Tag Archives: miss britt

Success

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I’ve been hanging out at Miss Britt‘s digital place a lot lately, and even if I don’t comment, her words always get me thinking. Today she wrote about going through her shoes, and how her vision of success has changed. It got me thinking: What is success, to me?

Dictionary.com lists the word “success” as

  1. the favorable or prosperous termination of attempts or endeavors
  2. the attainment of wealth, position, honors, or the like
  3. a successful performance or achievement
  4. a person or thing that is successful

When something goes well, I feel successful (1 and 3). When I am stable monetarily and have things I need and want, I feel successful (2). When I am doing well at something, I feel successful (4). For example, when I was self-employed and managed to make $400-600 last a month, I felt successful. I also felt successful when I could say to other people, “Oh, what do I do? I’m a self-employed web designer.” I did not, however, feel like a success when that $400-600 ran out and I had to bum cigarettes off Mike and hope the next check would come in before my next bill was due. I did not feel like a success when I lost my job; even though I was already broke, I still felt like a failure. Aside from what happened with my aunt, it still sucks to go from having a job — even if that job wasn’t too steady monetarily — to not having one. It sucks to not be able to buy the things I need and want. It sucks even more to have to cancel things I pay monthly, like my gym membership and web hosting¹. Suddenly not having a job makes me feel like I failed at being an adult, even though plenty of adults lose their jobs.

If I look at the big picture, though, I am still pretty successful, in many different ways.

  • I created and grew several communities online. Letters of Love, Freaking Bookworm, and my own personal blog are all their own little communities. I’ve even discovered that they can each survive without having their own website — something I honestly kind of feared. I can also do this on a business level. I am definitely a valuable tool in any company’s online marketing plan.
  • I found a partner who is my best friend, and supports me when I’m down. Even though many of my family members don’t try to hide the fact that they don’t like him and think that I will “grow out of him,” Mike and I are still together, over four years since the day we met. We take care of each other. These family members all think that a successful relationship relies on the man providing for everything, but I don’t see it that way. A relationship is a team effort. We lean on each other.
  • I can begin a story and write it to the finish line. The fact that I am now in the editing process for Sade On the Wall floors me. I am so proud of this novel and the work that I’ve put into it. I’m also proud of everything else I’ve ever finished writing.
  • I took this bad experience and turned it into something positive. Yes, I’m still hurt and angry, but now I have a world full of possibilities at my fingertips. I can go from here and do anything. And I am.

I want to find success in happiness; I don’t want my happiness to rely on success. I thought that by going to school and getting my A.S. in Multimedia/Web Authoring would make me successful, but I was never happy. Each success in my career made me happy, but not wholly. I always wanted something more. Now, I can go out there and get that something more. I might find that the education field really isn’t my thing, but at least I’ll have tried. Hell, I might even find that being a professional writer isn’t my thing, but again: at least I’ll have tried.

From now on, every goal and action will lead me to happiness, and that will be my success.

¹Speaking of hosting, for some reason my websites are all still live, even though my hosting was officially canceled yesterday. I haven’t been charged, either, so I’m wondering if their servers are caching or if they delete things at a certain time, like weekly or something.

Haircuts

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During the summer before I turned nine (I’m an August baby), my little sister and I somehow managed to get lice. It still, to this day, makes my head itch terribly just thinking about it.

Lauren and I were probably playing Barbies or with our gigantic town of various action figures when we noticed a teensy black bug crawling around in our hideaway book. (You know, one of those hollow books you can hide things in?) We bounced down the stairs to wherever Mom was at the moment (probably in the living room watching General Hospital).

“Look Mommy,” we said, holding out the book to her. “What is it?”

I think my mother had a heart attack.

Luckily, my mom has always been calm and composed, and she recovered pretty quickly. She checked our heads and, sure enough, it was lice.

My sister and I were very close as little kids (and still are). At the time, we didn’t hang out with other kids outside of school. Since it was the middle of summer, we hadn’t come into contact with other kids aside from our cousins (who were lice-free). Yet somehow we had managed to both come down with the little buggers.

Mom immediately went out and bought the lice rinses, shampooing and combing the stuff through our long, shiny hair. I hated the scent of it, and I hated stooping over the sink as she rinsed it out. When we were both done, however, we seemed to be cured.

Of course, we weren’t. We did the treatment several more times over the next couple of weeks. Mom and Dad bombed the whole house, and soaked our stuffed animals in the tub with some stuff that was supposed to kill any eggs nested in our stuffed friends. All of our clothing and sheets were washed with scalding hot water, yet we still couldn’t get rid of the lice.

Finally, some well-meaning person told my mom to soak our heads with Vaseline. I can still remember Mom and Dad getting ready for the project. Dad bought some Ajax, which was the only thing that would cut through to wash the Vaseline out once we were coated. Lauren and I sat in chairs as Mom and Dad worked Vaseline into our hair and put plastic shower caps and plastic bags over our heads to keep it from dripping onto anything. I’m not sure how long we had to let it set in, but eventually it was time to wash it out. To this day, I can’t look at a bottle of Ajax and not remember my parents soaping up my hair over and over again, trying to get all of the Vaseline out. Unfortunately, my and Lauren’s hair was so long that it just wasn’t happening.

“We’re going to have to cut it,” said one of my parents. (I’ve honestly blocked out who.)

“NO!” Lauren and I screamed.

“We don’t have a choice,” Mom said. And then she took out the scissors from the drawer — the same scissors Lauren had once used to give her Barbie a lopsided haircut — and cut our hair as we cried and begged her not to.

Once our hair was shorter (and by shorter I mean boy short), the Vaseline washed out without a problem. And the lice? Were gone, never to come back. But I had one hell of a horrible haircut, worse than the haircut Britt recently gave her daughter Emma — I promise!! (I refuse to post pictures, because it truly was that bad.)

For the longest time after that, I refused to cut my hair. It grew all the way down to my hips before, at thirteen, I decided to cut it. Now I could care less; I cut it all the time! But for some reason, when I was a kid, my hair seemed to be my sole identity.

Do you have a bad or funny haircut story? Comment here with your best (or worst), and let’s show Britt that she hasn’t totally traumatized her kid!

Sometimes it's a good hurt

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One night when I was at Tyla’s, we got into the Nice Guy discussion.

“Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d dated that perfect, cookie-cut guy.” You know, the one who always holds the door for you and is concerned about your feelings? The one who works three full-time jobs and wants to get his Master’s degree? He’s got goals, he’s got heart and I bet he’d spend all of his money on your flower of choice if he so much as breathed wrong. That guy.

I’ve been courted by many a Nice Guy. One was fourteen and already on his way to becoming a police officer or EMT. He was my best friend and was the first guy to call me beautiful. He asked me out several times and my dumb thirteen-year-old self turned him down. I still can’t explain why. He was funny, smart, driven and called me beautiful when my then-boyfriend managed to forget to tell me that he had a girlfriend in another state who was pregnant with his twins.

This Nice Guy stopped talking to me shortly after we started high school. To this day, he still refuses to speak to me, even though we’re buddies on several social networking sites.

I met another Nice Guy when I first started college. I had just started dating Mike, who was indecisive and made me want to put my head through a wall. (Yes, he still has trouble making up his mind, especially when we’re at a restaurant and the waitress asks us if we’d like to order. Heh.) He listened to my every word, let me cry and blubber on his shoulder when I talked about my miscarriage and the Brand-X Daddy who’d ditched me shortly after. He held doors for me, made me laugh and bought me lunch. Even when Mike unceremoniously dumped me — no babe, you’re never going to live that down :D — this Nice Guy continued to try to make me swoon.

And yet, all I talked about was Mike. MikeMikeMike. I’m sure Nice Guy was getting ready to hunt down Mike and put a bullet in his head so that he could have my full attention. When Mike and I got back together, Nice Guy still tried to court me, but I think he started to realize that I was in love with the bad guy guy I was inexplicably attracted to. Nice Guy continued to be my friend but as soon as he left the state to attend a highly-esteemed university, he cut off all contact with me.

A wise woman once said:

First, I am not a tease. Or a trollop. Befriending someone is not being a tease. Being open with someone is not being a tease. Letting someone get close to you is not being a tease. Telling someone that you care about them as your friend is not being a fucking tease.

Why do I have to be held accountable for someone else not being able to distinguish between friendship and romance?

Each time I encountered the Nice Guys of the world, I made it clear that I just wanted to be friends. (Well, minus one time. But that was during my I-just-got-ditched-after-losing-Brand-X’s-baby stage, so I think it’s excusable. Maybe. I’m sorry, Nice Guy. Really, I am. Especially since I tossed him aside like a used condom once Mike came into the picture. Yikes.) The Nice Guy is not only cookie-cut but also persistent. They don’t understand the word “no.” They can’t grasp the concept of friendship.

They also totally lack reckless abandon, dangerously good looks and the ability to crush your heart with the right choice of words. They don’t know how to break or refuse to make plans. They don’t oversleep or hesitate to pay the bill. They pick you up on time. Nice Guys deserve the world, but I’ve always had trouble giving it to them. Not when I’m in senseless love.

How do you explain a love that makes no sense? I can list a million reasons why I love Mike and still can’t explain why I am in love with this tattooed and sometimes pain-in-the-ass man and not some cookie-cut guy.

Still, Nice Guys need not give up. The first Nice Guy I mentioned is now an EMT and engaged to a beautiful woman who deserves him. Even though he won’t respond to my congratulations, I’m happy for him. I believe there is someone for everyone.

This post is secretly disguising another issue at heart. For the last year I’ve been asking myself how to tell when someone is The One. I finally came up with an answer the other night, and I hold onto it even when I have my doubts — AKA cold feet.

I’ve spent the last twenty years of my life feeling like a black sheep. Just when I think I belong somewhere, I discover I don’t. With Mike, I feel like I fit right in. It’s so easy to be with his family, as if I’d always been a part of them. He gets my jokes and can instantly tell when I’m upset. He also drives me utterly crazy sometimes but when he works third-shift for weeks and I have to look at photographs to remember what he looks like, I miss him. I miss every annoying moment, and if that isn’t true love, I don’t know what is. Each of the bad moments strengthens the good, and vice versa.

If you don’t believe me, just ask Incubus. They know how love rolls.