holding my breath...

Here we are folks, another election and I find myself holding my breath just like four years ago and fours before that. The last election, I found myself at home watching the polls on TV and when I felt I would burst from anxiety I made my way to an Irish pub down the road where the orange county democratic party was having a get together. I had join the party after the first election. After having countless arguments with co-workers after 9-11, about why we should not be going to war. After showing up at demonstrations hoping it could change things and nothing changed. I needed to do something and so in spite of the fact that I was only a temporary resident here in the US I joined the OC Dem. party. The party itself is an oxymoron of sorts. Anyone who has lived in the OC will tell you there is little that is democratic here. This is the heart of red country,in the very blue state of California. I joined the party because I needed to believe there were other folks living around me that shared the same values and thoughts. I was very seriously considering moving back to Canada afterall.

Anyways election night I make my way to the pub. They have a room reserved for the OC dem party, there are banners and streamers and everyone is very excited and exuberant. And very confident and hopeful. There is nothing to worry about!! What we were waiting for was the California polls to close and then see the whopping jump in the electoral vote collected from CA to clinch the elections. Except other state polls started to close and one after the other they were painted red. People started doing the math and realized we were now looking at a very close election even with the California vote. The mood very quickly soured, and by 9 pm, everyone had left the gathering except for this one lady and me. I was a non voter and she was too nervous to go and watch the events unfold alone. So we sat there nursing our beers and watching the TV screen. Finally by 10:30 we called it a night. I came home feeling nauseous, and suddenly very very depressed. How could this be? Not again. Not 4 more years of this. not AGAIN!!!

I decided I would head to bed. This was just a bad dream. I would go to sleep and tomorrow when I would wake up everything would be right.

I am still waiting to wake up, and I hope that tonight we can finally take that step to setting things right. But until then, I am holding my breath....

love me, love me not

It’s the morning and I am sitting with my steaming cup of coffee and doing what I do, reading celebrity gossip, my very secret shameful indulgence…

I am struck by the stories regarding parents of adoptive children that then happen to have birth children. Specifically today a story on Nicole Kidman. Okay being out from under the hold of shorty Tom and his couch jumping ideology must be a huge relief, worthy of a mighty Hallelujah!!! And finding a hotty singer from down under to be your best mate, must have her aglow with the “Soulmates are real” wisdom ( I question that by the way). To top that there is the birth of Sunday Rose, apparently a miracle, although though there are plenty of 41 year olds having babies… The blessed event apparently has given Nicole a new lease of life. She is now whole and complete.

To that I say bullshit. I don’t know if these are her words or those of the media, although I suspect the media for being so closed minded. The story makes it sound like she is a mother for the first time. Hello?!! She has two teenage adopted children. Tell me why would someone adopt a child only to make a point of showing them that they will never be the same as s birth child. Truthfully I blame Nicole too. She been gushing over the new baby and really not talking much about her other kids. Maybe they are too under the control of Tom and they have grown apart.

I don’t know, but it just bothers the heck out of me. Even Brangelina that I highly respect for having the kind of multicoloured brood I’d aspire to have someday, even with them the media is relentless. Now y’all know Angie loves her Maddox,afterall it he completely transformed the woman, but every since the birth of Shiloh, the media has a made a point of focusing on her, because she is the true fruit of the loins of Brangelina whereas Zahara, Pax and Maddox must be a rental deals.

Or take Madonna with her son David. Oh but he’s never just David. He little David Banda, lets make it clear in case you are colour blind, that he does NOT have the same last name as Madonna, because, wait for it,wait for it, .... he is not really her child.... Wow!!!

Get real folks, and grow up. A child is a child and if you love children it should not matter if they are your own or adopted. I love my friends children just as much as my own nieces. Blood is not thicker than water. This is simply a condition of society that say somehow what you make yourself has a special ingredient that somehow an adoptive child cannot have. And science doesn’t help. What with the stories of bonding between mother and child, baby knowing its mothers scent, how mothers milk is the secret sauce to have smart healthy kids.

What I do know is that babies are very smart. What they do bond to is attention. Give them love and give them attention and they are yours. And there are alot of those little ones out there looking for your love, looking for someone to bond to. So open your arms and bring them into your lives and love them because all you need is love.... and your life will never be the same.... Ask Angie…

The Lunch Bunch....

Every once in a while the gals from my office get together for lunch or happy hour, usually around a birthday. These get together are guaranteed to be fun filled with lost of laughs and plenty of interesting discussion. You see, we all work at an engineering company, so first off it’s great to be doing something away from the boys, but also because we are such a diverse group of women. In one meeting we had an animated discussion regarding raising teens about the subject of sex, and drugs. And the incredible thing is the insight everyone had on the topic, each seeing it from their point of view, regardless of whether they had children or not. I think we all learned something that night.

Anyways today’s get together was much more lighthearted. We were celebrating the birthday of a couple of the girls and conversation steered towards who is the youngest in the crowd (31) and who’s married and who is not. Actually it started by me mis-hearing some saying “I’m buried” , referring to work, and hearing it as “I’m married”. So I joked that I guess congratulations were in order. Her response was that marriage was never something on her agenda, and being a single Mom was fine by her. In turn she asked the our single birthday girl if she had ever been married or would like to be. Her response with a big wistful smile was that it’s something that would make her very happy and something she has on her vision board. I have heard people say that… That somehow marriage, not the big party and all that, completes you… She then said “I have a goal… for my next birthday I want to be on the hottest date of my life… I just have to find the guy...”

Now this here young lady happens to be a project manager in my company. Well getting things done and getting them done on time is her job. So we joked that she should set up a committee to investigate this project. We would need research, we would need regular meeting preferably over wine. We would need test subjects, prototypes and a products requirement document. After much laughter, we thought, why not?

From this was born “The Pathi Dev Project” (I’ll let you figure out what the Sanskrit term means). Although the original conversation starting with our dear girl landing a hot date, that became more and more of a minor goal, and the bigger goal the objective of having fun with the idea of finding the perfect date. After all this would require research, observing the subject in it’s natural habitat, and figuring out the best way to lay the trap and snare the prize LOL!!! Ultimately this would lead to spending time with the sisterhood, sharing laughs and swapping stories and ultimately having plenty of fun filled get togethers to track our “progress”. Like I said ours is a diverse group, there are single parents, divorced chicks, happily married wives, mothers and single gals. We’ve all had our own experiences in love arena and now we have a forum to share those experiences. That is what I love about being a woman. We are fiercely supportive of one another, and no one has as much fun as a bunch of gals on the town. Like Cindi says, Girls just wanna have fun!!!

What if ...?

Ever look back at your choices in life and wonder what if I had taken a different path. Stupid question, every one does, right? You often have these soul searching moments when you find yourself at a crossroads so to speak. Not sure how to move forward, so you go backwards in your mind. Maybe you are trying to validate that you did the right things. Maybe it’s to torture yourself by thinking of the alternate routes you could have taken and how sweet everything would be now if you had…

Truth is none of us knows what the future holds and no one can tell what other things could have happened had your path diverged from the one you are on now. Yet we still do this. This reflection on the past. This “what if” scenario that we ponder over and over again.

Happiness is a pretty elusive thing. It’s really more of an art form. To be happy in life you have to perfect the skill of contentment, be able to accept things for what they are, be able to see the glass half full at all times. It’s a state of mind. One that requires a lot of work and focus and definitely does not come naturally. Our every present darkside is always at work, stealthy chipping away at our happy facade. It’s why depression never happens over night but sneakily works it way into your mind day by day till it takes you down,knocked youoff your feet and eaving you wondering how you never saw it coming. There is reason, sorry Tom Cruise, you need the pills to get out a hole like that…

I have alot of what-ifs that my always awake brain likes to roll around in my mind. Did I pick the right career? Spend more time on my relationships? tried to have kids? live closer to family ....

The fact is in almost every major decision I have made in life I chose be non-conformist. Which is really weird considering I hate breaking the law. I guess I saw the popular choices in life , doing just what everyone else was doing as boring. That is not to say I am THAT unique of a person. I am not. The are plenty of folks that made the same kind of choices that I have. But I think the motivation for all of us was to do something different. Be different…

I knew, when I was 11 that I wanted to be an engineer. Not because my Dad, or my cousins were engineers. But because I read an article in Scientific American, about the designer of Audi fox. She was on the cover and hailed as a revolutionary engineer. And I knew right then, I wanted to be just like her. Not just an engineer, but kick ass one. It’s not often you have such clarity of thought, but it never occurred to me to question myself then.

I do now.

I know I am a pretty kick ass engineer. Check there. But having accomplished that I don’t really sense satisfaction. The reality of life as an engineer, the long hours, the working with fellow geeks and nerds, the logical thinking that makes us socially retarded creatures, never considered how that would effect my everyday life. Not to mention, who cares that I designed the fastest networking chip. Great! Some pervert can download porn faster now...How does that help me make my mark on the world?

My point is I wonder how things could have been different if I had not had that epiphany at age 11… What would I be today… Would life be infinitely more interesting than it is now?

I can’t change the past but I certainly can change the present. Work on that glass half full attitude. Anything can be interesting if you show an interest and engage with it. Life is no exception. So lets go forth and be happy and live interesting lives…

Who Knew?

I always joke with friends that I was born on a very insignificant day. No one worth knowing shares my birthday. Sorry Mila Jovavich and Giovanni Riabissi that you don’t count. If I was born a day earlier or a day later well then I would have the honour of sharing my birth day with the likes of Brad Pitt, Katie Holmes, Beethoven. But alas it was not to be. Or so I thought…

I have been reading this book, titled “The Red Book”. It had a bit on Rumi, who I have come to appreciate ALOT now that I can read his poetry in english. I know I know. I should really be reading it in farsi, but lets face it my farsi is crap. I’d never ever have the fortune of learning anything about persian literature if I relied on my broken farsi.

Anyhoo, I have been reading alot of Rumi as well as Hafez. Let just say I am looking for some answers, and well they are both very wise men, whose wisdom is still relevant given the passage of time. So imagine my delight in finding out that my birthday is the day that the turkish dervishes celebrate “sema”. My birthday is the day Rumi died, and dervishes chose that day to do their riutual of sema, twirling in ecstasy and connecting to the divine, just like Rumi did 100s of years ago in longing for his beloved Shams, God, and the divine. My birthday is the day that Rumi finally re-united with his beloved. Wow!! Now that’s significant ....

So come Dec, on my birthday, I will be celebrating with my own sema. Twirling like dervish and lighting up my own divine spark.

Random Musings...

Here’s a thought for you.... You know how you are driving along, you see someone trying to turn in front of you and you let them in? And then they drive away, like letting them in was their God given right? Not to sound petty, but after 8 years of having lived in California ( I moved from Canada, where last I checked people still waved) , this is still something I have not gotten used to. What happened to a wave to say thanks?

Here’s what I think. Our car’s are these metal boxes that keep the outside world out. We feel like we are in our own little world. Don’t need to speak or talk to anyone. I am my own island. But we are also human, social creatures and part of the network that is humankind.

Raising a hand to wave is more than just acknowledging that you appreciate a total stranger doing something nice for you. It’s not just about manners and being polite. It’s about connections. Establishing a link. Showing your humanity driving along in your metal tank. It’s about take a fleeting moment in our high speed, broadband lives to say, hi, I see your kindness and I raise it with a smile and a wave. Have a nice day too…

Next time you are on the road, and someone lets you cut in front of them, lets you merge on a lane, or basically tolerates your crazy ass driving, raise a hand and say thanks. Just try it. See what happens…