September 19, 2012

someecards2

The first step is, don’t part with them.

Once you’ve gotten over that, the next logical thing to do is to stare at them for a long, long time. At least 45 minutes. This will help you remember the way they look in your 4 bookshelves, and they will become firmly planted in your photographic memory for years and years to come.

The next step is realizing that this won’t work, and you must take a picture of the way they look in your 4 bookshelves, or multiple pictures. Once you’ve done that, sit down in front of your bookshelves again, and stare at them for another 40 minutes or so, silently saying your goodbyes. Touch them if you have to. Open each of them to page 149, plunge your nose deep into the spine of the book and get a nice good sniff.

Finally, firmly state the reasons you must let go of these books aloud to yourself, one by one.

    1. You will never read them. You don’t even like the genre. They were donated to you because you are a sick, sick book fiend with no pets and frizzy hair.
    1. At no point in time will someone come into your house and say, “that’s it?” when you show them your book collection. It only happens on Gilmore Girls.
    1. You have no space in your living room or your bedroom, because the bookshelves dwarf everything.
  1. You will never have a wall to ceiling library like the one from Beauty and the Beast. Nor will you ever need one.

At this point, you have to put down the brown bag you’ve been breathing into for the last 12 minutes and admit that you’re not getting rid of ALL of your books. T.S. Eliot isn’t going to see the light of day, Sylvia Plath couldn’t move if she wanted to, and the Book of Poisons you bought that lonely Friday night at Barnes and Noble might as well be paralyzed from the spine down.

You have to admit, there’s a season for hoarding and a season for purging. The goal here is to get rid of at least one book shelf, to make more room for light, people, and places to faint. After all, you’re not getting rid of all the bookshelves (you’d have to kill me first), just one. And it’s like they say, all journeys to eliminate books begin with a single hyperventilation (and maybe a small box to put them in).

And if dropping them off at the Goodwill is as painful as dropping a carton of french fries on the ground, blindfold yourself if you have to.

 

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…………blog.

When boys piss you off.

Blog.

When your sickness comes back after 3 days of antibiotics and there’s no one around to whine about it to.

Blog.

When you’re inspired again.

Blog.

When the neighbors play music so loudly, even the shut windows do not drown it out.

Blog.

When you have questions about Pepperdine’s Graziadio School of Business on a weekend and no one is around to answer them.

Blog.

When you’re feeling bad for not running 4 days in a row.

Blog.

When he’s not texting you back.

Blog.

When you’re sneezing into bags of Baked chips.

Blog.

When you receive a bill from your ob-gyn for over $600…?

Blog.

When you’re feeling confused about your direction, your job, and your relationships.

Blog.

It helps.

001

Breakthrough alert!

Monique has been researching LMU as a potential business school for nearly 2 weeks, and she has decided to abandon ship.

Firstly, her research was not as intensive as it should have been. She was researching the school website, contacting alumni via LinkedIn, and looking up their business school profile in Businessweek. Turns out she wasn’t reading about everything the world had to say about the school, and what she found on more open forum sites turned her off.

Secondly, she had been ignoring the red flags: there was no information on the site or anywhere about a typical student’s compensation upon graduation, it wasn’t as highly ranked as others (not that that was the deciding factor), and their emphasis on post-graduate career placement seemed minimal. Further, she found that most of their entering class this past year had an emphasis in finance/accounting, which made her wonder if the school might be better suited for students of that caliber. She also saw in Businessweek’s profiling of that school, that the teaching methods were more lecture-based than teamwork and case-study based, which for her didn’t sit well. Monique wants to embrace the situations she typically shies away from! Like team work and presentations! Let’s get together, yeah, yeah, yeah!

Monique pauses here to reflect on how delicious her microwaved dinner tastes, and whether or not she’s making sense. She had half a glass of chardonnay but she hasn’t been drinking very much recently and thinks her tolerance level may have plummeted about half a point.

She decides she is making sense.

Monique was particularly fond of LMU’s small class sizes, the ability to tailor your own curriculum based on which path you wanted to take after graduation, its flexibility, proximity, and affordability (compared to other schools).  However she has come to the conclusion that she will not be applying to LMU’s MBA program, as nice and rigorous as it sounded in the information session she attended. It’s more the lack of information about the statistics of LMU graduates getting a return on investment from the program than anything else. This, my friends and family, is a very important consideration, given the amount of time and effort this lady is going to put forth, while still happily partaking in a full time job.

And what’s more, they don’t do interviews. MAKE THIS LADY SWEAT WITH FEAR, LMU! MAKE IT HARD FOR HER TO GET IN, SO SHE CAN EARN IT.

And just like Forrest Gump, that’s all she has to say about that. On to Pepperdine!

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http://miss-beatrix.blogspot.com
A new idea has struck, this time while she was washing her hair.

Monique wants to preface this ‘new idea’ post by saying that this morning started out in failure. Every time she sets her alarm for 615am to run and doesn’t do it, she feels a little like a failure. But her throat was a little sore when she woke up, so she snoozed till about 8am.

Moving on. She was feeling slightly bad about phoning in her morning work out, or at least putting it off until the evening, when she got to thinking about her vlogs. Monique truly enjoys vlogging, but honestly, how many times can you talk about what’s new in your life before people start to lose interest? The point with the video blogs at first was to have a fun, goofy side project to nurture some creative yearning she had to video edit, but now that she has a few of them under belt, Monique wondered how exactly she could use her vlogs to provide VALUE to her audience.

What would make more people want to watch them?

Value. Sure, a little comedy would get a few people to watch once in awhile, but they would eventually get bored. Besides, she REALLY enjoys adding value to people’s lives, whether it be through a unique new software she hasn’t invented yet, or a cool new social site that inspires creativity (which she also hasn’t invented yet).

So what was the big idea? If she told you, she’d have to grill you. Like an onion. Then mash you between melted cheese, beef, and lettuce, and swallow you in one bite. She’s not at all reminiscing about her last In’n’Out encounter with a double double, she’s just protecting her little idea until she can actually publish it. Plus, she’s never kept you in suspense for anything, so come on.

The big idea will be unveiled in the next vlog, which will be sometime in between now and the next vlog. Don’t get your hopes up too much, it’s nothing incredibly major, but it will be the start of a new vlogging era for Monique, one in which each vlog will not only be quirky, but add a little something for her audience to walk away with. It will hopefully, after a few, give you something to look forward to in forthcoming vlogs, and will even be something you can share with people you know, who can relate.

For now though, the new vlogging era is in the…what do they call it? Beta stage. Monique is hoping to film it Thursday evening, and have it posted 3 to 5 business days after that.

So stay tuned, keep your eyes peeled, make sure your shirts are tucked in and your pants pulled up. Monique’s been doin’ some imagineering in the shower, and you KNOW nothing good can come of that. Except for maybe this.

 

**Update: Monique has since tossed this idea. Her latest one in the video sector is her Mursa Pie series.

80s Run
The weekend started with a bang. Just like the creation of the universe.

Monique pauses here to kick off her sandals, take a sip of chardonnay, and turn off her fan. Is it giving her a headache?

After devouring a leftover turkey burger and cheese fries while watching Naked Gun with Adam on Friday night, she woke up at 6am the next morning to run an 80’s themed 10k in 90 degree heat. It was awesome, but she could have done without the heat. In fact, it is a truth universally acknowledged that Moniques everywhere, in possession of good faith and running shoes, must be in want of a 6 mile run without heat.

Hard to prove, but true none the less.

That was the bang, the early run in heat. What came later, however, was nothing short of awesomeness, light, and creation, all of which happened in Monique’s own heart. She headed to her dad’s house after the race and hastily devoured a sizzling, tuna melt sandwich with skinny french fries, which in and of itself was awesome. But it was a chance encounter with Walt Disney, the man behind the mouse, that changed everything. 

Monique watched a special on Disney, called Walt Disney: The Man Behind the Myth. The show documented his entire upbringing, his business-related struggles, and family life. It was brilliant, and affected Monique in a very profound way. After all, who knew Walt Disney wasn’t the nicest of employers? Who knew he was so affectionate towards his family? Who knew this man, who brings so much joy and wonder to SO many people every day, used everything he had to make his dreams come true? Everything he had! It was crazy, if he had an idea, he went about finding the money to make it happen. And even after he had produced so much, and was at the end of his rope health-wise, he was STILL churning out ideas.

The craziest part is, Disney reminded Monique of herself, because Monique is missing a link. She’s missing the connection between thinking and doing. It’s a pretty crucial connection. She has all these ideas just buzzing around in the background, of how to make things easier, our lives better, more fulfilling. She has all these worlds she wants to create with her fiction,  all these crazy shorts she wants to film on camera, all these POEMS. But her thinking is so limited. Everything she wants to do she knows she can, but lack of funding stops her in her tracks, and it’s always hot on those tracks and there’s never enough water. Again with the heat and dehydration!

It just made her stop and consider something important. She lives in the year 2012, a century of ABUNDANCE, a century of the INTERWEB, a century where she can find a husband, a job, a cruise ship, a great bottle of wine, or a limited edition Gaga hair piece at the click of a BUTTON, and Walt Disney was able to accomplish all he did WITHOUT all of this?

“Throw me a freakin bone!” she shouts. A crow outside sort of caws in reply, and a siren fades away in the distance.

That simple fact alone (the one about Walt doing all of this with limited resources) has completely rocketed her senses. It was all so endearing! Tearfully so. The poor guy was freaking awesome not only in his obsession with perfection in everything he created, but with his ability to accomplish. The ability to simply work with what he was given, to see something in his head, and do it. Sure, a dream is a wish your heart makes, but the decision to pursue it is one your head makes.

It was all too much. The sense of gratuity Monique felt for being alive at a time like this was overwhelming. All of the things she could accomplish if she seriously took her head outside of the freakin’ box, and started using her creativity not only to create but to accomplish. It takes hard work people. It’s like Tom Hanks said in A League of Their Own, it’s the hard that makes it great. If it were easy, everyone would do it. And sometimes, it’s only as hard as you make it, as in Monique’s case.

So Monique had a very serious talk with herself about all of this. It went something like, “Oh my God oh my God I am all flush with excitement and ready to embark on a journey to do something GREAT and I’m not going to let the boundaries set up at the rim of my world stop me from accomplishing whatever the hell it is I want to accomplish because if Walt Disney can create animation in the 1920’s for Gods sake I can do something cool too.”

Something like that. She can’t say for sure that’s how the talk went because there weren’t very many bystanders around but she’s positive it was along those lines.

So sure, Saturday she was feeling enlivened and simultaneously tired and passed out for two hours after this wonderful special on Disney because of the run and the heat. And sure, she might have spent the rest of the evening dancing with a lot of half naked women, and gobbling a double double at 230 in the morning (the In’n’Out in Hollywood is opened until 3am, FYI), but that is not to say she wasn’t up at 11am Monday morning, searching for ways to patent her idea and unleash this inner productivity beast that has so nicely hatched inside of her.

But someday these under cooked dreams are gonna smell like grilled onions, and how thrilling that moment will be.

 

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Monique has so much stuff she wants to share with you about turning 27, the business school research process, and her feelings about running an 80’s themed 10k tomorrow but it’s LABOR DAY WEEKEND and her first love is WRITING, so she wanted to show you something special that combines the two.

Open Road Media, a digital publisher, created a brief but wonderful video for Labor Day on what a few popular authors did for a living before they were able to write full time. (You want to pay me to write all day? Hmm, I have a pretty full schedule but I think that could work. )

Monique has GREAT experience with this. She scored a part time internet marketing internship that eventually hired her, all while saying quietly to herself “But it’s really just writing I want to do. I think I’ll use this to pay my rent, and write at night.”

That never really happened though. She ended up getting into party mode and slightly feisty and started coming up with ideas and ended up wanting to go to business school. But things change. The point is, Monique has always wondered how writers ‘make it’. Do they just collect unemployment and write all day, hoping it’s a best seller? Do they give it their all at a day job and then slave away at night? OR are they one of the lucky few that just land a writing job?

Below is a short video on what authors like Edna O’Brien, Susan Dunlap, and Patricia Bosworth did to pay the rent before they became published authors.

And on that note, have a beautiful Labor Day weekend!!