Hi there! Welcome to my blog! I love, love, love talking about all things metaphysics, writing, and blogging. My hope is that you leave here feeling much better than when you came. It's great to see you!
I’D LOVE TO…
If I learn nothing else from blogging about my quest to be something great, it’s that the quest is the best part. I can’t stress to you how much my anxiety has dissipated on this path to a mysterious future since I’ve embraced the journey (slowly but surely of course). I’ve put absolute faith in the fact that the projects on my plate will one day empower and inspire people to realize their own greatness, and for that reason I’m no longer filled with anxiety the moment I get home from work. I’m not longer gripped by fear when I think about my purpose in life, and whether or not I’m fulfilling it. I’m alive, I’m awake, and I am present. And most of the time, I am really, really hungry.
That being said, I thought I’d update you on everything! Lately I’ve been writing a bunch of introspective blog posts about my experiences with the world. And while those are cool too, I’m ready to write a few posts on the awesomeness that has been going on behind the scenes.
First off, I created a couple of new pictures in my Art section. Nothing fancy, nothing awe-inspiring, but I’m proud of them. I’m sort of dabbling in the combination of words/pictures to create a feeling. Sort of like those memes that get burned into your brain on a daily basis, but I want them to be a bit weirder. And more artsy maybe. Something to make you think.
Secondly, I added a new Mursa Pie to the videos section. It’s the last one in the bunch, and it’s on a slice of my life in Australia. It’s such a small sliver of the fun I had there, and I’m slowly but surely compiling more, but I wanted to let you know it was there in case you wanted to see some of the shenanigans that went on.
Thirdly, publicity. Lately I’ve been really into guest posting opportunities and interview features. The other day le blog and I were featured in something called the Heart of Blogging Series on Blogger Effect. Blogger Effect is a new platform for bloggers that is still in beta, but they were looking for bloggers to feature for their blog series so of course I jumped at the opportunity. After all, it’s just like my Passion Series!
Oddly enough, that very same week, an old colleague of mine introduced me to one of the ladies from LoveFabu.com, a site for women to discuss everything from love and death, to relationships and spirituality. They were seeking contributors, and after a brief introduction via email, I knocked out a 500 word piece on business school rejection and voila! Guest post nailed. It hasn’t been posted yet because they are still building out their site, but when it is you will surely be the first to know. Additionally, I’m working ANOTHER guest post for a great blog I discovered through Linkedin called A Caffeinated Brunette. Is that not the most awesome title for a blog? That is totally a blog I should have created. At any rate, it’s run by a gal who writes about travel, recipes, and any other pretty thought that enters her mind. She was looking for guest posters the other day and I offered one up that I think might fit for her “If you ever” series. It’s kind of like “If you ever want to eat a great pizza in LA” sort of stuff, so I’ll keep you posted if it all works out.
Lastly, I’m developing a website. Okay, I’m hiring someone to develop a website for me. And they’re almost done. I haven’t really talked about it because I’m waiting for the wisdom of hindsight to set in, if you know what I mean. A lot of times I talk about projects that just don’t happen, and I really want to talk about this one after I’ve made some actual progress, so I can share what I’ve learned. It’s the project I’m hoping (fingers crossed) that really takes off because I feel the message behind it is so important. I’ll tell you ALL about it when it’s launched!
Well, that’s the latest. You heard it here first. I hope you have a magnatastical weekend (magnanimous + fantastical if you didn’t guess). It’s Friday, and it’s FALL! Talk about two great ‘F’ words (although I’m sure we can think of at least one more that gives us a warm, fuzzy feeling.) Time to whip out the pumpkin ales and scary movies. I’m hoping I get to go to Septemberfest tomorrow with the BF, but we’ll see how that pans out.
Till next time, peace, pitstops, and pumpkin everything…
This post is part of a weekly feature called the Passion Series…enjoy!
Every day we are in constant evolution, trying to, as Erika Napoletano often says, become the next better version of ourselves. Ellory Wells understands this all too well, as he is constantly in a state of personal growth and development.
Titled Empowering the 80 Percent, Ellory’s blog revolves around empowering people to bridge the gap between their current leadership capabilities and their leadership potential. He focuses on encouraging people to see themselves as valuable, and on how to build better teams and successful partnerships in business. He is doing extremely well for himself considering he was laid off a few short years ago in 2009. He ‘rose from the ashes’ so to speak, tapped into his passion, was able to land a job doing what he loved, and is now building a personal brand for himself and assisting others in the community he has built around his blog.
I personally feel like I learn so much every time I visit his blog. He has put so much effort into helping people shine, I’m so happy I get to share his blog with my audience as well. Here’s what he had to say.
Has blogging helped you in any emotional or creative way?
Blogging has definitely pushed me to become more creative. As I look at branding myself and my blog, I have to find new and creative ways to do that. Additionally, as most bloggers do, I am continually trying to find new and creative ways to build and draw traffic.
Has blogging daily/weekly helped you achieve any personal goals?
I typically blog twice a week, sometimes three times. I write about leadership, personal development and developing a leadership mindset. With those three topics, I’m constantly having to learn and grow, not only for myself but to help others who have started coming to me for coaching. I read about a book a month and share what I’ve learned. My goal is to continue on this path of personal development.
Does the ritual of daily/weekly blogging give you motivation to pursue things you are passionate about?
I know that building a community takes time. The ritual of weekly blogging provides a rhythm and helps me gain momentum.
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This post is part of a series on bloggers who have found direction or passion through blogging. If you would like to be featured in the Passion Series, please contact me through this form with responses to the above questions, and share your passions. Thanks! See all Passion Series posts >>
In keeping with the “How do you eat an elephant?” idiom, the correct answer to the cupcake question is “one bite at a time”. But there are multiple ways to eat cupcakes, and in fact life is a lot like cupcakes–there are multiple ways to get them down.
If I had to choose one way to eat a cupcake though, it would be one bite at a time. Consequently, this is how I’ve decided to live. But let’s be real for a moment, I thought of this concept while brushing my teeth this morning, not while eating cupcakes.
I’ve said this before–I can’t handle thinking about too much stuff at once. If I think about a busy weekend on a Thursday, my stomach gets tense and my mind starts racing. That is what I call, shoving the cupcake down your throat without chewing, and at a very young age, our mums have always told us to chew our food. We don’t swallow our food without chewing, so why do we “swallow” predictions for the future before they’ve been served to us? And by “swallow” here, I mean like, swallowing the fact that you have a million things to do in two days before those million things have even had a chance to present themselves.
You’ve gotta chew. Chew your food, and enjoy it. The million things on your to-do list can’t get done all at once, they have to be done one at a time, and when you look at your to-do list from the perspective of doing just one thing in that one moment, the list doesn’t seem half as bad.
When I was driving my mom and brother home from Las Vegas last weekend, I would look at the signs that said “Los Angeles 222 miles” and think holy shit. When I was running my first half-marathon a year and a half ago, and saw the sign that said I’d only completed three miles with ten left to go, I thought HOLY SHIT. The best way for me to face these situations was to tell myself to “just get through this one piece” or “this one step” or “this one mile”, because that was the easiest way for me to look at the big picture. Or the big cupcake, if you will.
I have no idea how this weekend is going to turn out. I have things planned with a couple of different friends, and worrying about fitting in time with my boyfriend, AND time with myself is futile. All I have is this one bite, this one moment in front of me. This weekend must be taken piece by piece, because plans fail.
The sun never shines bright enough when you plan for it.
This post is part of a weekly feature called the Passion Series…enjoy!
Lo Rain is a twenty-something blogging about her misadventures in the dating scene. I love the idea behind her blog, so aptly named Misadventures in Dating, because dating is one of those horrible things that seem to always need some kind of strategic game plan before starting. I appreciate when a blogger takes the time to provide food for thought on a topic that people find valuable, for all those twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty somethings who are also having trouble getting back into the dating scene.
Having ended an 8-year relationship, Lo Rain knows about heartbreak,and also about what it’s like to have to ease back into the game. Not only that, but she also sheds light on long-distance relationships, sharing useful tips that can keep expenses low when trying to communicate from thousands of miles away.
Blogging about her dating misadventures makes the experience of finding ‘the right one’ bearable because there will always be someone who can relate. There are hordes of single people out there struggling to find their perfect match, and I think having a place to share and openly communicate personal experiences on the subject of dating is an awesome idea! And because she’s also a writer (woo-hoo!) blogging helps her tap into her creative juices as well.
Here’s what she had to say.
Has blogging helped you in any emotional or creative way?
Blogging has helped me in an emotional way. In 2010 I ended an almost 8 year relationship, and began dating later in the year. I had been out of the dating world for so long, and was completely shocked at how awful dating can be. I eventually met a traveling business man that I, for lack of a better term, had a “thing” with. He didn’t think it would be fair to either of us to have a relationship, because he was shortly headed back to his home state. He told me that I was a beautiful woman and would have no problem finding someone else. Uh, wrong. I started blogging to vent about my terrible dating experiences because of this man. Blogging about the crazy things that happened made me feel better, and it also helped knowing that I am not the only person going through these things.
Has blogging daily/weekly helped you achieve any personal goals?
Friends have always come to me asking for relationship advice. I wanted to help
more people, and blogging has paved the way for me to provide insight and advice to a much larger audience.
Does the ritual of daily/weekly blogging give you motivation to pursue things you are passionate about?
I’m passionate about writing. Blogging has given me a weekly topic to adhere to. It
keeps my creative juices flowing and has inspired me to begin various short stories or expand on ideas I’ve had for novels.
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This post is part of a series on bloggers who have found direction or passion through blogging. If you would like to be featured in the Passion Series, please contact me through this form with responses to the above questions, and share your passions. Thanks! See all Passion Series posts >>
It takes serious effort to enjoy traffic. It just might take every positive thought you can drum up to be happy about a Monday, the construction in the road, the commercials on the radio, and the thought of facing another work day with the same tasks as yesterday with the same people asking for the same things. Living every day like this, over and over, is hard. Trying not to live like this, without the day-to-day monotony eating you alive, is even harder.
I know because this Monday I was sitting in traffic, annoyed with the commercials on the radio, and not looking forward to going to work. I wasn’t looking forward to having the same old thing for lunch. I wasn’t looking forward to the drive home from work. I’d planned to absolutely not pick up my phone the entire way to work in an effort to detach myself from the addiction I mentioned last post, and all of it was just making me feel bored and annoyed.
I rolled down the window, and Muse came on the radio. It was the song Resistance. I decide to listen to it because there was nothing else on and I gave up flipping around the stations. I was ‘under’ in this moment, and that is to say, I was not aware. I was getting sucked into the monotony of the week and I hate it when that happens. I start spiraling downwards into the life sucks song and dance that played so often in my early twenties and teenage years. I realized very quickly that I needed something to pull me out of this, and that is when that part in the song comes on. You know the part.
Love is our resistance, they’ll keep us apart and they won’t stop breaking us down.
Those are the lyrics in that part of the song. I thought to myself, MONIQUE! Love is the answer! Love is the resistance to all of this crazy frustration that is weighing you down in this Monday moment. Love is our resistance to anger, to monotony, to ‘do this’ or ‘do that’, feel this or feel that, buy this, read that. It was a grand feeling! Right there at the intersection of Venice and Robertson! Imagine that? I felt so much better after that, knowing that because I had love in my being, I could resist all that was attempting to break down my spirit. YOU GO, LOVE! AND YOU GO, MUSE!
And while it takes constant effort throughout the day to remember love, and remember kindness, and remember joy when you’re in the middle of a boring lunch or some minute task, it’s worthwhile effort because it nourishes the soul. And we mustn’t forget it. Even Amy Poehler gets it. (Thank you Mashable).
I hope you’re having a great week NOT letting the mundane get you down. Look in the mirror and keep on shining, as Rihanna would say. (That was my last musical reference I promise). And to the rest of the week I say, I can’t wait to get to know you.
I drank too much last night. Every time I move I want to fall over. So this is what gravity must actually feel like. Like 5 toddlers holding onto both of your hands and legs as you try to make your way over to the coffee shop for anything pumpkin-flavored.
As I walked into Starbucks this morning, in my hungover-induced haze, I started to badly hate my phone. The first thing I wanted to do as I got in line, was hunch over it, check Instagram, check Facebook, check email, and respond to hours-old texts. This hunch-and-stare position came so natural to my body that it may as well been as daily and as automatic as my own breath. I resisted. I was too hungover to really care about anything the phone had to offer, but it struck me twelve times over how addicted I’d become to checking my phone and social networks, just like 97% of the rest of the country.
I ordered my coffee, and stood aside to wait. I read a little bit about Starbucks and their Shared Planet goals, and about how they were committed to doing good business for people and for the planet. I started marveling at how Starbucks has built such a positive brand for themselves, and how their name and logo have always been associated with good, if not muy expensivo.
But what really inspired this post today, was the waving baby. After reading this commitment from Starbucks on the wall, I turned and caught a baby boy, no more than a year old, staring at me from his stroller. He wore a little red shirt and a floppy blue jean hat. He looked at my eyes, then my feet, then my eyes again, as if sizing me up. I smiled at him, and looked away for about a minute. Then, from the corner of my eye, I saw him wave at me. You know, in that way that babies do, where they don’t really wave their hand but just sort of fist pump their hand up and down in a big way. I turned back to him, smiled, and waved back. The father smiled as well.
The whole scenario was sweet. This baby had thought about this wave for a full minute, or so it seemed, before deciding that I was a person to be waved at. Well, whether or not he was actually thinking about it I’ll never know, but the interaction was precious none-the-less, and whether or not the sweet energy I could feel around this interaction was a predictor of anything special, it just felt good. I’m no momma, but there’s something very beautiful about interacting with a baby, like coming full circle. That is a blog post in itself.
I couldn’t help but think…if I had been on my phone, in full hunch-and-stare position, I would have missed this entire thing. If I had been seeking likes, favorites, and new emails instead of cherishing this very sweet, primitive, and human interaction well, let’s say you wouldn’t be hearing from me until something similar to it happened on another occasion, where I decided to skip the constant need for fake acceptance, and cherish the present.
There are whole books written on this topic I’m sure, as we become more and more aware of how addicted we are to social media, the internet, and the ability to connect to thousands of people through pocketable devices. It’s true, we’re free to do whatever we want, and I’ll be the first to be a thousand times grateful for the ability to connect constantly, but connecting humanly is important too.
Don’t miss the waving baby. That feeling is more fulfilling, more memorable, and more real, than any ‘like’ you’ll ever receive. Someone else is noticing you, while you’re noticing other things. Notice them. Smile. Wave back.
This post is part of a weekly feature called the Passion Series…enjoy!
Through this series I’ve had the opportunity to meet such a diverse group of bloggers, I couldn’t be happier to introduce to you yet another kind of blogger who has discovered her passion through blogging: the blogger without a name.
The internet is rife with anonymity, and where blogging is concerned, I haven’t yet met a blogger who wasn’t racing to get their name and face out there–until now.
Blogging under the pseudonym Missy Oh So, this lady blogger hails from London, where she works as a journalist. I don’t know her name, or what she looks like, but she’s here to tell us a little bit about her passion for blogging.
Out of a great love for the city, Missy decided to start blogging anonymously about London fashion, food, restaurants, healthy living, and culture, to see if she could create a sustainable business out of it. By publishing anonymously, she is able to share with her readers her rendezvous in the city completely objectively, which I think is a great angle to have on a blog, especially as it grows in popularity. There’s nothing better than being able to publish your feelings for the world to see, without anyone tracing it back to you. Why do you think Post Secret was so successful?
Her blog can be found at Oh So London, where you won’t find a single picture of her face, but you’ll fall in love with her journeys. After reading a few of her posts, I’ve discovered the luxury of cruises, at-home spas, as well as revisited my sheer adoration for the heaven that is Five Guys. (Did you even know they had a Five Guys in London?) I need to visit ASAP.
Here’s what she had to say.
Has blogging helped you in any emotional or creative way?
As a journalist, it has given me an additional outlet to write creatively about what I love most, lifestyle, London and food. Missy OhSo is obviously not my real name (I run my blog anonymously) so it’s also great to see objectively how people react to my blog.
Has blogging daily/weekly helped you achieve any personal goals?
It has helped me test whether this could one day be a successful business. I believe that blogs grow organically and while it might take a few years to become successful enough to be my full time career, it’s also the journey to this that counts!
Does the ritual of daily/weekly blogging give you motivation to pursue things you are passionate about?
As a freelance journalist it does motivate me to juggle my workload in an organised manner but also encourages me to try out restaurants/events in London which I might otherwise not get up and do. So it’s great all round!
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This post is part of a series on bloggers who have found direction or passion through blogging. If you would like to be featured in the Passion Series, please contact me through this form with responses to the above questions, and share your passions. Thanks! See all Passion Series posts >>
I was at Trader Joe’s tonight, feeling out of sorts.
The work day had just ended, and a small something towards the end of the day put me in a funk. I wasn’t in the greatest mood, but I wasn’t unhappy. I sort of love it when something puts me in a funk though, because it calls for introspection. It got me thinking how sometimes we are so entrenched in the way certain things make us feel all the time, as though our wants/needs should determine the world’s priorities (to steal from my favorite video of all time). Just because I wasn’t feeling all that great after work didn’t mean a) my life was over b) I was going to have a bad night c) I was going to have a bad week or d) that I should give a flyin’ hoot about this one small thing that made me feel icky. Sometimes I wish I could hover a mile above the city for awhile to get perspective on my size and get away from my head.
So I was standing in line at Trader Joe’s, absorbing the music of life from all angles. Not in the greatest mood, but not unhappy.
I should pause here to mention I was there because I had a gift card.
When it was my turn, the cashier and I got to talking about how I’d almost left my ID in the car, (he asked to see it cause I bought a bottle of wine), and how horrifically terrible that would have been if I had. Then as he was packing up my loot, he started talking about how he was off his game, because he was having trouble fitting my toilet paper and paper towels in the paper bags with all my other goods. I told him he was fine, and that he was doing a great job. I thanked him, and as he handed the bags to me he said, “There you go, now you accomplish something.”
Huh?
“You got rid of that gift card.”
Oh.
I love this, because he didn’t actually say ‘you accomplish something’, he said ‘you‘ve accomplished something’. He was referencing the gift card I’d just used to pay for my food. He trying to say that no longer having to carry it around in my wallet was an accomplishment. But dear God I swear on all that is holy that he said “…now you accomplish something, Monique!“
It was like my Joan of Arcadia moment. Do you remember that show? How Joan, the main character, would be talking to a random person, and then out of nowhere that random person would turn into God? It was as magical and as mystical as that. I couldn’t believe a cashier was being so forthright about my plans post-Trader Joes, and I even thought for a minute that this might offend people who had indeed, already accomplished a lot.
On my way home I realized that I had only heard what I wanted to hear. I had been in a funk, and even though I was ready to go home and ‘crush it’ with regard to my side projects, I felt like I needed a little inspiration to get me going.
It sounds cheesy, but from that point on, shit got better. Even the toll guy who took my parking ticket as I exited the structure seemed to pick up on some strange cool vibe I was emitting and was SO freakin friendly. Light attracts light.
I made the photo for this post today shortly after I got home. I saw it on Facebook, and decided you know what? Some of us have to work during the day, and we can’t unfortunately spend the entirety of it working on where we want to be.
But then there’s the night.