The Amazing Woman

The Chiney Shop

Thanks to my dad for sending me the link to this video, an interview with Jeanette Kong on her documentary "The Chiney Shop".  I may not remember any specific chiney shops in Jamaica itself (too young when I left), but I still find myself gravitating to the local "Asian store" -- I'm more posh these days :) -- for anything out of the ordinary, whether in America or here in Ireland.

Great video about a key part of the Jamaican experience that very few non-Jamaicans know about. "Out Of Many, One People" indeed!

Beautiful Yearning

So I wait for you like a lonely house / till you will see me again and live in me.  Till then my windows ache. 
- Pablo Neruda, Sonnet LXV

Being A Good Person Is Not Always Easy, But It Is Relatively Straightforward

I've recently become addicted to a new blogger, Dan Pearce, who writes Single Dad Laughing.  His posts are often insightful, challenging, thought provoking and convicting.  And, always passionate. 

The comments by his readers even more so.  Having come across his 2010 post on childhood bullying, one of his commenters shared the following Holocaust quote that just really stuck with me. 

Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above all, thou shalt not be a bystander. ― Yehuda Bauer

 It's that simple.

Yours Truly Lends Her Voiceover to World Food Programme PSA video

Myself and 9 other voiceover artists lent our voices to this PSA on behalf of VoiceOver East Africa's 2011-2012 campaign for the crisis in the Horn of Africa.

*Listen for me as the 3rd voice in!

Beautiful Language

I just came across this list of the ten most beautiful words in the English language, as proposed by the writer, Wilfred J. Funk, in 1932.

Melody
Golden
Chimes
Luminous
Mist
Tranquil
Murmuring
Lullaby
Hush
Dawn

Just reading them out loud brings such a feeling of calm and peace.  One that I think is missing from the list though is "Grace".

What would be on your list?

Friday Pearls

For hatred is corrosive of a person’s wisdom and conscience; the mentality of enmity can poison a nation’s spirit, instigate brutal life-and-death struggles, destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity. I hope therefore … to counter the hostility of the regime with the best of intentions, and defuse hate with love.
- Liu Xiaobo, a literature professor, essayist, human rights activist and Chinese political prisoner, awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. (Source: Los Angeles Times)

Differing Mindsets

Ever received that email forward giving a list of cultural references for incoming college students?  The one that immediately makes you feel old and decrepit because it shows just how different these young 'uns are?  How different their lives have been.  They have drastically different assumptions, worries, obsessions, shock levels and jokes.

Well, apparently the original list has a pedigree; it's based in academia.  Who knew?  The Beloit College Mindset List has been put out by two officials there for the past twelve years, designed to alert faculty there to their students' cultural touchstones and help them avoid dated references.  We've all been there.  You make a joke, reference somebody famous, give a funny tagline and... the silence has crickets, it's so loud!

Anyway, the new list has just been put out for the incoming class of 2014.  !!!  It's certainly interesting, but actually the points it makes are so far beyond my own cultural touchstones that it loses some of it's impact.  So I checked back on the list, to the very first list for the class of 2002.  Now THAT made an impact! 

Read on and let me know if it's as disorienting for you as it was for me. 

1. The people starting college this fall [1998] across the nation were born in 1980.
2. They have no meaningful recollection of the Reagan era, and did not know he had ever been shot.
3. They were prepubescent when the Persian Gulf War was waged.
4. Black Monday 1987 is as significant to them as the Great Depression.
5. There has only been one Pope. They can only remember one other president.
6. They were 11 when the Soviet Union broke apart, and do not remember the Cold War.
7. They have never feared a nuclear war. "The Day After" is a pill to them, not a movie.
8. They are too young to remember the Space Shuttle Challenger blowing up.
9. Their lifetime has always included AIDS.
10. They never had a polio shot, and likely, do not know what it is.
11. Bottle caps have not always been screw off, but have always been plastic. They have no idea what a pull top can looks like.
12. Atari pre-dates them, as do vinyl albums.
13. The expression "you sound like a broken record" means nothing to them.
14. They have never owned a record player.
15. They have likely never played Pac Man, and have never heard of "Pong."
16. Star Wars looks very fake to them, and the special effects are pathetic.
17. There have always been red M&Ms, and blue ones are not new. What do you mean there used to be beige ones?
18. They may never have heard of an 8-track, and chances are they've never heard or seen one.
19. The compact disc was introduced when they were one year old.
20. As far as they know, stamps have always cost about 32 cents.
21. They have always had an answering machine.
22. Most have never seen a TV set with only 13 channels, nor have they seen a black & white TV.
23. They have always had cable.
24. There have always been VCRs, but they have no idea what Beta is.
25. They cannot fathom what it was like not having a remote control.
26. They were born the year Walkmen were introduced by Sony.
27. Roller-skating has always meant in-line for them.
28. "The Tonight Show" has always been with Jay Leno.
29. They have no idea when or why Jordache jeans were cool.
30. Popcorn has always been cooked in the microwave.
31. They have never seen Larry Bird play, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a football player.
32. They never took a swim and thought about Jaws.
33. The Vietnam War is as ancient history to them as WWI and WWII or even the Civil War.
34. They have no idea that Americans were ever held hostage in Iran.
35. They can't imagine what hard contact lenses are.
36. They don't know who Mork was, or where he was from.
37. They never heard the terms "Where's the Beef?", "I'd walk a mile for a Camel" or "De plane, de plane!"
38. They do not care who shot J.R. and have no idea who J.R. is.
39. The Titanic was found? I thought we always knew where it was.
40. Michael Jackson has always been white.
41. Kansas, Boston, Chicago, America, and Alabama are all places, not music groups.
42. McDonald's never came in Styrofoam containers.
43. There has always been MTV, and it has always included non-musical shows.

Friday Pearls

He that speaketh against his own reason, speaks against his own conscience, and therefore it is certain that no man serves God with a good conscience who serves him against his reason.
- Bishop Jeremy Taylor, 16th Century

Friday Pearls

"Many persons have the wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose."
- Helen Keller (via Criminal Minds, series 5: A Rite of Passage)

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Friday Pearls

Men do not differ much about what things they call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.
- G. K. Chesterton

I've been thinking a lot about repentance and forgiveness lately with the final report of the Bloody Sunday Commission, 28 years after the events of that horrible day, and David Cameron's unflinching apology on behalf of his government and country.  Remarkable.

The beginning of atonement is the sense of its necessity.
- Lord Byron

Friday Pearls

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Happy Memorial Day!

This is the day we remember our fallen soldiers, those who have given their time, energy and, ultimately, their lives to protect and serve their nation and the democratic principles on which it is based.

No matter your political leanings or feelings about the various administrations that come and go, this is something we can all agree on. These are people who deserve our respect.

I'm proud to say I have a (retired) member of the military in my family and, despite our loving political "discussions" :-), I have nothing for respect for him and those like him who volunteered to serve. Politics dictate where they're sent and why, but honor, courage and loyalty keep them there doing their job.

We salute you.

Reflections in an Airport

I recently flew to Miami for a sad occasion - the death of a very much loved aunt. I'm actually still there, writing in a spare moment while spending time with family. Thankfully, I hadn't had to attend a funeral of a loved one in years before this, so I'm trying to focus on the positives rather than dreading the inevitable outcome of my certain age where this will start happening more and more :-(

But, that actually wasn't the point of why I started to write this. While waiting for my next connection, on one of the layovers of the flight here, a few thoughts hit me:

• That first few hours on U.S. soil always brings a welter of mixed emotions. I feel blessedly normal (it's so much easier to blend in) but jarringly anonymous at the same time (there's nothing that special about me here... weird). In Ireland, I'm kind of exotic (not that many other Americans/black Americans/Jamaican-Americans running around). Here, I'm a dime a dozen. I'm literally of two minds about it.

• When did the whole world switch from laptops to netbooks? (All of a sudden, laptops look big and clunky). And, how can I get one??

• Being surrounded by rushing, semi-panicked strangers, tight spaces, bright lights and loud, clashing noises is NOT the best place to be when the worst sinus headache in the world comes crashing down on you! Don't. Do. That. Again.

Unlike the A-Team, I can't seem to make this plan come together

I love birthdays. I think it’s a wonderful opportunity to celebrate the lives of others… and to be celebrated of course. Everyone needs to feel special at least one day of the year.

Historically, I’ve had a close group of women friends who made it a point to get together to mark each other’s special occasion with dinner, drinks, funny cards, and great camaraderie. Then, as each of us reached our 40th, we would get a special ring. Not all of the group have reached that milestone yet but, once we do, I’m planning to nominate we change our unofficial name from the Friday Night Girls to the Fellowship of the Ring :-)  I know, I’m a geek.

Reaching even further back beyond what feels like half a lifetime of the FNG fellowship, there’s the unique bond I’ve always shared with my sister (aka C.B.). Our family is weird. For many reasons, but one of the best is that she and I have the same birthday a year apart. (My mother’s is the day after… I know, weird). All my life I’ve shared birthday celebrations with my sister. If it made for fewer gifts for each of us, I don’t think either of us ever cared even when we were young and selfish. We’ve always felt like odd sort of twins, despite my being the older sister and taking massive pride (and advantage) of that fact, and have hung on to our family birthday traditions as much as we can as we’ve aged and moved away… and away… and away.

So, birthdays have always been a good time for me. Well, almost always. I can only remember one year that I hated it. Ahhh, 27. Drama, emotional angst, wallowing in self-pity. Picture this dear reader: me lying flat on my back on my living room carpet with a huge glass of red wine in my hand and music blasting from the stereo loud enough to bring my upstairs neighbor down to bang on my door.

Why the patheticness? It had hit me that The Plan was shot. Girls, you know the plan! Most of us had something just like it. I was to have met Prince Charming sometime in the my early 20’s (despite the distractions of grad school and establishing myself professionally), married Mr. Right, and had a couple of years luxuriating in our marital bliss before proceeding to have our 2-3 children all before I turned 30. This was so all the kiddies would be grown and gone before I got “too old”.

Hitting 27 with no man in sight crushed that plan like a ton of bricks – a growing career, supportive family, great women friends and a couple of good male friends as well to feed my need didn’t count. It was clear that I would have to re-imagine my future, my goals, my self-image. Thus the pity party.

Thankfully I was able to scrape myself together well enough that future birthdays were again causes for celebration rather than self-pity. And, as my new picture of myself solidified, my confidence grew. So much that I hit 40 last year with a freight train’s worth of satisfaction and conviction that the 40’s were going to be My Decade. After all, hadn’t I made a new life for myself? I’d left my job, my home, my friends and family and hauled myself all the way overseas in search of adventure. I was high on a sense of accomplishment.

Now with a month left till 41, I find myself with the urge to pour a large tumbler of something alcoholic and play Linkin Park as loud as I can. Not so much out of self-pity as of sober realization that no matter how young I feel inside or look on the outside, I’m about to fall over the crest into the second half of my life. Right now that feels more like a downhill slide – single, alone, making a new life for myself at a time when it feels like everyone else… isn’t.

Ok, so there’s some self-pity there. The truth is 41 is the suck. I think I’m just going to have to wallow here for a bit before strapping on my boots, sucking it up, and coming up with The Plan 3.0.

Anniversary Reflections

We're now officially in July and you know what that means?! It's now just 2 weeks shy of two years since I started this mad adventure. Shock and awe!!

I could go on and on about what this experience has meant to me - actually I have, ad nauseum via this blog :-) But maybe the quickest way to capture how much I've been changed is through a look at how my language has changed. It may seem superficial on the surface, but language (grammar, spelling, usage) has always been an integral and deliberate part of how I present myself to the world. And changes therein have always represented core shifts in how I see myself and feel about who I've become.

I remember moving to Miami from Jamaica when I was nine. How strange everything was - flat, wide open, covered in tarmac. But, the greatest point of friction was the differences in language. I was a native English-speaker, but Jamaican English and it's Patois counterpart were not the same as American English. And, of course, as the outsider, my way was the wrong way. Not only did I sound strange with my Jamaican accent - it would be several years before I got the benefit of sounding "exotic" once I moved away from Florida - but the King's English that I spoke and wrote actually got me in trouble. It took several months for me to start getting the A's on spelling tests that I always strove for (and deserved!) because I would refuse or forget to spell words without the "u". Humor, color, flavor, etc.

Then I moved here to Ireland, and I started getting noticed for the weirdest thing! Suddenly, my language and accent started identifying me to others as American!! And, again, I was exotic. Ahh, how I'd missed it :-)

Now I found myself going through a strangely familiar experience. Holding on to my "normal" way of saying things while feeling acutely aware of sticking out by sounding different. The local way of saying things sounded both strange and fascinating. If I'd found myself somewhere that spoke a foreign language, I'd have been eager to try it out and show my respect by trying to make myself understood in the local lingua franca. But, because it was still (technically) English, I was resistant to the idea of making a fool of myself by trying to sound Irish. Plus, why give up being "exotic" again? I like being different. I was unique again.

Ah, but time moves on and before you know it you've been infected! First it was the little lilt at the end of every sentence. Then, it was substituting the gentle inquiry-style sentence for the brash, direct American one ("Will we go to the pub?" vs. "Let's go get a drink"). Now? Now, I'm stuck. I hear myself choosing to use the Irish vocabulary automatically, but it's too late, I've already said it - "That's grand", "Ring me", "Your new car's boot is tiny!", "Take the lift to the 3rd floor", "Where's your toilet" or "I've got to go to the loo".

The truth is I've almost stopped wincing every time I hear myself. The next step will be to not even notice what I'm saying. I've already found myself searching for the American term for certain words and concepts - how do you say "tailback" in American again? The process is well on it's way and clearly there's nothing I can do about it outside of abandoning my new life here and going back to the States.

Nah, I'll just live with it. Happily.

Fine, Truly Fine

You know it when you have one of those days. Before, you were languishing in the doldrums of "sorta okay" and "grand". Nothing too drastically out of place. Except for the persistent doubts about "do I truly know what I'm doing?" and "am I really helping anybody?"

One of the major perils of being a psychologist, I guess any similar health profession, is the self-questioning, the self-doubt. And the comparing. Even when you know the TV and the literary and the memoir psychologists don't reflect the reality of the day in, day out drudgery that can be your professional life, it's still hard to convince yourself a lot of the times that somebody else, anybody else, couldn't do a heck of a lot better.

And even though you know, after almost 15 years doing this, that this is just part of the rhythm of the ups and downs of what you do, you still get caught up in it.

People come to you in pain, expecting that you have all the answers, and get pissed or sad or hopeless when you don't spoon feed the miracle cure to them. You know this is how things work. You know it.

Then, when you least expect it, you have that day. When all the floundering you've been doing, trying to figure out what the heck your next step is, resolves into something resembling clarity and you remember that there actually is some substance to the facade you play out every day. The day that client walks in and you have that session where, even though you're only at the start of things, magic happens. You click. He or she connects. You're riding the flow of the emotional energy between you and you can almost see them lifted up. And it's a beautiful thing - enlightening, emotional, spiritual even.

That was today. It wasn't the first time and it won't be the last, but I needed it... to remind me why I do this and that it's okay to keep on doing this. Today was beautiful even in the midst of its flaws. A fine blessing indeed.

(Sort of) Wild At Heart

My friend L.K. from NC made a teasing comment today about how "wild" I've gotten over here in Ireland. I know she was (mostly) joking, but the fact is that there is a kernel of truth in what she said. There's something about having made such an earth shattering (to me) life change that makes it that much easier to try things and contemplate possibilities that would never have fit with my old self.

The pre-Ireland, pre-blogger me was caught in a rut of her own making, and she knew it. I could have stayed in my mostly comfortable, largely happy life and kept on doing the same things on and on. Eventually, my sense of being boxed in and living inside skin just a size too small may have faded away and left me, and that probably would have been ok. But, you know what? I like doing more than ok. I like finding myself chancing things that I would have pooh poohed or talked myself out of (I'm a great overintellectualizer) or just been too darn scared to imagine before. The box, the limits, I'd created for myself and talked myself into accepting was very familiar and very comfortable.

This? Isn't comfortable. Not at all. And sometimes I really feel it. I miss my townhouse, family, friends and the other great things that surrounded me in Raleigh. I find myself flashing to the most random images sometimes... being in my car driving down the highway at 74 mph (if you keep it less than 10 under the speed limit, the cops probably won't stop you); meeting up with the Friday Night Girls for Maker's Mark and random conversations about bodily functions; spending a quiet Friday night till late in Barnes & Noble with a truckload of books and something sweet from their cafe (a bookstore open till 11 pm!); long, reflective conversations with E.J.; the final moments of the Maundy Thursday church service before Easter; getting my semi-regular massage from John (best hands ever!) while Narada-ish muzak plays in the background. But, the happy truth is that I'm still glad I made the move. On the face of it, my life here is pretty normal, but just being forced out of my routine and forced to examine my assumptions and beliefs about myself has been incredibly liberating.

So yeah, pre-Ireland me would never have put her thoughts out on the web for anyone to see, hosted strangers in her house, chanced making friends online, flirted madly via text, or considered getting inked. Considering my previous comfort zone, that is pretty darn wild. But then, as I face the last few weeks before the big 4-0, I'm thrilled I took the chance to see what life could be like outside the box.