Author: Libby

Page Six: Who We Are

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The thing is that the love that I have for Amy Poehler and Tina Fey is so much more than just, “Oh, they make me laugh!” But, closer to, “Oh, I’m going to use you as my spirit guides.” Don’t get me wrong. There are other powerful, brave, strong and hilarious women in the world with whom I would love to hang. Mindy, Lena, Hillary: call me. But I feel like if I ever happened upon Tina or Amy, I would undoubtedly interrupt their day, crawl into their lap (because they share a lap) and thank them uncontrollably.

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Ryan gave me a copy of Bossypants for my birthday a few years ago and I think reading that is what started this spirit in me that I can be whoever I want to be. And not in an after school special kind of way, either. Like, in a real, tangible way that I didn’t know was possible. It’s the kind of thing that you can hear over and over again but won’t really stick until it slaps you in the face at the right moment when you’re wearing comfortable shoes and are just hungry enough to pay attention but not so hungry that you’re distracted and ravenous. It’s a delicate balance and we’re, frankly, lucky that we ever learn anything at all.

For starters, for me, it was this section in Bossypants (page 143-144):

Amy Poehler was new to SNL and we were all crowded into the seventeenth-floor writers’ room, waiting for the Wednesday  read-through to start. There were always a lot of noisy “comedy bits” going on in that room. Amy was in the middle of some such nonsense with Seth Meyers across the table, and she did something vulgar as a joke. I can’t remember what it was exactly, except that it was dirty and loud and “unladylike.”
Jimmy Fallon, who was arguably the star of the show at the time, turned to her and in a faux-squeamish voice said, “Stop that! It’s not cute! I don’t like it.”

Amy dropped what she was doing, went black in the eyes for a second, and wheeled around on him. “I don’t fucking care if you like it.” Jimmy was visibly startled. Amy went right back to enjoying her ridiculous bit. 

With that exchange, a cosmic shift took place. Amy made it clear that she wasn’t there to be cute. She wasn’t there to play wives and girlfriends in the boys’ scenes. She was there to do what she wanted to do and she did not fucking care if you like it. 

A few paragraphs later, Tina continues, “Ask yourself the following question: ‘Is this person in between me and what I want to do?’ If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way.”

I know a lot of Tina’s book is about being a successful working woman–because that’s what she is and it’s important to have a cohesive thesis throughout whatever you’re working on. But I think that in this situation, your “work” can be whatever you want it to be. Your work can be your job, sure. Your work can be an aggressive hobby. But I think what it boils down to is this: your work is becoming whatever kind of person it is that you want to become.

Okay, so I read that (and all the stuff before and after that and then opened it up to the first page and read it again. Yes.) and felt empowered to not settle for the life that I have just because it’s the one that I feel like happened to me. I imagined the woman that I want to be most in the world (surprise, it’s mostly a conglomeration of all of the beautiful qualities that I see in my friends). I want to be kind and patient. I want to be creative and I want to be a really good friend and I want to be honest. I want to see when I’m wrong and be confident when I am right. I want, to quote a line from Gillmore Girls, “to live my life so that when I read an in-depth biography of myself in later years, I will not puke.”

So I know who I want to be. And, surprise, surprise, it’s Amy Poehler that inspires me to know how to be that woman. When she helped to launch Smart Girls at the Party, she started a series called Ask Amy. This is undoubtedly aimed at much younger ladies than I but, admirably, it’s not dumbed down in any way whatsoever so a 29 year old me can watch it and not feel like I’m sneaking in kid stuff. And Amy dishes out legitimate advice that I wish I had when I was thirteen and advice that I know I’m going to continue needing to hear as I march through the rest of my life.

This one is my favorites. A girl writes in and explains to Amy that she has a really difficult time admitting when she’s wrong. She knows she’s wrong and everyone else does too, but she can’t bring herself to accept it and move past it. Amy’s technique is so kind and feeling–she’s a good example of what I want to be like. She explains that it can be so powerful to admit when you’re wrong because it’s “showing that you’re vulnerable and that you’re a supple person who can admit when they’ve made a mistake and can therefore be trusted.”

It seems to me that a lot of becoming the person that you want to be all boils down to two things. Honesty: being honest with yourself and with other people. And practice: practice being that woman. Practice being thoughtful and reliable and brave–recognize when you have not met the bar, administer some grace to yourself and practice again.

I’m working on me. I’m recognizing that my days are full to the brim with opportunities to choose. The choices that we make create us into the people that we will become and the good news is that we’re in charge.

I hope you have a really good day and if you’re in the mood for cupcakes, I’m just getting ready to frost them.

XOXO,
Lib

Page Five: Pizza

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Few things in this life of mine are more gratifying than engaging in repetitive motion. Had a bad day? To the dishes! Run the sink, plunge my hands into the terribly hot water, scrub, rinse repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Or going for a walk. It’s just proper ear bud placement and one foot in front of another until the sidewalk ends.

Since I can remember, I’ve gotten deep satisfaction from slicing vegetables. It’s the Parker Girl way. As teenagers, my sister and I used to love cutting up onions so much that sometimes we would saute them in butter and eat them over white rice for dinner. That was a life-phase where I can’t imagine we smelled great.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve taken to this practice to calm or distract my mind when I’m feeling less than favorably. If you walk in and find that I’ve prepared fajitas and a tossed salad, odds are good that I didn’t have an awesome day. I have learned and accepted that I can be in charge of my feels but sometimes it takes doing something completely unrelated to take control of those feels. If it weren’t blizarding yesterday, then I would have gone for a very long walk. But it was, and so I went to the produce section.

These may have been around for ages but I just now discovered that you can buy a pillsbury pizza crust in the section of the grocery store that’s filled with canned biscuits and cinnamon rolls. So I bought a whole grain pizza crust (in a tube) and made everything up right there in the grocery store. Sweet tomatoes, salty artichokes, neutral squash, and feta cheese.

And I chopped a full bowl of vegetables (it seems like a lot but veggies not only get more delicious when you roast them, they also shrink down), did all of the dishes, and made enough for leftovers for a few days this week. I served it with a tossed salad but ended up just throwing the salad on top of the pizza and it was pretty delicious. By the time dinner was over, I couldn’t really recall what it was that I was feeling earlier.

XOXO, Lib

Roasted Vegetable Pizza

Ingredients: 

2 small, yellow squash (cut into a satisfying dice)
1 large zucchini (cut into a satisfying dice)
1 carton grape tomatoes (halved)
3 Tablespoons olive oil
1 Tablespoon Italian seasoning
salt and pepper
1 prepared whole-grain pizza crust
2 T. butter
1/2 T. garlic salt
1 T. crushed red pepper flakes
1/2 c. shredded mozzarella cheese
1/4 c. crumbled feta cheese

Directions

-Toss vegetables together in a large bowl with seasonings and oil. Spread out on cookie sheet and roast at 500 degrees for 20 minutes–stirring once. Once the vegetables are done, lower the oven temperature to 400 degrees.
-Press the pizza crust into a prepared cookie sheet and par-bake at 400 degrees for 8 minutes.
-Meanwhile, mix butter, garlic salt and red pepper flakes. Brush onto crust, leaving a dry edge around the perimeter.
-Top with 1/2 of the mozzarella cheese, roasted vegetables, and then the rest of the cheeses.
-Bake until warmed through and mozzarella melts–about 5-8 minutes. 

Page Four: That Season

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To make this point, I’m going to have to tell you a really boring part of my job.

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The bulk of my everyday activity at work is inputting the same information about patients over and over and over all day long. There is an option where I can click a button and it will just magically fill in all of the information itself if we’ve seen the patient before and previously filled in this information. Great, right? Well, we’ve only had this software since last February and since most of the population is recommended to visit the optometrist only once a year, I’ve been doing a lot of inputting tedious information since I started this job last May. For the record, I adore every single other aspect of my job so it’s totally worth it.

Anyway, somewhere around November, I kept thinking to myself, “I can not wait until we’ve had this software for a year so that most of the people who come through here will probably already have their info taken care of.” Every day I would curse, “I wish I could just push that [stupid] button!”

The other day, I realized that it’s March. We’ve had this software for a year, and by now the majority of our patients are repeats and I can just push the button! And, oh, I do. I push it with complete glee and relief and  it occurred to me that I am in that season that I was so looking forward to–I had been for weeks–and I didn’t even notice it.

I tend to run into that a lot. I would watch movies and see the single girl who has her own sun-bathed apartment and I couldn’t wait to have that for myself. And sometimes, usually when I’m stepping into the shower or lugging groceries up the stairs, I remember– I am in that season that I was so looking forward to and I don’t even notice it.
A few weeks ago, I pulled up to my house after a long and stressful day and I saw my boyfriend descending the stairs of my apartment, carrying a trash bag. He was a little embarrassed that I caught him in the midst of what was supposed to be a vaguely anonymous good deed. But I sat there in my car and I thought, ” I am in this graceful season that I could have never imagined to hope for and I so rarely notice it.”

I am moving around so fast, just barely getting through the day sometimes and other times daydreaming about the future so much that I so rarely take a moment to look at this life that I am living–that I am immeasurably satisfied with. I am happy. Happier than I remember ever being, and I almost never look around with grateful eyes.

I have friends who have re-defined “friendship” as my mind has ever known it, I have a job that I want to have forever, I am dating the most witty, talented, kind man that I have ever known, and I have two–two plants in my home that, as of this morning, I have not killed. Things are difficult but things are perfect and worth acknowledging. Worth fighting for.

And I hope you can see that, too.

XOXO, Lib

Page Three: Lunch Date

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I took myself out to lunch, today. Lately I’ve been trying to eat more vegetables and less fried things and drink more water and less sugar. That makes eating anywhere other than your house a little bit on the difficult side. It shouldn’t be that way, right? Anyway, what with all of the snow days and all of the salads at home, I just wasn’t thrilled about going home for lunch today.

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So, then I went through my mind thinking about who I could invite to lunch with me but the idea of making conversation for an hour seemed a little exhausting. So I took myself and my book to Perkins. I went to Perkins. Perkins is filled to the brim with elderly people–big clumps of them. Some were celebrating a birthday. Some were just eating pot roast. But they were all around me and they all had that clean, old person smell. It’s not a bad smell it’s just a distinct one.

You know how they say that the sense of smell will bring back more memories than any other smell? Sitting in this booth reminded me a lot of my grandma who passed away last month.

She used to run this lunch program for the senior center in Macksville, KS. She organized the meals on wheels for the people who couldn’t make it out of their house and then served lunch in the Senior Center for everyone who could make it out. When I was really little, I remember going with her every now and again. The old people loved it when I came. I was a pretty timid, polite kid–not exactly prone to tantrums or hysterics of any type. I’d sit there and talk to them or I’d run and get drinks for them. There was one lady who would always ask me, “if they get olive oil from olives and vegetable oil from vegetables, where do they get baby oil?” I did not know this was a joke and it troubled me greatly.

I learned to read a little bit before I was old enough to go to school (the only time in my life I could be described as an early bloomer) because my older brother was learning to read and he taught me things. When I was learning to read, I would bring my copy of The Baggy Saggy Elephant and read it to my captive audience who never let on that it was in the least bit annoying to hear the same story three or four times. I’d make my way down the tables, stopping at every empty chair with my box of chocolate milk and my book and tell everyone about this elephant who’s skin was too big for him.

And then it was time to run some errands and then go back to work.

XOXO, Lib.

Page Two: The Golden Rule

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Towards the end of the first season of HBO’s Girls, there’s a scene where best friends Hannah and Marnie get into their most epic fight ever. It starts out over something small and escalates (as these things so often do) into some much deeper, silent issues. They’re going back and forth saying mean things about one another and finally Hannah says, “There’s nothing that you can say to me that hasn’t already been said to me, by me, probably in the last ten minutes.”

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There is certainly an enormous part of friendship that implores that if you recognize flaws in the other person, you will accept them without question unless and until those things start to cause harm to someone or to the friendship. And then they will be tackled, if the friendship is worth it, or abandoned all together, if the friendship is not. This is just how basic friendship works ordinarily. You don’t say mean things about Friend A’s annoying laugh and she doesn’t talk about how you sometimes speak in hash-tags and then we all get on with life.

If someone else were to make disparaging comments about your friend’s laugh, you would probably not be thrilled about that, right?  And then they’d go on to pick at little things about her that you didn’t even notice before. Like her muffin top or a bend in her nose or the way her boobs are two different sizes. I’d like to think that we would step in and say, “woah, woah, woah, uncalled for.” Right? We stand up for our friends but we don’t stand up for ourselves against ourselves. Well, I think we need to start doing that.

I mean, if we’re really going to employ the Golden Rule in our lives and treat others the way we would want to be treated, then the way we treat ourselves should be the precedent that is set, by which we decide to treat other people–right?? But that’s not what happens. We treat other people awesome and then we treat ourselves like garbage (constantly picking on the jiggle in our thighs or upper arms or lack of planning) and we find that we’re never really happy. And who would be? Who could possibly be happy when there’s someone following you around talking shit on you all day? “You’re not smart enough, you’re bad at dancing, you have a bulbous nose, you’re too bossy, everyone only puts up with you.”

Yesterday, I was experiencing severe cabin fever and restless brain syndrome so my boyfriend took me to the grocery store so that we could buy enough toilet paper to last us through the next rumored blizzard. I was happy to be out of the house but my attitude persisted. Silently, to myself, I was playing this tape of, “You’re not brave enough and you’re just never satisfied and nothing is ever good enough for you and your boyfriend is totally picking up on your bad attitude and just can not wait to take you home and be rid of you…” Finally I just couldn’t stand it anymore and I whined to Ryan, “I am in such a grouchy mood!!” I stomped my foot–in the produce section. It was a sliver of a tantrum–only the tiniest fraction of how I actually felt inside. He squeezed my shoulders and said, “but I still want to hang out with you.” And that went right to my heart. It made me feel warm in my spirit and it spread to my mind. He didn’t deny what was completely obvious to the both of us. He just got right to the point: there are things about you that are not entirely pleasant all of the time but they do not define you and I like you.

I’m not going to tell you to stop acknowledging the things you don’t like–because that’s just hard and a measure of self-awareness is nothing to sneeze at. It helps us to know what to change and what to embrace. But maybe if we appended those gripes with a kindness. And accept kindness as fully as we accept meanness. “My thighs have carried me miles and miles and miles without acknowledgement or complaint,” is just as true as, “my thighs appear pretty jiggly when I’m wearing these shorts.” So maybe let’s try to find some kindness.

XOXO, Lib.