, click the link below.

Zazzle Designs for writers by the Bright Eyed Dyer 

Liberal Rant

This is something I posted on the book of faces today and thought I should put it here as well.

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In case you’re new to me, what I believe, and those things for which I advocate, here’s a list. I have zero desire to hear opinions from the other side of these positions as you’re not going to change my mind and I probably won’t change yours. So if you feel the need to comment from that position, please just save us both some time and unfollow or unfriend me.

I believe the only person who should be allowed to decide if an abortion is the right course of action for a woman is the woman herself. Period.

I believe climate change is real and humans are to blame.

I don’t believe that corporations are the same as people and I’m sick of the oligarchy our country has become.

I believe that stronger gun control laws would save lives. I am in favor of not just banning assault weapons, but all sales of new guns. I am also in favor of getting rid of almost all of them. (I get that people hunt. I don’t agree with that either, but whatever).

I know there are plenty of heroes in uniform. That said, I don’t believe that everyone who serves in the military is a hero and I find it insulting to those who have served with a distinction when every idiot who chooses to go into the military is described as such. For many, it was simply a job choice when nothing else worked out for them.

I don’t believe all cops are racist murderers, but those that are (and there are far too many) are making them all look bad. People need to acknowledge that both good and bad exist and we need to work to get rid of the bad guys dressed in blue.

Black lives matter. And if your reaction to that statement is to say that all lives matter, then you’re part of the reason the statement exists. If you don’t understand this, go educate yourself on the issue.

White privilege is real. I have it and am aware of this. If you’re white and deny this, you’re an idiot. Sorry, but this is another one where you need to educate yourself. Most people experience some discrimination at various times in their lives. People of color live with it every minute of every day. That’s what this is about.

I believe in helping those less fortunate than myself. I do what I can personally and want a government that looks out for the least among us instead of the wealthiest. There is much less fraud and abuse of the system by those at the bottom than those at the top and I frankly don’t care. I’m not willing to take assistance away from a family desperately trying to survive because someone else committed fraud in the food stamp system while corporations are raping the workers and the economy.

I believe in equality for all. I don’t care what sex a person was born, what sex they identify as, or who they love or how. We are all human beings and as such deserve respect and equal rights.

I have zero tolerance for fat shaming, body shaming, slut shaming or ANY sort of shaming. Stop judging other people. Period.

I’m sure I probably missed a few of my hot buttons so I’ll just summarize by saying I’m a socialist democrat. A bleeding heart liberal. And I’m sick to fucking death of the status quo in this country.

You can carry on now.

 

As a footnote, I also believe in: science, math, art, music, the power of words, that between science and creativity we can solve any problem,  that good will triumph in the end, and in the power of the human soul to transcend death. Oh, and in the power of love. I should have said that first.

Turtle Do

A number of things collided and as a result, I now look like this:

October is breast cancer awareness month. I’ve known a number of women who have had various types of cancers and lived through the surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. They all lost their hair.
I have a habit of growing my hair long for 3-5 years and then donating it. It was time.
I wanted to do something that would call attention to me precisely because I’m not  usually comfortable with that. I wanted to push my own boundaries while also pushing back at the way society objectifies women and their appearance.
My son loves turtles.
I love color.
I think I look more like my mother now than I ever have before only with my wacky artsy spin on something very similar to the ultra short cut she used to call a chemo-cut.

On the one hand, it’s just hair and will grow out soon enough. On the other, it’s so much more. It’s symbolic on many levels. But I kinda wish it wasn’t. It really should just be another part of me. Just hair.

*Credit goes to the phenomenal Caitlin of Shear Crossing in Mechanicsburg, PA

**And a special thank you to my friend, Amy, for giving this to me as the most awesome birthday gift ever!

Cover Reveal

I have a degree in fine arts and have very specific designs in mind for my work. However, my degrees are in photography from back in the dark ages when the computers we worked on were Apple IIe’s. So, I am decidedly lacking in the technical skills needed to do digital design. It’s not that I don’t want to develop these skills, it’s just that there is only time for so much and that’s never made it to the top of my list. Having an art background and very specific designs in mind does not make me the ideal client for a designer….in fact, it makes me the client from hell. However, I have the extreme good fortune to work with an amazing artist and great friend on my book covers/designs who puts up with my craziness and helps me realize my artistic vision. If you find yourself in need of an artist or designer, you need to contact Scott Pond. He truly is the best!

Here’s the brand spanking new, gorgeous, perfect cover for my next book, “Cheap Therapy”.

Epiphanies

I saw a quote about gratitude this morning. “Gratitude turns what we have into enough” taken from a longer thought on gratitude by Melodie Beattie and expounded upon by Elizabeth Gilbert.

Yesterday, as I was purging and packing to move, I ended up throwing out and giving away much more than I am taking with me. I still haven’t let go of everything, but I will have substantially lightened my overall load by the time I’m through with this. And it made me wonder what had changed in me to allow this to happen.

All of my life, I’ve moved from one hobby to the next, searching for that magical, elusive thing that I both love to do and that I do well enough to be able to do it professionally. I hated that every time I would both enjoy doing something and be even slightly talented at it (music, drawing, photography), my mom would tell me that maybe I could make money at it. Somehow, for me, talking about monetizing something I loved took some of the joy out of it. I know now what she meant, but back then, her words had the opposite effect on me of what she was trying to do.

When my mom would push me to practice more at the piano because someday, if I was good enough, I could be a professional pianist, all I could think was that I didn’t ever want to have to play simply because it was a job. When I played, I felt joy. Yes, there was a lot of hard work involved. But I did that work to get it right. There was a huge payoff, a personal accomplishment, in finally getting it right, in playing the piece the way the composer intended. But the idea of having to play according to someone else’s schedule for anything other than my own enjoyment was anathema.

As I grew up and moved on, I let music slide. In its place, I began taking photographs. This time I could see how I could do this artsy thing as a profession. I even pursued and received two degrees in photography. But it turned out that I didn’t know how to be or wasn’t able to be aggressive or extroverted enough to make photojournalism my occupation.

Instead, I got a job. You know, one of those roles that society dictates we need, that no one ever aspires to, that mostly pays the bills. And when I did that, I started looking for new hobbies that would let me continue to express that part of me that the music and drawing and photography were connected to.

So I took up hobbies like cross stitch, crafts, aromatherapy, quilting, and eventually knitting. Cross stitch and quilting taught me that copying someone else’s design and merely executing the craft is so unfulfilling for me that I would rather not be doing anything. I learned that I am a designer first and foremost. So whatever thing I do, for pleasure and/or work, needs to allow me to express myself.

With each different hobby that I tried, I was obsessive. I had to have ALL the options, ALL the tools, ALL the colors. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was desperately trying to fulfill my needs of expression, self-fulfillment, and the need for validation through these various crafts. And in the process, they became a need for things. The things related to whatever the new hobby was. So I collected these otherwise meaningless things.

During this time of hobbies and crafts, I also read. A lot. I also developed social anxiety. Or it simply worsened. I’ve been a relatively withdrawn introvert my entire life. Having to interact with a large number of people due to having school-age children was and continues to be difficult for me.

When I discovered knitting, it felt like I was given the key to unlocking a huge part of myself that had been hidden away, that I didn’t know existed. It felt right and I understood it on a primal level. It also gave me something to do with my hands when in uncomfortable social situations. It was a coping mechanism. But when I was knitting, I wasn’t reading. The first five years that I knit, I read no non-knitting books. Zero. I couldn’t do them simultaneously, so I didn’t read. At all.

Knitting helped open doors for me in terms of meeting other creative people and also giving me a way to cope when those new interactions were more than I could handle otherwise. But I was still collecting (yarn stashing is like a socially acceptable form of hoarding). But I reached my limit in terms of not reading. I went almost 6 years without reading. During this time, when I was preparing to sell my yarn and knitting, I joined Twitter. And started expressing my thoughts in words for the first time in 20 years.

I’ve tried, and failed, to explain how Twitter changed my life. It sounds so cliche and melodramatic. But it’s true. It wasn’t Twitter itself. It was in part, writing again. Or more specifically, the deep desire, the NEED, to express myself in words. It was meeting people who understood this and encouraged me.

An offshoot of this was discovering that I enjoy working with writers as an editor, sounding board, assistant, and cheerleader. And, amazingly enough, others have told me I’m pretty good at these things. Good enough that they wanted to hire me in this capacity. And, I love the work. See, that’s the difference, it’s work, not a hobby. And I prefer it that way. I finally found that artistic thing that is something I’m good at and that I can make a living at, and doing so increases rather than diminishes, my love for it.

And when I found that thing, all the other things, became mere hobbies. I use the word mere to mean only hobbies in the sense that I’m no longer constantly trying to monetize them. No longer taking the pure joy out of them by worrying about how to supplement the income I get from my day job. But in making that leap from how do I make money at these things to how do I do these things for the enjoyment alone, I severely cut back on the amount of time I spend doing them.

Now, I’m purging and packing to move. Again. The last time was three years ago during the worst part of my divorce. I had lived in one house for almost twenty years. All three of my kids had only ever known living in that house. Almost all of my adult memories had happened while I lived there. And, I had accumulated a LOT of stuff. Most of that stuff was either connected to memories or hobbies. Going through it to move to the townhouse I’m now preparing to leave was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. So hard, I gave up and just packed everything, figuring I’d go through it on the other end when I unpacked.

In other words, I found another way to procrastinate. When I unpacked, I threw out some of it, but kept a lot too. Now, I find that I’m in a very different place. A place where I have developed a sense of self, a confidence, a sense of purpose, that I was previously lacking.

While I haven’t knit much in the past few years, each time I did, I went out and got new yarn for the project. Yarn specific to my tastes and needs at that time. Specific to the project. I realized this as I started to go through my stuff again. I had amassed a yarn stash full of possibilities and things I wanted to make. Except that I never got around to any of them. And I also realized that no matter how wonderful that yarn was, the odds of me ever using much of it was somewhere between slim and Are You Kidding Me?.

I also recently read The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo. It was the way that her book is written, her nonjudgmental voice, that makes this book so wonderful. Her style makes it easier to absorb the lessons. And while I was scared that I would try this and fail, I finally worked up the courage to try it.

So here I am…faced with all of this extra stuff. Stuff I needed once upon a time for reasons I never understood. Stuff that I knew wasn’t important on the face of things. But didn’t know why I felt the need to hang on to it all. Only now, I have more knowledge of myself and my surroundings, and a LOT of stuff to deal with.

One of the things I read or heard somewhere (not sure where or whom to attribute) is if you haven’t used something in a long time, AND you can replace it in under 20 minutes for under $20, you don’t need to keep it. Knowing this, has made pitching a lot of the things that only serve to clutter up my existence.

Some of the excess (clothing in particular) has been donated. The vast majority of the yarn is being adopted by two good friends of mine who create some of the coolest fiber things I’ve ever seen and who love the crafts of knitting and crocheting as much as me. Some craft supplies have gone to another good friend and her daughter’s girl scout troop. But beyond that, I’m pitching a lot. While I know this is not the most eco-friendly way to go about this, I also know I don’t have the energy or time needed to find new homes for this stuff. And honestly, most of it is junk to anyone else anyway.

I’m just so thrilled to have made these connections. To better understand myself. To appreciate all of my loves as hobbies now. To not feel guilty when I go long stretches of time without participating in any of them. To know that I’m simplifying my life and keeping only that which truly gives me joy. That which serves me now.

And on that note, I need to get back to purging and packing and save any more writing for another day.

American Values

When I see people throwing around the phrase, “American values” I don’t feel a sense of pride nor do I usually want to follow or find out anything about the person saying it. Recently, the same people saying the want a return to American values are the homophobic, racist, misogynistic Christians who don’t see their white male privilege for what it is. Which values do they want to return to exactly?

Our country was founded by a group of wealthy white slave owners who didn’t want to pay taxes to a king or be told they had to worship a particular way. Fast forward to today and the ideological descendants of our founding fathers, the 1%, still don’t want to pay any taxes, think their brand of religion is the only acceptable possibility, and own more slaves in the form of employees and consumers than ever before.

I prefer a more global view of our world where we all work together to eradicate pain and suffering, to end discrimination and bullying (in all its forms), to lift each other up, and form a new society that does not rely on fear and keeping people distracted and fighting against each other while the 1% keeps all the power and wealth for themselves at the pain and suffering of the rest of the world.

So, if you are one of the folks saying you want a return to American values, how about you specify exactly which of those “values” you mean rather than use a catch phrase that has so many negative connotations associated with it. Unless, of course, a country run by rich, white, male, Christian slave owners is what you really do have in mind. In which case, fuck you.