.SOMETIMES RAW.

I believe there are two kinds of people: Alive people and Not Alive people. Alive people are engaged in the act of living, attuned to others, present in the moment, and “a little bit shiny”. Not alive people, on the other hand, exhibit and almost spiritual dullness. They are dampened, muted, and view life at a distance.

I am an alive person who turns 41-years old today. Wow! Happy birthday to me. The past year has been an amazing one so far with lots of changes.

Because I am a visual thinker, it helps me to take notes and refer to them often. I take notes all the time and everywhere. I want to share my notes from one year that I jotted down in my little Moleskine notebook and that are daily reminders that life is awesome no matter what it throws at you. Do not take my notes to be literal, all-encompassing, or fitting in every context. This is just what works for me.

And always remember: There are lots of lavender bushes out there, waiting patiently to be sniffed.

• If you don’t know what someone’s talking about, ASK.
• Little by little, become yourself.
• How to become rich? 1. Make a lot of money. 2. Don’t spend it.
• Articulate what you love about the ones you love.
• Empathise with caution, practice compassion with abandon.
• Go for a walk. Don’t bring your phone.
• Excuse yourself and tend to yourself.
• Saying “Drive Safe” magically shields any person you say it to from getting in an accident, so say it to everyone, all the time.
• Know that terrible and wonderful things will befall you, regardless of your anxiety and yearning.
• Do not use “balls” to mean toughness. The testes are extremely sensitive, I have heard.
• Captivate your audience. Dazzle them with your wit and grace. Falter and remind them you are human.
• Remember that the likely explanation for the symptom you self-diagnosed as an obscure cancer from reading WebMD at 1 a.m. is: Bodies are weird.
• Think about what you will miss most when you are dead. Do more of that.
• Repeat a word until it makes you laugh. Kiss Kiss Kiss Kiss Kiss Kiss Kiss Kiss…..
• One possible solution to this dire, urgent problem is to go to bed and deal with it in the morning.
• I am plenty. I have plenty. (Say it out loud)
• Require decency of your friends, no matter how long you have known them.
• Dispense advice if it is asked for. Otherwise, dispense love.
• Think about how proud your past self would be if they could see you now.
• Think about death enough to appreciate life, but not so much that it eclipses life.
• Treat children like human beings. But also like children.
• Let other people be other people.
• Be kind to customer service workers on the phone. Firm, but kind.
• Write down your daydreams, night dreams, and things you say in conversations. (Sometimes making art is just paying attention)
• Travel far distances to see old friends.
• Talk to yourself sweetly, like you would speak to a scared child. Issue forgiveness gently and easily.
• There are many kinds of beauty and your kind is one of them.
• Look up. What do you see? What do you hear, smell, feel? Isn’t it fun to be alive?
• Conjure specialness from think air. Invent holidays, traditions, and surprises. Ice-cream Tuesday?
• It is okay to be pretentious, but set it down every once in a while and maybe go to Legoland.
• If at first you park badly, repark.
• Keep the exclamation points in your email. What the hell, add a smiley face ! 🙂
• Make new friends: through other friends, through common interests, on the street, on the internet, through one person bering brave, no matter how many friends you have, no matter how old you are.
• Avoid anyone who is more than 2% cruel.
• If you are lying awake imagining art you want to make, get out of bed and make it.
• When you meet someone from somewhere, ask if they know the one person you know from there. It’s worth a shot!
• If you find yourself obsessing about everything you don’t have, give something away to someone who needs it more.
• When something is good, enjoy it. Things are allowed to be good.
• Consider that you might be wrong and correct course.
• When people ask you how you are, tell them how you really are. So they will tell you how they really are, unless you don’t care how they really are, in which case it is fine to say “fine”.
• You don’t need a good voice to sing.
• Let the people you love the most tell the stories they love to tell, even if you have heard them before. For everyone else, politely stop them mid-sentence.
• Your partner should get you through the hard times. Your partner shouldn’t BE the hard times.
• When someone you know is grieving, overcome your discomfort and reach out.
• Eat!
• Ask new friends about their friends. Learn about their little universe of love and admiration, and you will become a part of it.
• Say goodbye with gusto each time, just in case.
• Treat it as sacred and it will become sacred.
• Take pride in being the least frustrated person at the airport, in traffic, waiting in line….
• Listen to yourself when you talk.
• Live with people who already love you and will easily forgive you for accidentally breaking their favourite cup.
• Respect the natural world and it may tolerate us for a bit longer.
• Accept rejection as a grand indication that you are trying.
• When complaining, consider why. Is it because you actually want something to change? Or just want support and affirmation? Or love to complain? When, warn those around you so they know whether to offer help, chime in, or tune out.
• Say thank you with details. Example: “I know you worked very hard at that presentation. Thank you for sharing that knowledge with me.”
• You might die soon, or they might die. Or we all might. Make peace and hold each other close and never leave someone in anger and fighting without saying sorry.
• Never make your bed with a monkey in it.
• Leaning forward in your chair when someone is trying to squeeze behind you isn’t enough. You have to move our chair.
• If you have portraits of yourself up allover your house, people are going to think you are conceited. Replace them with portraits of me.
• Answering every question with “You got it, girlfriend!” can apparently be irritating to others.
• Be happy. Do things that make you happy within the confines of the legal system. Do things that make you feel good and proud. It can be almost anything. Name something. Yes, sure, try that.
• Help people. Help someone. Show someone you care. Say something nice. Smile. Make eye contact. Hug. Kiss. Get naked. Laugh. Laugh as much as you can.
• Find out who you are.

I don’t mean to tell you what to do or how to live your lives, but those are some of the things that have worked for me. And I believe with all my heart and should that even if we try the teeniest tiniest bit we can make this world a much happier and healthier one. And if we try even harder, we can do some pretty spectacular things.

Oh, one more thing talking about spectacular: My fifth book “Apparently, there were Complaints” has been published by Morawa and can be ordered very soon everywhere where you can purchase books. What an awesome birthday gift indeed.

Hey, you! Don’t say straight! Children are too young to learn about gender identity and gender roles. Why should kids be indoctrinated to believe that women should marry men and be their wives? This nuclear family model didn’t even exist for most of homo sapiens’ existence. It is just a gross, freakish phenomenon, like pairing cheese with fig jam.

Don’t say straight! It is time for us to resist the radical heterosexual gender ideology and the corrosive efforts to brainwash our kids into believing that the nuclear family is normal. The whole “wife-husband” thing is unnatural, which is why perfectly reasonable and nonviolent people fantasize about their spouses dying several times a day. That’s something for you to think about the next time your mom stares out the window with a pensive expression. It also explains why married straight people with enough money decide to live in their own house, like weirdos or freaks.

Don’t say straight! Humans evolved to live communally, and then some fetishist religious nuts imposed this bizarre isolationist family structure on everyone. Now, look at us. Parents don’t have enough support to raise their children. They have to manically scramble to find daycare, summer camps, nannies, and after-school programs, which are just overpriced babysitters with capoeira drums.

Don’t say straight! Heterosexual relationships are largely unhealthy, and imbalanced and many of them end in painful breakups and divorce. It is like we are setting our kids up for failure when we tell them about the existence of straight relationships. Michael and Christine, Woody and Annie – it always ends in tears, lawsuits, and threats.

Don’t say straight! When kids are small and impressionable, they believe the world is full of possibilities. One kid might want to grow up and live in a house with their two best friends and make handicrafts for a living, for example. Another might want to create a universe structured around their favourite manga comic. It would be a shame to expose children to heterosexual relationships so early and ruin their chances for happiness and fulfilment.

Look where all this heterosexual madness has gotten us! Society is breaking down. The heterosexual agenda is responsible for what happened for example in the U.S. when 62 million Americans voted for a man accused by dozens of women of sexual assault, and who bragged about assaulting women to other men. Kids are way too young to learn about that without becoming traumatized. Let’s protect our children from this terrible knowledge so they can feel safe. What kind of twisted mind would want our children to learn about these degenerates?

Don’t say straight! Kids are too young to learn about gender identity, and about all the horrors associated with heterosexual identity. Who can even keep count of the historical atrocities that come from heterosexual ideology? Forced marriage, child marriage, bride kidnappings, genital mutilation, legalized marital rape — the heterosexual agenda is the worst thing to happen to humanity ever. Not convinced? The Bachelor is in its twenty-sixth season.

When kids are born, parents want to protect them, and the best way to do this is to stop them from learning about heterosexual identity. Will kids sometimes discover that they have classmates who have one mom and one dad who are married to each other? Inevitable, they will. But it should be up to parents to explain why and how this happened. Teachers should be forced to stay silent on these sensitive subjects. They shouldn’t be grooming our children into a destructive heterosexual lifestyle. Responsible parents want to keep children from knowing the truth about heterosexual relationships for as long as possible. We should definitely let them.

Rather teach your kids that if they want to transition, meaning changing their gender, that it is okay. But then, I will transition, too. I will have muscles as big as Dwayne Johnson’s in order to pass as a man, and then I would get cast in a Fast and Furious movie against my will, and then I would get fired from my job for taking three months off to film car stunts. But I will have my own cast changing room.

For now, teach your kids that being in the LGTBQ+ community is “in” and I will do my best to get all the pronouns right. Him/His/Her/Hers/They…. and please don’t lose track of your mind in all this. Teach your kids that it is normal if a man wants to be a woman and vice versa. Teach your kids that you have to call trans people by whatever name they choose to have after their transition. Trans people can use whatever bathroom best suits their gender, and I’ll have to pee in a bucket that I bring with me wherever I go to change my tampon in peace. Teach your kids, that trans people can get surgery and have their penis or vagina removed. Teach them that it is normal for men to wear nail polish, high heels, and dresses. Teach your kids that it is normal to be binary and have no clue if you are a man or a woman or anything else. If your child says, “Mommy, I have a penis,” tell them it could also be a vagina.

Teach your kid that if trans people transition, it is none of your business what they do with their bodies.

Almost as non of your business that I am Dwayne Johnson now getting fired from my job for doing car stunts, as stated above. I want my own “muscle” locker room because I am too hot to share my body with the regular crowd.

And if all explanations fail and your kids look at you with huge eyes, tell them that they can rainbow their way through life. However they choose to.

A lot has changed in my life and I feel so much better. I am still easygoing but sometimes difficult. A woman who startles easily. I still forget to wash an apple before I eat it. I think, “Yes, things could be grosser, hotter and nastier”. The sound of people spitting bothers me. I still interrupt occasionally when people talk but I am getting better at it. I am confused about how strange it feels to receive a postcard or a letter – this little card that travelled to my house while I wonder how many people at the post office have read it. But writing an actual letter will soon be history, I think.

When I lived in Canada, I wrote a weekly letter to my grandpa, who had dementia. He read the letter for one week straight amazed that it was addressed to just him. I sent pictures of my son and me, too. Whenever the next letter arrived he felt better according to my grandma. It is always the little things that make a difference.

Oh, yeah, I still prefer to count to twenty instead of ten. I love ice cream and the weird sensation of brain freeze I get when eating it too fast and then quickly swallowing it down. I still have trouble discerning between solitude and loneliness, and the weird feeling of sadness I get on Sundays; is the same feeling I get when listening to Beethoven on a rainy day. I am still wondering why I am initially comfortable and then restless when sitting on grass. I love the size of LP records and want a record player for the longest time. I love when people collect them and play their records.

Sometimes I am still shocked by how irreversible life is. That there is no going back to this old version of me that existed before. What is done is done, I try not to dwell on the past too much anymore. Or how much life was before I figured out the pleasure of doing absolutely nothing. Or before I figured out that there is no one way to live and to life. Or before I smelled city smog in New York Midtown Manhattan and thought I could never live there yet I rented an apartment for a couple of years and loved it. Or when I read Marguerite Duras’s The Lover and thought it was the best book I have ever read. Or whatever version of me existed before I moved on, found a new perspective, saw the magnolias in early spring blooming in a somewhat different way – not just pink but rather flowering almost forcefully and ambient letting me know that a new chapter is about to begin.

Weirdly, I get shivers on very hot days and I get annoyed when a Post-it unsticks and comes off my journal. Sometimes I still confuse being misunderstood with feeling some sort of shame and uncomfortableness. I am super hungry when it is not quite lunchtime or dinner yet. I love sitting on a porch when there is lightning, thunderstorm, and rain. To sit in my hot tub and watch the stars and the moon makes me happy. I still imagine my brain is the size of a pea when it comes to mathematics, statistics, spreadsheets or when I do not understand how bridges are built over large amounts of water or whenever I don’t get the exact location of countries or continents on a globe.

For whatever reasons I am drawn to the colour red. Recently, someone told me, “People don’t change.” Listening to some people feels like hard work trying to retrieve a mutual tenderness that has already fallen from our hands and rolled into a storm drain a long time ago. How unfamiliar it feels to deal with some people or to even look at them. All these unresolved arguments and trying to test the other over nothing that now just feels colourless, sad, unnecessary and creeps back silently when least expected over emotions long forgotten. I am now in this strange possession of a history that often pulls me in different directions that I can manage pretty well.

I can identify now what constitutes a big drama, hot air or the difference between the former and latter. I know how it feels to be hurt. Also, the hurt we cause when we have been enduring too much in silence and have started to trust our fixed claim that everything is just fine even though it is not. How it lightens but also strikes the heart. I learned that I should not try to change a person. The effort exerted is often ineffectual and rather upsetting. Change, I have learned, rises like nausea – the simple promise of relief is what makes it all bearable. I learned that I have to be careful of overvaluing what people give and be cautious of how proportioned my ability to love is.

What I love is watching stars with one special person who listens while I don’t finish my thoughts because maintaining completeness all the time grows tiresome. A person so acquainted with my treasury of reluctance, with the lines of my body, with my soul, that I forget I have those, and he forgets he has those and we just melt together into one; while the shooting stars keep shooting. There is no rush.