Here's Looking At Me, Kid

While looking at my blog stats, I noticed that someone visited the blog after finding it by doing a Google search for the word "Shelly".

Please allow me to introduce you to the odds of finding a blog with low readership and virtually no advertising by searching the un-famous author's not-entirely-unique first name.  

Because I'm here for you, I did the research.

Of the 17 million results, the bulk of the first several pages consisted of web sites for a bunch of people most of us have never heard of, with verbiage stating that "This is the OFFICIAL Shelly _(last name)_ web site!" like it means something.   There were the "Shelly, Inc," sites and the Shellys who are actors/TV hosts/authors, and the Shellys who are wacky stay at home moms with "crazy" lives (Tip: if you own a mini-van, your activities are immediately excluded from being considered "crazy".  Driving your kids around and making it home just in time to make dinner is not "crazy"--that's just a Tuesday), and that's all very entertaining reading for a bitch like me, BUT...

I think my personal favorite was the description under shelly.com, which states "Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here."

I would like to apply that last statement to all of the self-important Shellys on the web, myself included.  I would especially like to say that very thing to the Shellys I found who spoke about themselves in the third person, or peppered their pages with performance reviews declaring them to be the only Shellys we should care about, or those Shellys who appear to be taking themselves too seriously (talking to you, Lowenkopf--you're lucky you're a man, is all I can say. Wait--I would also like to say, Mars, you're cool, so just ignore all that negative shit I just said about all those other Shellys).

There are a lot of singer Shellys, photographer and writer Shellys and, oddly, realtor Shellys on the web.  I'm sure they are all lovely people.  Then again, if they are anything like me, maybe not.

I found a web site for the 2008 Shelly Awards, OK?  The friggin' Shelly AWARDS.

Anyway...my point is that I never did find this blog while searching for Shelly.  I didn't even find anyone named Shelly Payne in the first 30 or 40 pages, so, wow, and also, I didn't know Zac Brown's wife was named Shelly!  Cool!

OK, forget that last part.  My real point is...we all get so wrapped up in our little "thing" that we forget that there are hundreds of other Shellys out there, waiting to be found.  

Except for Zac Brown's wife--clearly, she has already been located.  

Many are, like me, in various stages of desperation, depending on what day of the week it is, and whether or not anybody said anything nice about them that day.  Because you've never heard of most of them, you might be safe in assuming that they have more love than "talent" or "luck"--those two wildly subjective things that determine whether or not people take you seriously enough to throw piles of money at you and adore and/or loathe everything you do, regardless of whether you think they should.

But they keep trying, those Shellys...I like that.  I like the fact that there are a bunch of schmo's like me, getting up every day and doing something, and feeling good enough about it to share.  Even better?  There's somebody willing to power through hundreds of pages of search results to find even the most obscure of them.

Pat On The Head

Did you ever have someone talk to you as if you were very small? 

I mean something along the lines of a, "Wow, you tied your shoes all by yourself!  You are such a BIG GIRL!" kind of thing…

Why yes, just today, in fact.  Why do you ask?

Let me give you a little background, starting with the obvious, that being that I'm a grown-ass woman and any patting on the head that occurs as a result of my miraculously being able to do something any normal grown-ass woman should be able to do is only going to result in me being annoyed at your condescension.

Also, I have been speaking in the grown –up language about grown-up topics for many years now.  Granted, I spent 14 years in radio, so, I was a bit slower in developing my Adult Persona (radio is really all about extending your inappropriateness as far as you can, for as long as you can), but, I stopped doing that ten years ago, and I now know how to behave appropriately in many situations. 

Funny thing is, when I was in radio, everybody assumed I was appropriate when I seriously wasn't.  Now that I'm no longer in radio, they assume I can't be appropriate.  Weird.

Anyway….today, I wrote an email.  It was an email just like the million other emails I write every day for work, and somebody went out of their way to say, "That email you sent to Dr. So-And-So was very appropriate."

As if they were concerned that I would send Dr. So-And-So an email that was inappropriate. 

As if, for my jollies, I like to annoy and confuse our clients, and when I'm feeling REALLY crazy, I create litigation-able correspondence in hopes that I can say something SO inappropriate that my Fortune 500 company gets sued.

(Insert eye roll here)

Does anyone out there have a job where people act like you know what you're doing?  I'm just curious if they even exist. 

Anyone?  Anyone?

I'm a writer, OK?  I write.  That's what I do.  I write.  To assume that I cannot create a simple document is the highest insult.  So I just would like to take this opportunity to very inappropriately say "Fuck off" to the people who do that.  Please also note that the "Fuck off" is located a safe distance from the business correspondence.  Because I'm just that good.  Now please, don't let me keep you from the very important business of fucking off.  Thank you and have a wonderful day.

They Write About Love

So...

I was archive diving and found this little scribble from June 18, 2008--thought I would re-post.  Ironically, it's a post based on something I originally wrote in 2007, which was, itself, written during the fallout from a chance encounter from late 2006.

You would think I would not miss several years of "emotional mess", but I do.  I am not a drama queen by any stretch, but I do love to FEEL, and I want to feel love, and am not content to shut it off because I'm afraid it's going to end badly.  I have had my share of bad endings.  Yes, they sucked.  They all sucked.  I'm not going to lie--it is a teeny bit depressing to read things that I wrote while "under the influence" of some gigantic emotion while I sit here feeling blank for several months in a row.  It's coming around, though.  Slowly.  And as I climb back up to a place where I can feel those huge feelings again without worrying about my hand being slapped, I am heartened by this post.

 

Freaky Scene

I just found this thing I wrote back in January 2007--I couldn't edit it in a way that I liked back then, but this morning it seems to make sense.


Love gives you a strong sense of what is right and what is wrong, while simultaneously injecting you with the world's most powerful hallucinogen.  It is the one thing you will need on this earth, in order to be able to experience anything else--any color, any flavor, good or bad.  You can't order it ala carte--it only comes on gigantic, heaping platters, piled high with both things you desire, and things you despise.  It is for nothing terribly poetic, though the very skilled can sometimes create a clever lyric around the concept. It is a requirement of being alive. Simple. Grand. Wonderful. Awful


Clearly, only someone in the thick of obsession could have written that.


I'm amazed at just how MUCH is created as a direct result of falling in love with someone--glorious things, and really, really dreadful things--all smashed together in some chaotic mix in your head.  At the time I wrote this, I would sometimes wake up feeling wonderful, but awful by bed time, or vice versa.  Feelings of exhilaration and joy were almost always followed by the overwhelming notion that I was completely undesirable.  An all day roller coaster ride, only, like every other emotion, its not something that is actually "happening", that others can experience, and no matter how much you talk about it with friends, if you can't express it to the object of your desire, you're all alone in your freaked-out world.  You can't imagine how many times in the last year I have asked my best friend "Am I crazy?  I'm not crazy, right?" while we pick through the minutiae and try to interpret every nuance, in an frantic effort just to keep my head about water.  Obsession becomes the only word that describes it--it makes you f*cking crazy.

What has changed since that time is the pitch of the highs and the lows.  Somehow, I managed to not self-destruct, and reached a place where there really aren't any lows--or at least no lows based on what someone else might be thinking, which is always the worst possible thing to hitch your life to.  I am quite calm these days, and that is a good thing because frankly, I thought my brain was going to explode.

But I still believe those things that I wrote--falling in love snaps you immediately into a perfect perspective, because they say that relationships are like mirrors, and what you love about someone else is actually a reflection of something in yourself.  To say that it gives you a very strong sense of right and wrong is to say that when you fall for someone, you actually find your own values--you might say things like, "I don't even know what it is about him that I like, he just seems like a good person", while your mental Rolodex silently flips through all the qualities that you consider "good" in relation to your own goodness--you relate everything about that person to yourself, unconsciously.  Maybe you didn't think too much of yourself before, but when presented with someone who seems to share your values, it validates them and, by extension, you.  All of those things you have been feeling, those things inside of yourself that you cannot change because they make up the very essence of You, are always ten times more beautiful when you see them in or through someone else.
 
It is easily the happiest thing in the world to find a kindred spirit.  You're filled with joy, but also disbelief--especially if you've been alone with your thoughts for a while, or you're deep into a "nobody will ever 'get' me" funk. 

(Personally, I have a permanent residence in Nobody Really Understands Me Land--palatial estate, in fact.  The neighbors are friendly, but, for obvious reasons, we all pretty much keep to ourselves.)

While your This-Is-Probably-Going-To Hurt-Really-Bad, logic tells you to approach with caution, every other cell in your body just feels like a moth drawn to the flame--every urge screams MATE WITH THIS PERSON RIGHT NOW! 

And that's the "makes you crazy" part that make you write poetry and sh*t...