As you may have noticed in my last post, I’m on a bit of a spiritual kick. And, I know, that doesn’t explain a thing about WHAT THE HELL that post was, but that’s the point (or the non-point). Maybe “spiritual” isn’t the right word. And hopefully this isn’t a “kick.” Because, as I said in that last post, I’m happy — happy not trying to be happy. Because trying to be happy presupposes that I’m not happy. And if I step outside my bumbling brain for a bit and look at things as they are, I’m damn happy. Yeeaahh.

“Spiritual” is definitely not the right word either. I’ve sort of been-there-done-that, and it didn’t stick. It was definitely a “kick.” I don’t even really care if the psychic across the road from the big bookstore I frequent is really psychic or not, or even if I have a “spirit guide,” and what his name is, or if my dead cat is communicating with me when I’m sleeping. Because, at least for me, it doesn’t matter. Matter.

Regular yoga practice is teaching me this. How good practicing yoga makes me feel doesn’t matter. Matter. What matters is what’s here, what’s clear. My cat sitting on my lap, purring, now turning to me with stinky wet kisses, the click-clicking of the keys under my fingertips, my daughter upstairs serenading her dad: “it’s not my fault, the police gave me a ticket once because it’s not catching up to you, na-na-na-na-na” (#wtf?). Time passes quickly, and I’m done squandering my life.

So there are things to let go of. Me, the clinger. Addictions, fears, desires, anxieties. This doesn’t mean I plan on repressing or transcending these things, or never-ever-having-a-Starbucks-soy-no-water-tazo-chai-ever-again-EVER. It just means watching, noticing, observing the patterns, the wanting, the cravings — human stuff that we all get sucked into, stuck in. Not caring where it all comes from or why.

This is all a little something I’m learning from him (ignore the old caption — try)…

…and through him (who happens to have been my best friend when I was around 4-6 years old — so, kind of kismet)…

One day, I’ll have the guts to go to Michael Stone’s studio, maybe take a class, maybe let him know the impact he’s had on my life and, so, the lives around me….

Don’t worry, I’m still loving The Real Housewives. Just dancing more to the beat of my own drummer. And maybe even to a little Alicia Keys, because…

…because that’s what my girls are playing because we’re going to NYC — Blogher ‘10 — this summer with a whole bunch of other fabulous people whom I genuinely love. Come with us!? God help me, my family’s coming, too! But they’ll be staying with Josh’s sister and husband in Brooklyn. Yes, it will be quite the roadtrip. And I expect to overhear many a backseat conversation, such as this little nugget from today:

TANGENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

All that matters: my amazing family, good friends, authenticity (but not the cliche kind), the world, this earth, “this ground.” What doesn’t matter: “big bloggers,” stats, twitter followers, fame, what-if’s, what so-and-so thinks of how my kid behaved in the restaurant, or what so-and-so thinks of what I’m wearing (again)…. None of it matters. Too much squandering. Squandering.

So, basically, while I’m not going to give up squandering altogether (you’d have to PAY me to give up Housewives right now, and, hmmm, twitter), I’m a little more focused on what matters, on what’s real, here, and now, on this earth.

One more tweet for the road – because it came out of nowhere last week and is, dare I say, très apropos….

It’s about being here and now and balanced within an extremely unbalanced society, ecology, economy, etc., etc….

Kind of like this wonderful boy, my blog friend (and fellow T-Dot book clubber) Sandra Diaz’s eight-year-old son Zachary, raising thousands of dollars for assaulted women, and volunteering any way he can for other important charities. He was honoured at Disney on Ice the other night. That’s yoga — as opposed to “blissing out” in hot pink lululemons. I got to take a picture….

Though it’s a fabulous workout and great for the nervous system, the heart of yoga is in the here and now. In not escaping but being present and active anywhere that you’re needed. Most people don’t realize it. Most people don’t realize how enlightening it is to really be in the here and now — through yoga, meditation, and even just reading (maybe even a blog post?) about it.

Bottom line in 140 characters or less? I don’t care about small stuff anymore. Dunzo. (Okay more than 140 characters.) I will continue to wear my flaws on my sleeve. But I’ll let them be. I’ll go with the flow and focus on what matters. Really matters.

It’s a work in progress…, of course.

People ask me about yoga and yoga books/dvds all the time. So, basically: Michael’s books (he has three of them now) — Cheaty RECOMMENDS.

Love!

xo Haley-O

“Oh, I’m sorry! My name’s Nick. I’m a reporter out here in Santa Monica, and I just finished up an interview with Julia [Child] for our paper out here.”

I was really going to have to get my phone number unlisted.

“I’d like to get your thoughts on some things. Because I asked her about you, and frankly, she was kind of a pill about it. Is this a bad time?”

“Oh. No. It’s fine.”

When I hung up the phone five minutes later, I felt numb.

…I sat on the couch beside Eric…. “That was a reporter from California. He just interviewed Julia. He asked her about me. She hates me.” I giggled, like I do in these breathless situations. ”She thinks I’m not respectful or not serious or something.”

…Eric put his arm over my shoulder. “What is she, ninety?”

“Ninety-One,” I sniffled.

“See? She probably doesn’t have the first idea what a blog is.“

…”I don’t know. Maybe she thinks I’m taking advantage or I’m — I’m not –” I was taken surprise by a sudden rush of tears. “I thought I was — I’m sorry if I –”

And then abruptly I was wailing….

–Julie Powell, Julie and Julia, pp. 333-334

So there was a Simon Fraser University Masters thesis written extensively about me and seven other “mommybloggers” (grrr…). I heard about it yesterday, of all places, when I was sitting at Podcamp TO, listening to a panel discussion, of all things, about what happens when social media goes wrong. My heart started pounding when I heard — my face turned beat red, palms sweating, hands shaking.

I’m used to people responding to my individual posts in the comments, on twitter, even on email. I’m definitely not used to someone reading my blog from start to finish, making gross assumptions based on posts here and there, and then publishing these gross assumptions and frustrating misreadings in a thesis — both offline and on — and not telling me about it, even after the fact.

At first I was furious. And I definitely (over)reacted on twitter:

I got really upset that The Thesis wasn’t in fact about the “works” themselves or the genre of blogging, as indicated in The Thesis’ abstract, and that, rather, it was about our lives, our income, whether or not we love that our children are away (for 2.5 hours, hello) at preschool, and so on. When Danigirl sent me the abstract (which was all I could see for hours until I got home to open the pdf file that contained The Thesis), I was a little flattered and excited. To be studied in the context of Bakhtin’s Dialogic, for example, and to be categorized as “Canadian Women’s Literature,” was so cool. Bring it on!

But, when I opened the document and searched my name…, I was floored. All those assumptions about all sorts of irrelevant stuff. It hurt. Bad.

I think the thing that bothered me most was when The Thesis writer suggested that I may have contrived how I started blogging in the first place. I told the world that Ali Martell introduced me to blogging when the Monkey was 8 months old, and that’s the truth — no questions asked. But, according to The Thesis writer, I “contrived” this bit in order to appear flippy and erratic or whatever. In another post, she ingeniously discovers, I mention that Jennifer Lawrence, who happens to be the author of the blog MUBAR (which no longer exists), helped me out when I was clinically depressed while pregnant with the Monkey. (And, by the way, an article was written about my prenatal depression and published in some major psychiatry journal — APA? — and, you betcha, the author asked my permission even though they used an alias and I’d never find it in a million years!). Yes, Jen Lawrence helped me, but it was OVER THE PHONE. I didn’t know she had a blog, or what a blog was.

Why does this bother me? Because it’s an insult to my integrity as a blogger. SURE, I might exaggerate things — for entertainment’s sake — here and there, and less so these days. But I would never flat-out lie. I would never “contrive” something. To me, that’s the ultimate insult to a blogger.

Somewhere, way out yonder in the internet ether, there’s a great old email conversation in which Ali reveals to me, “I HAVE A BLOG,” and to which I reply, “WHAT’S A BLOG???”

Anyway.

Whatever. I’m really okay now. I’m flattered that I’m in an MA thesis, even though the reading of “me” is false and unflattering for the most part. As you can see on twitter, I felt beyond violated and uncomfortable when I first read the thesis. But, I haven’t looked at it since, and I’ll never look at it again — and I feel better. And I can laugh at the broad assumptions, as I’ve also done on twitter:

And, this one….

Oops, how’d that tweet get there? (Disclosure: CONTRIVED.)

Here, see I can make light of The Thesis writer’s totally unfounded statement that I am the most “affluent” of all the bloggers (if she only knew!?):

Should the student have contacted me? It would have been the nice and, I think, scholarly thing to do.

Do I blame the student? Do I “hate” her SORT OF like Julia Child hated Julia Powell? No. I’ve done a Master’s Thesis, and I know how difficult that can be on several levels. This writer wrote the thesis in 2008. She’s obviously young, likely not a mother. There I go assuming, though….

As with all controversies surrounding “mommyblogging,”  people are now taking the opportunity to troll thoughtful posts on the subject and preach about the ethics of “mommyblogging.” We’re putting ourselves and our kids out there for scrutiny and misinterpretation, so apparently we should just suck it up, not react, and just plain expect this. But, surely we’re allowed to “giggle” or “wail.” On twitter?

Know what happened to me today? I went to Starbucks (shut it — I’m not affluent — I got a card for Valentine’s Day). Rascal and I sat beside a woman who was typing on her mini laptop. When she got up to leave, she said:

You know, I’ve been watching you, and you’re a wonderful mother. I see the way you talk to him and look at him, the way he looks at you. And I don’t see that all the time, unfortunately. It’s amazing to watch you. And I’m a therapist….

That compliment, that observation of ME, was so beautiful and so welcomed given my current frustration. And, so often, my readers and fellow bloggers, whether in comments, twitter, or email, make me feel THAT good with their genuine, caring feedback and friendship.

You can’t read a blog and claim to know the writer. As I stated several days ago on twitter,

You can’t judge a blogger by his or her blog. It’s not a novel. It’s its own genre. One absolutely worth exploring at an academic level.

If you’d like to see a copy of The Thesis, just contact me — which is easy to do for the record….

Love!

xo Haley-O

I’m only writing a post right now so that I can move the last post I wrote down the line. You know — the one DOWN THERE where I say I’m obsessed with Bethenny Frankel? I’m NOT obsessed with Bethenny Frankel. I’ve just had a fever on and off for 2 weeks, and I, clearly, wrote that post during one of my more feverish moments. I’m shivering with fever chills just thinking about it: me, obsessed with Bethenny Frankel. While I like her — and maintain that I still LOVE the whole Real Housewives series and may write about it elsewhere on the internet later today, from my bed, while feverish — I’m not obsessed with her. Although her body really is something else, and she tells it like it is like nobody’s business, and she makes a mean margarita (not that I drink margaritas)…. Not obsessed. Seriously. Did I mention I’m SICK AS A DOG?

I’ve been sick for 2 weeks. And, aside from the smoking part, I remind myself of Rosana Rosanadana in this famous SNL skit (FAVE)…..

From the rash in Florida, to the worst sore throat I’ve ever had in my life, to the stomach flu that had me praying to the porcelain god like I HAVE NEVER, and now to this cold? I’m A MESS. So I thought I’d share. And this is better than nothing, right? It’s better than leaving a post up for days stating I’m obsessed with Bethenny Frankel. Actually, I’m a little, more admirably, obsessed with Wallace Stevens today — since I found his book Palm at the End of the Mind in a box in my garage while I was looking for another book (that I for the life of me cannot find):

To say more than human things with human voice,
That cannot be; to say human things with more
Than human voice, that, also, cannot be;
To speak humanly from the height or from the depth
Of human things, that is acutest speech.
(Wallace Stevens, “Chocurua to its Neighbor”)

So there’s that. And just when I was about to go to bed for the entire day and maybe, like, heal and such, I realize Monkey and I have to count one hundred hearts together….

And we have to do our Friday school homework assignment…. And we have to make Valentine’s Day cards — 20 of them, which involve the handwriting of each child’s name in her class GOD HELP US ALL. And the mystery therein lies in this undeniable fact: my child’s “y”s look like vaginas….

Okay, to bed….

Love!

xo Haley-O

I’m back home from Florida, but with a bit of a heavy heart. Isn’t it always SO HARD coming back from a vacation? Isn’t it always SO HARD coming back to the snow and cold from a warm and OCEAN-y vacation?

Rascal: Mama, I yuf buhds. I yuf buhds. I yuf buhds. I yuf……… (Trans. “I love birds.”)

I’m welling up just writing this.

It was a weird vacation. It went really quickly, but really slowly at the same time — as if it was an entire lifetime, a flash of an entire lifetime. I’m not sure if it was the podcast I was listening to: yoga lectures by a guy who happens to have been my best friend when I was 4-6 years old, which totally resonated with me in, like, flabbergasting ways. Or, maybe it was the fact that I was surrounded by family the whole time. Or, maybe it was the fact that, relatively speaking, I didn’t do much work. Or, maybe it was that I didn’t so much as LOOK at my blackberry the whole time….

Maybe it was my aching throat that kept me up all night EVERY night, listening to stunning podcasts by my best friend when I was 4-6…. Maybe it was my aching throat that sent me, crying, frustrated, down the stairs for some tea in the wee hours of the morning, and that sent my mother down right after me. With back rubs, a blanket and some Tylenol.

Maybe it was this Monkey at the Bibbidy Bobbidy Boutique in Cinderella’s Castle at Disney World. “It’s the best style, Mama!”….

Or this dog (Quincey!)….

Or this Rascal on this beach in these over-sized new clothes (TARGET)….

Or this new hoodie (TARGET)….

Or this new Superman shirt (TARGET)….

Or So You Think You Can Dance in this, our very own, living room….

Or my dad and The Monkey collecting shells on this beach….

Or this man in that Speedo whom I spoke to for a half an hour about banks and business and Long Island (I know, what the what?) while the extreme waves pushed and pulled and played tricks on me; or, that thing in the water that stung me on the ass and made my skin burn and forced me, finally, to dart out of the water (my friend in the Speedo probably thinking it was him), but was so worth it….

Or nightlife….

These trees….

This foot (Rascal)….

I don’t know what it was that made this trip so confusing, so life-changing and difficult to process as Monday emerges and I embark on ROUTINE again.

I’ve made it so my blackberry no longer blinks at me….

I’ve scheduled specific work hours for the week….

I made lentil and barley soup….

I’m going to bed before 11:00 11:30….

I’m breathing in and out and in and out.

My throat still hurts. It isn’t strep. But I feel rested and happy and exhausted and heavy-hearted, and new….

LOVE!

xo Haley-O

We went for “Mexican” tonight.

“DADA!!! CAN WE GO TO MEXICAN FOR DINNER, DADA?”

The Monkey loves Mexican. It’s not so much the food, but the restaurant, and maybe the chips and salsa, and the fried ice cream (which we managed to skip tonight) and the lollipop at the end. Maybe also that fruity mango drink with the sugar granules (granules?) along the rim. SLURRRP!

Anyway, we just got back, and now I’m a little bored with the Golden Globe awards because my favourite movie, of, like, all time right now,  AVATAR hasn’t won anything yet. Yet.

…WISH the Avatar music had won, wahh.

Ooo! And now my whole WEBSITE’s been DOWN for an hour and, YES!, James Cameron has just won Best Director for Avatar. Good. Good. WOOHOO! And GLEE has WON. All is right in the entertainment world.

So I went to a Naturopath for the first time yesterday. I think I’m too exhausted from waiting for them to fix my site, and, still, from the appointment itself, to write in any real detail about it. The 90-minute session involved a lot of emotional work, to my surprise. I went home with some herbal tinctures for my li’l (HUGE) OCD disorder, a binder full of gentle info, and lots of homework — both physical and emotional.

I’ll tell you some more about this seriously great experience later. Arnold Schwarzenegger is introducing Avatar, and I’m still processing the rest of my session. Why I, miss natural “granola” girl, have never been to a naturopathic doctor is a mystery even to me. But, I highly recommend it to everyone wanting to feel their best. And I recommend MY NATUROPATH (Dr. Jennifer Baer), in particular — she’s actually a VERY old friend, and a wise woman in the perfect profession for her. More later.

All I’ll say for now is that today was a good day. We went to the MUSEUM because I wanted to MAKE something of this day (instead of swimming, as I tend to do this time of year, in my head) — a GOOD SIGN. I went to Starbucks and drank a chai latte without guilt, while sitting by myself reading the newspaper book reviews instead of THE HEALTH SECTION — a very GOOD SIGN. I just let everything go.

Oh, and we went for Mexican because…, to cooking a perfect wholesome dinner, I said F*CK IT! And, of course, because the Monkey asked for it. And I may or may not have put the idea in her head.

Love!
xo Haley-O

For more ways to help the people of Haiti, check out Canada Helps. Wish we could do so much more. Apparently, the Government of Canada will match donations by individual Canadians. For more info on that, see here.