Cole, 1/18/15:

 

Hola a todos!  Without fail, and as always, I hope that everyone is doing well.  The New Year is still so young and there are so many possibilities and things to look forward to, goals to be achieved and new things to learn, obstacles to overcome and other shit to conquer!

 

My year has kicked off pretty badass, I must say.  The first week or two seemed just mediocre to me, at best, but then I had a beer with a good friend of mine, took a step back, saw things from a different angle, had some things put into perspective, and the end result was that my pleasure with how my New Year has begun waxed immensely.  Aside from he and I setting an awesome new goal for each of us to achieve, mainly, getting some work of ours published by August 30’th of this year (an ambitious goal, to be sure, but there is no harm in trying, even if we don’t succeed), I also realized that at the core, though some aspects of my life of course are not quite 100% where I want them to be, I am truly, genuinely happy. 

 

I was looking at things all wrong before, and I was too concerned with what I didn’t have to realize what I did have.  To most people, my reasoning will probably sound insane, but I am me, I am different, and to people who truly know me, this will make perfect sense.  I am going to break it down like this:

Though eternally cynical, yes, I used to be one of the happiest people I knew, most likely the happiest, but then I had my access pulled from the nuke plant (not just for something I did not do, but something outrageous!) and I was, for the first time in my life (since the age of 12), without a job.  No matter how hard I tried to get re-hired, for one reason or another, finding another job proved near impossible.  I sank into a deep depression, something I had never before experienced, and it consumed me.  For close to two years the happiness I had once known eluded me.  True, from time to time I had happy moments, but for the most part all I really wanted to do was drink myself into a coma, to forget how miserable I was and to forget how dire my employment prospects were.  I woke up with incapacitating anxiety every morning.  Any time the slightest thing seemed off or wrong in my life, I sank back into the darkness that I could not escape no matter how hard I clawed at the walls to keep my head above the water.  It felt like living in six feet of freezing, filthy water at the bottom of a dank well, constantly treading in order not to drown, fifty feet under sea level, three-foot circumference around me, slimy lichen-covered stone encompassing me.  I would wake up dry heaving, my anxiety was so bad, and sometimes I would spontaneously vomit, a new form my anxiety took, as if panic attacks and feeling like I couldn’t breathe weren’t bad enough, though luckily the vomiting was mostly a morning occurrence that would disappear after an hour or two. 

I didn’t feel good enough; not for an employer and not as a girlfriend.  I always felt like I was somehow inferior, letting people down, was a failure, etc, ad nauseam.  There were peaks and valleys, but the valleys far outweighed the peaks, and I was beginning to wonder if I could ever again be the person I was before, the person that I longed to be again, the person who loved herself and knew she was strong, and intelligent, and not only good enough, but the crème de la crème that any employer or lover should want, because I don’t slack off and always try to be the best possible employee or lover a person could have.  For close to two years, when I didn’t have something distracting me, I would stare off into space, not really wanting to do anything but hide under a blanket and not have to deal with anyone, anything, the world, people in general, or debt collectors.  I can’t tell you how many times I almost had my car impounded, because I could not make my loan payments, but somehow, at the last moment, the money was made and I juggled my finances to somehow make things work.  I kept most of my troubles and feelings of inadequacy inside, because I don’t like pity and I don’t enjoy talking about my problems.  Throughout those two years, only one of my friends saw me cry, as I prefer to keep my emotions to myself, and would most often cry quietly in the shower to myself, so no one would hear me or know the deep slicing pain that I was experiencing.  I almost always laughed and smiled, but the smile was a mask.  The pain only visible if you searched deep into my eyes, but luckily, no one did. 

 

Some days I couldn’t even get out of bed without prescribed medication, Klonopin, an anti-anxiety pill.  I would wake up feeling completely nauseous and yet chained to the bed, gasping for breath, feeling like I was suffocating, dying.  It was all the courage and strength I could muster to roll out of bed, walk the five, ten, twenty-five feet to my purse, swallow the pill, crawl back into bed and try to go back to sleep until the calming effects of the pill washed over me and I could face the day.  But the thing about Klonopin is, it doesn’t make you happy, it just makes you Zen, or rather, numb.  I could take one, and once it kicked in, someone could tell me that I had ten minutes left to live, and I would blink at them slowly, through glazed over eyes and say something like, “far out.  You got any Jameson?”  I could not give a fuck about anything, which is really no way to live.  

 

And then the most spectacular thing happened.  My situation was so desperate, my mood so somber, I decided to turn my résumé into a temp agency and just have them find work for me.  I felt desolate.  I honestly didn’t know what else to do.  Once I did that, and work started coming in, everyone I worked for LOVED me!  True, it being a temp. agency, most of the jobs were only temporary, but soon, the agency was getting rave reviews about me, and they would send me out to more jobs, landscaping jobs, construction jobs, solar plant jobs, jobs where the foreman would say that he didn’t want a chick, and the ladies at the temp agency would just reply ‘trust me, you’re going to want this chick, and you’re not going to want to give her up, but at the end of this week, she’s promised elsewhere.’  But they were like my pimp, the temp agency, and I was their ho, their property.  It felt good being appreciated and wanted, but at the end of the day, they were making the majority of the money, and if a company wanted to keep me, they would have to buy me, for a TON of money before I could be legally theirs.  I met a lot of cool, and some really not cool, people, but at the end of the day I was caught in a web of making a fraction of what I was worth, but not really knowing what else to do.  The agency found me work, which was more than I had been able to do for myself, so I didn’t really feel like I had any way out.  It was either stay and put in three plus months of underpaid work to get hired on full time, or find something for myself. 

 

When I finally found a job and a company I could love, a company that was trying to bribe me away from the temp agency, the temp agency found me another job working harvest at a winery.  So though I loved being back into construction, installing solar panels, with a crew of badass dudes who respected me and made me laugh, I had another hard decision to make.  I left the solar job, and worked harvest, which was a blessing, and a curse, but long story short, it lead to me finding this new job that I am working now, without the help of the temp agency, doing something that I love, that I found on my own, was hired because of my diverse and kick ass background, and now I could not be happier with where I am at, as far as work is concerned.

 

 

This new job is so great and so perfect for me, I know that the reason nothing really worked out for me before was because I needed to go through what I went through in order to be where I am now.  They love me for who I am, encourage me to be myself and rock my own style, I don’t have to cover my tattoos, remove my facial piercing, dye my red and purple hair back to brown, they encourage me to use my own judgment in choosing my outfits, so long as I wear mostly black.  Some days I come in totally punk rock, leather skirt, fishnet tights, black combat boots, skulls, so long as I wear makeup and provide excellent customer service, know the wines like the back of my own damn eyelids, and keep customers well informed and entertained.  They did say they want us to be “edgy”, after all, and I think I fit the bill pretty well.  Hell, I’ve even rocked the faux hawk in the tasting room before, and they didn’t mind one bit, in fact, they thought it was hilarious, and very “on brand”.

 

As far as my co-workers are concerned, they are all pretty badass, and I like them all for different reasons, though there are only a handful that I kick it with outside of work.  Some people I just want to remain professional with, but I would have a beer with any damn one of them after work (this is how I gauge whether or not a person likes there co-worker or not, though in this case it would more likely be for a glass of wine, but if you ask someone if they would have a beer with their co-workers after work and their answer is “yes”, you know they like their co-workers.  If the answer is “no”, that spells trouble) because they are good people, every one of them.  There are four of us though that work together on a pretty consistent basis, and I would like to think of us as sort of the dream team.  Our bosses call the group of all of us that work behind the bar “the Breakfast Club”, because we are all so different and diverse, but when it’s the four of us within the Breakfast Club working together, and it’s slammed busy, I would like to think that we fucking kill it! 

 

You get the four of us behind the bar and it’s a fucking party!  We’re rocking out to the music, either live or on the stereo, I’m “Lola dancing”, we’re talking shit, encouraging each other, egging each other on, it’s high fives and fist bumps, lip-sinking lyrics, and our energy is infectious, and more often than not, the customer is just as stoked as we are to be there, drinking wine, but also experiencing something different, something special, unique, and “edgy”, and that is what we are paid to do, no matter how ludicrous it sometimes seems, to me, anyway, to actually get paid to do what I do, which is something I love more than an almost anything else in this world:  Drink wine, and have stimulating conversations.  I think I’ve found my dream job, after writing, of course, but I still want more cellar hours… 

 

Non-verbal communication is key.  We can understand what the other needs with a nod of the head, a hand gesture, or even just the look on a face, the glint in an eye.  I have to say that it’s pretty fucking fun, being behind the bar with these people, when it’s fucking slammed, and you don’t even have time to think when a new group of six rolls up, you’re pouring for three groups outside, four groups inside, and you just smile, open the tasting menu, set out glasses, and give your spiel, and just know that somehow, you will manage to juggle all the groups without a hiccup, and then sip on a delicious bit of wine when the shift is over, and you are closing together, laughing about the day, exhausted (though undeniably a different kind of exhausted than I am used to), but happy. 

 

These are the people I go out with on Tuesdays, when the tasting room is closed, if I’m not lucky enough to have cellar hours.  We taste for free everywhere we go, because we are industry, but of course we buy wine (at an industry discount) and at the very least leave a tip, because it is proper etiquette.  We do this to bond, to have fun, to get to know each other better, team-build, and get to know our neighboring wineries and staff, so we know who to send people to after they taste at our winery.  It is a very tight-knit industry, and everyone knows each other and everyone in every tasting room has their favorite other wineries they send people to.  I’ve met some of the most awesome people, in the industry, who come in to taste where I work, and I always send customers their way.  It’s our way of paying it forward.  It’s good business, and it’s just the way things work.

 

 

 

So things at work are basically great for me, but being the person that I am, I can’t just be content to enjoy what I do, I have to be the best!  I want the most hours, I want the highest sales, I want the best shifts.  I am always putting more pressure on myself than I need to, because simply floating along like a feather in the placid wind isn’t going to cut it for me.  If I have forty hours a week, I strive for fifty.  I never feel like I get enough cellar time, even though there really isn’t that much to do in the cellar right now, or really up until next harvest, and I have the best shifts, but I want longer hours on the best shifts, or else more responsibilities.  I am incapable of just kicking back and watching the grass grow, that sort of shit drives me crazy!

 

But… I am happy.  The epiphany that lead to my discovery of why I am truly, and sincerely happy, however, will have to wait.  Conclusions cannot be rushed, and it really is a complex happiness, in a sense, even if the clues that lead up to my discovery of happiness would, to the normal person, seem quite obvious…

 

I know that I put a lot of pressure on myself.  I know that I am the type of person who will never be content with mediocre.  I will always strive to learn more, know more, dream more, and never give up on my dreams, and even if I achieved them all, I would create new dreams, because living a life with nothing more to strive to achieve would greatly disappoint me, and leave me as uninspired and unpalatable as a glass of delicious champagne left out on the counter over night; tepid, and flat, something that could have been beautiful, but had gone to waste instead of being consumed.

 

I do not want to live a tepid and flat existence, and so I challenge myself.  I know a lot of people who are content with living tepid, flat existences.  I could name names, but I won’t.  All I know, is that my friends and I do not want to be tepid and flat.  We face challenges that the tepid and flat vast majority do not have to face.  My friends and I face mockery, ridicule, incredulousness, and even pity, from the vast majority of the tepid and flat existence.  I say, “fuck authority.  Fuck the majority!”  Middle finger out, honestly, go FUCK YOURSELVES! 

 

 

Anyone eager to mock myself or my posse is beneath me, beneath us.  Our paths are rocky, unstable, and dangerous, but at least we feel alive.  Through the pain, sorrow, tears, tribulations and triumphs, we are living a superior existence, in my opinion, but to each their own.  Some people think squeezing out spawn is all they have to offer to the world.  Congrats, and power on!  Other people want to change the world through other means of self expression, or even do both.  Each are valuable contributions to the world as a whole.  I applaud those willing to be tepid and flat.  Without the banality, mankind as we know it would cease to exist.  So lets just all simmer down, and appreciate the individual paths we all take, because we all are dealing with our own pains, sacrifices, struggles, dreams, and goals.  What kills me the most is that we can’t just learn to be supportive of our unique, individual paths, and we all seem to prefer to gravitate toward ripping each other to shreds.       

 

 

I know that I can, in all reality, just breathe and relax, now that I am content with my job situation, and I know I would be better off if I could just do that, but that is not me.  I want more.  I cannot, will not, and have never been able to just settle.  If I were capable of simply being content with life, I would still be married to my ex-husband.  I actually don’t even think it’s a matter of wanting more, it’s needing more.  Before, I was incredibly well off, owned my home, had a “nice”, “pleasant”, easy going, white picket fence sort of existence, but I was far from happy.  Now I’m pretty much broke, living with my best friend, but I feel alive, challenged, happy, and I am inspired to live up to the expectations I have always had for myself, only now I do not sit my ass upon a fluffy white pillow at night and know that if I do not succeed, I will still be taken care of (though Marge pretty much takes care of me, but that is not exactly what I mean).  Now is the time for me to step up to the plate and make some magic happen.  Now is the time to do something that could ultimately change my future, and only then can I re-pay Marge, and then some.  Some of my favorite successes, from artists I admire, sparked from pretty dire circumstances.  The point is to never give up, to never let the tepid, flat majority effect your future in any way.  Let them sit on their banal asses and judge, mock, and belittle you for trying, at the very least, to do something, while they strive to do nothing.  Now who should hold the gavel?  Huh?  When did sitting on one’s ass, eating Doritos and judging with no shame, but with crumbs on their lap become admirable?  That is actually quite disgusting and despicable to me, but I never pointed a finger at that sort of slovenly existence until a finger was pointed at me, in judgment, or at one of my friends. 

 

I have never picked on anyone for just being content with being average, or ordinary, until the average or ordinary decided to pick on my friends, or myself.  I don’t think I ever mocked people who just wanted to lead bland, stale, placid sort of lives, but when those people want to find their amusement in the lives of people who have the courage to put their egos aside and strive for something more out of life, it is then that I pick up my figurative machete and want to make heads roll!  It is easy to mock people for their attempted goals and dreams when a person has no goals or dreams of their own, but is it fair?  Is it just?  The type of person who mocks a revolutionary is someone too timid to step up to the plate, grab a bat, and look a fastball in the face, eyes narrowed, crooked brow, sweat dripping down one’s temple, pulse racing, heart thumping, everything to lose and next to nothing to gain.  It takes courage to pursue dreams, to face mockery, to stand up for what one believes in, but I suppose I’ve gotten a bit off track, and have gone off on a tangent, because I want to stand up to bullies who really have no right to judge. 

 

 

Bullies bully because they are intimidated by ferocious, strong willed and strong minded people who have the balls and courage to take a chance and strive for something different, something better, for a life less placid and banal.  Bullies only bully because they are afraid that if they don’t bully, the spotlight will inevitably fall back upon them, their failures, their inadequesies, and they know they have nothing worthy of placing in the spot light to begin with.  Bullies are nothing more than cowards.

 

 

 

Again I digress, and I apologize.  I just get pretty heated when inferior people pick on my friends or other people who are eager to dream big because a life without dreams, to people like us, would not be a life worth living.  I will conclude my previous thought with this:

 

Since the beginning of the New Year, I thought that perhaps my year was starting off to a somewhat uninspired and mundane, hiccupping start with fits and jolts because I did not wake up every morning shouting with joy, throwing the covers off of me, dancing through the hallway on my way to the coffee machine.  Some mornings I felt like that, yes.  Some mornings, I woke up with an absolutely erotic sort of delicious, deviant excitement, a mischievousness, a wicked determination, a gratitude for nothing, really, aside from being alive and loving life and feeling great.  This was a good thing, and I recognized it as such, however, on days when I woke up just feeling “normal”, When I hit the snooze button a couple of times, when I did not want to get out of bed and face the frigid cold of winter, when I just wanted to stay warm and cuddle up with my puppy and not get out of bed, instead of accepting that that is how most people start their day, I thought of this as a bad sign, and not something normal at all.  I had been having so many delicious mornings, that when a morning was not positively gorgeous, and was just “fine”, I started wondering why I wasn’t dancing, and started wondering if I was slipping back into depression again.

 

This is why I think most people would think I was crazy for feeling the way I did, the past few weeks of the New Year.  Most people do not know me personally, and did not know me as the person I was before.  But even when I was working at the nuke plant, no, I did not enjoy waking up at fucking 4:30 in the morning, and more often than not hit snooze a couple of times, but once I was awake and at the plant, I was all laughs and smiles, because I was always happy.  Cynical, determined, hard working, serious in my work, but always happy, and quick to joke, laugh, and smile.  So these days, for some random reason, I think that I focus more on the fear of what may be wrong with me if I am not as I used to be, all jokes and smiles, as opposed to being incredibly appreciative of perhaps the most important occurrence in the past two years; the fact that I no longer wake up in the morning with incapacitating anxiety, and even better than that, I wake up with no anxiety at all.

 

 

 

My rare days off are no longer spent stressing out, wandering the house aimlessly, filled with anxiety, antsy butterflies in my stomach and a complete lack of focus, but are instead spent studying my world Atlas of Wine, in preparation for the sommelier two day course and exam I will be taking in San Francisco, either at the end of this year or some time next year, I have looked into taking some extended education classes at Cal Poly, in enology, winemaking, and wine appreciation, which my father has enthusiastically offered to help fund, or doing other creative, gratifying art projects, or else writing.  To think of all the time I wasted allowing anxiety to consume me really bums me out, but instead of focusing on the negative, and all the time I have lost, I enjoy the moment with a smile on my face, and reflect eagerly on all the time I have ahead of me, the new goals I have set for myself, and all that I am going to learn in the present, and near future.   

 

Anxiety is a tricky bastard, a mischievous motherfucker.  To those who have not experienced it, it is difficult to describe, much the way I did not understand depression until I myself had experienced it.  For me, if I knew what was causing my anxiety, I could usually talk myself out of it without having to take medication, and could carry on with my day as any normal person would.  But when you wake up gripping your bed sheets in terror, clammy, sweating, hyperventilating, gasping for breath, feeling like you are drowning and being suffocated with a pillow at the same time, you don’t know what is causing the sensation, all that you know is that you are feeling the way you do, for what appears to be no reason at all.  If nothing is causing your misery, you cannot approach it rationally and tackle it the ground and make it your bitch, and so you suffer, all too greatly.

 

So I suppose my point is that, until I met up with my dear friend and we had a couple of beers together, I thought the beginning of my New Year sort of sucked because though I woke up more often than not positively ecstatic, the days I felt just mediocre I thought maybe something wrong with me, and that is just an insane and ludicrous way to think!  I mean, honestly, I should have been focusing on the positive fact that I no longer woke up with anxiety, but that just goes to show the huge amount of pressure I put on myself, and though I know I need to tone it down a bit, I know that is just who I am as a person, and I will always strive to be the best I can possibly be.  I just need to learn to allow myself to hit the snooze and not feel guilty about it.  What is life without a few guilty pleasures, after all?  ;)

 

 

The contradiction that is me...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHYDFClkqHw