Blogging

you have to click on the cartoon so that it will become big enough to read, but it gave me a good laugh...

today i was on my way home from an appointment with my doctor driving down foothill drive heading southbound toward the freeway and i looked over and noticed that the foothill Marie Callender's is no longer there...this specific restaurant is a place that is significant to me in a negative way and because of the piece of personal history that i associate it with i have never been a big fan. i can not see a marie callender's and not be reminded of the painful childhood experience that it represents to me. now it is gone. good riddance.

...and again i find myself awake when i should be far off in dreamland...tomorrow dave and i are meeting with a reproductive endocrinologist and i am a ball of nerves anticipating the appointment...i don't really know why i am feeling so apprehensive, probably just fear of the unkown. i remember when i first started feeling pain in my abdomen and i knew that something was amiss, and then came my surgery and they found endometriosis and ovarian cysts...i can't help feeling fear about what we may discover tomorrow and then another part of me is concerned that they won't be able to give us any information and it is back to the drawing board and i get to start shopping for a new doctor again...dave is patient with my fears and knows how to calm me and give me hope with his steady nature and his faith that everything will work out...
i am trying to muster all my courage, even though i am afraid of what the outcome may be...after all, courage is doing what you are afraid to do. without fear, there could be no courage.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear. -Mark Twain

diet coke plus

i love diet coke, i'm a huge fan...but does anyone else find this new product odd and highly amusing?

no use crying over spilled milk, or should i say, broken glass...

So I am again failing to find sleep and I just walked into our spare bedroom in search of a book to read when i came across the framed art piece that was broken today when Dave bumped it off the wall…I found it odd because I had completely forgotten that it had happened at all.

Dave took the day off work and we went to lunch with my parents, my brother and my nephew and then to see Shrek the third. The frame had been broken before we left the house to meet for lunch. The reason that this struck me as strange is that a few months ago we had hosted a dinner for Dave’s family and I had pulled out our nice glass water pitcher that dave had purchased for me while we were engaged and the day after we used it, but before I had the chance to put it away, I bumped into it and it came down and cracked, the handle broke off and in one fail swoop I had ruined something that was valuable to me…this was not a little thing that I forgot about…this is something that caused me stress, something that I berated myself for, something that made me feel bad all day until dave came home from work and I confessed and started crying. Dave, being the amazing husband that he is, went out with me that evening to drive to several different stores in search of a new glass water pitcher to replace the one I had broken earlier that day. We were looking for hours and didn’t make it home to eat dinner until about nine in the evening and we came home empty-handed…of course we didn’t find a pitcher as nice as the one I had broken…

When I looked at the framed art picture tonight I realized that I had forgotten about the broken glass immediately following today’s accident, but had let the broken pitcher that was caused by my accident let me feel bad about myself. What was the difference? Was the pitcher more special than our framed art? No, that was not it. I would like to say that I have learned a lot about life since then and while this is true, I have learned quite a bit, that was not it either. I realized that I am hard on julie. I expect no less than perfection from myself. I think about what I tell Dave…that stuff is just stuff, and he is what is important to me.

For Christmas one of the gifts Dave purchased for me was a beautiful new glass water pitcher from Macy*s and it is far nicer than the first one that I broke, and i love it...but I don’t know that it was the pitcher that I was frantically searching for that day after I broke it. I think it was forgiveness. I think it was acceptance. I think that I just wanted to restore what was lost to me in the intangible sense, the part of me that I beat up and expect so much from. I wanted to find a new pitcher the day I broke it so that I could let myself off the hook. I need to pull out that glass water pitcher more often, because it is beautiful and I should use it and let it be a reminder to me of how much easier it is to replace material things that it is to restore my self acceptance.

my husband is good to me...

Dave gave me stargazer lilies for mother's day. they are so beautiful, i just had to take a picture...

creating something beautiful...

i love learning new things about myself. tonight i spent my evening making mini cupcakes for a party we are attending tomorrow to honor Dave's mom. as i was frosting each individual cupcake i realized something...i love to bake. i love making sugar cookies and decorating them. i have fun baking poppyseed bread. i thoroughly enjoy baking cakes and decorating them with fruit, candy and icing. i know i have always found pleasure in baking, but tonight i think i realized why. i love to bake because i love creating something beautiful. Baking is a simple and inexpensive way to create a masterpiece. i associate baking with holidays, parties and people that i love. i bake when i am celebrating something or someone i love and do my best to present it in a beautiful way because it represents the love i have for the people i am celebrating.

the struggle of sisyphus

Insomnia has found me once again tonight, it seems to be my constant companion these days and so I have been reading old journal entries, letters I wrote with no intent to send, written for the sole purpose of processing my feelings and various lists of things in my life, both trivial and significant, and how I felt about them…some of which date back to ten years ago…and I have realized something that I already knew, but it hit me in a different, more profound way. I am who I am, my likes are my likes, my struggles are my struggles, and I will be me for as long as I am living. I guess I could be frustrated. I mean ten years of living, progressing, and learning only to find myself dealing with the same weaknesses and disappointments I have in my own imperfect self? I work through a personal trial at a specific time only to have it pop back up in my life after I thought I had it beat. I couldn’t help but think of Sisyphus.

Sisyphus is a figure of greek mythology who was condemned to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a rock up a mountain, only to see it roll down again. Can you think of anything more futile or frustrating? Sisyphus is a great representation of the human experience. Everyone has their own personal rock to roll up the hill. We all have challenges that are unique to us, and some of those challenges last our whole life long. It is a never-ending battle to master ourselves and make strong within us those things that are weak. Though it is an ongoing struggle, think about what Sisyphus gained…how much stronger he must be forty years into his lifelong sentence than he was on his first trip up the hill…how, with each trip, it must become easier…how maybe, once he has built up strength and endurance to roll the rock up without much effort, he can focus on the sheer beauty of the hill. The rock is still his, it will always be his, but it will not always be the overwhelming trial that it started out as and he will have become a stronger man.

I think that is a great metaphor for life. We may carry long term burdens that seem at times, to be overwhelming and endless, but they will not always seem that way and in carrying them, they change us…we become stronger. And while I still have some of the same trials and shortcomings that I had then, they do not carry the same negative emotions that they used to...and through them, i have learned about myself and become a stronger person.

"yeah, you'll be happy. you just won't know it, that's all."

today marks five months since i had my ultrasound and Dave and i found out that our baby had died in utero. as i type this, tears fill my eyes and my vision becomes blurred. i have felt so many different emotions from this loss...sorrow, anger, betrayal, frustration, abandonment, loneliness, envy, fear, and many more...each of these feelings are such painful ones, and it has been hard for me to find happiness. a friend sent me an email last week and mentioned how, sometimes she missed her life, and went on to express her feelings of being happy at one time, but not knowing it. i immediately thought of a quote from the movie "she's having a baby" kevin bacon is about to get married and he has cold feet. he asks alec baldwin(his best man) if he will be happy with his wife and the life he is about to start with her and alec's reply is, "yeah, you'll be happy. you just won't know it, that's all"

i think back to when Dave and i were engaged and both of us were working 50+ hours a week, we worked hard and we played hard and everything seems so rose colored to me. it seems like i was successful, thin, full of anticipation of this adventure of marriage to such a wonderful man that i was about to embark on and it does seem like a dream to me, very surreal when i think about it now, facing the complex emotions that i feel when dealing with this enormous loss. As i reflect on that time, i wonder...if someone had asked me how i was last year at this time, what would my answer be? maybe i would say i was stressed, worried about how i was going to get everything done for the wedding with my hectic work schedule, or maybe i would say tired, that i never really got the sleep i needed to feel rested each day, or maybe i would say frustrated, because i'd fallen short of some impossible expectation that i had created for myself...would i have answered that i was happy? when people now ask me how i am, there are many different ways to answer(see above to the list of my recent emotions) but there are so many reasons for me to answer in a positive way. i am happy that i have such a great husband, who would forego his lunch breaks for the rest of the week so he could come home early to be with me because i had a hard day....i am happy to have such a beautiful, comfortable home to live in that provides us refuge from the storms of life...i am happy to have this time with Dave that we can pick up and leave for the weekend at a moment's notice for a weekend getaway when we want some time alone together... i am happy that i have the time to take long baths and reflective walks on the trail by our house when i need some time to myself.

i look ahead to the future and i can hear the little pitter patter of tiny feet in our home. i know we will have children someday. i can only imagine looking back on this time and i wonder how i will describe it in retrospect. i am trying to realize the happiness in each moment because, at the very least, it will put the pain in perspective. our lives are like a novel and we are the authors. we can be the hero or the victim. we are the ones who tell the story to ourselves, and i want mine to be a good one, the kind you can't put down...you know, a real page-turner...

just a victim of pop culture

I went through a mixed-cd phase a few years back where I was consumed with making compilations, each with their own genre to match whatever mood I found myself in…because I didn’t want to confuse any of the discs, I would title them with an excerpt from the first song on each cd. As I was getting things in order to move back to Utah my older brother Eliot, who was helping me pack, came across these cds and asked me about the various titles of the mixed cds. I explained my reasoning and he kind of chuckled. He said he thought they sounded more like themes for life because of the titles…

“my assumption is the mother of all mistakes.”

“this place is a prison”

“all the world is waiting for you”

“grasp for something true”

“everything’s my fault”

I was glad that Eliot made that observation because it started me thinking…at some point in my life I related to each of these quotes when taken out of the context of the songs they were written for. Each one of them represent something to me, some lesson I have learned or person that I have known that has changed me forever. I love to see things from a different perspective, no matter the medium...books, songs, people, movies...anything that makes me examine the way I look at the world, and gives me a fresh look at something already familiar to me. When I was going to school in Virginia, I would often quote movies, sometimes entire scenes from movies, quotes from books, or lines from my favorite songs when someone was in a dilemma or sometimes, just for fun. It usually got laughs around our house and it became common for me to say, "Don't blame me, I'm just a victim of pop culture." It became an inside joke among us, but there is some truth to that statement. There are many books I have read, songs I have listened to, movies I have watched, and people that I have known that have changed the way I think about something, or at least forced me to reflect on my beliefs or actions and for this reason, they stay with me. Many people tell you to learn from your mistakes. Others say you should learn from the mistakes of others because you’ll never have time to make them all yourself. I say learn from everything, whether it is something that has happened or something that is entirely fictitious, there is something to learn from everything that we experience.

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.”

-Dr. Seuss

"...so the man was left by himself, incomplete and all alone..."

Dave recorded edward scissorhands for me, so i started to watch it and i actually related to it in a way that i haven't related to it since a very dark and lonely time for me in 2003, i had even had dreams where my hands were replaced by scissors... "he died before he got to finish the man he invented, so the man was left by himself, incomplete and all alone..." wow, isn't the man all of us, incomplete and all alone? we may have family and friends but alone in the sense that we are cut off from our maker? aren't we each one of us alone on earth trying to make sense of the mixed up nature of mortality, trying to find the rhyme or reason to any of the chaos that is life? all of us are lacking in parts of our lives, each one of us is fragmented, though we may not have scissors for hands, none of us are quite complete...