Adventure Bowl Learn How To Surf (But... It's Freezing!!!)

But it's Winter!  I have thin blood!  And I put this Adventure in the Bowl when I lived in perpetually sunny, "freakishly almost 80 degrees every day" L.A.  Now I live in New York City!  In fact, I can't even find a photo of winter surfing to go with this post!  

(Do you see the rampant use of explanation points?!  It's BECAUSE I AM IN DISBELIEF/GIDDY/EXCITED/A LITTLE FREAKED OUT/I THINK THIS WILL BE A LIFETIME MEMORY...SO THAT MIGHT BE AWESOME)

HELP!!!!!!!!!  LOL!

Well, first rule of Adventure Bowl is "no backing out, no excuses" so stay tuned for how I am going to figure out how to take surf lessons in the freezing cold!

What am I getting myself into?!

UPDATE #1  (Friday afternoon)

I found a place to winter surf!  Time to plan the road trip!  

UPDATE #2  (Saturday early afternoon)

So here I am in New England with not only a free place to stay but a friend who will drive me and my pups back to New York City.  I am a lucky, lucky girl.

The only problem is, I am scared, really scared to do this adventure.  Here are some of the things I'm feeling:

1)  Since I fell and broke my shoulder I have no upper body strength.  What if I can't paddle out?  Or pull myself up?  Or carry a board for that matter?

2)  I have this overwhelming need to be good at what I do.  I am not going to be good at this.  It's hard for me to be vulnerable in front of someone I don't know (instructor).  It's hard for me to be patient or easy on myself.

3)  Is this a bad time to mention I have a fear of the ocean?  I have spoken about it in many posts.  I did great with the jet ski adventure but this is different.  I've had to be rescued 3 times that I can remember since I was 19.  And I was trained as a life guard and spent my life, up until then, swimming in the ocean.

4)  Fear, fear, fear.  Lack of control.  And yes, I find this very ironic as I just wrote a post about fear.

Sitting with all this...

*****

Adventure Bowl
Learn How To Surf (But... It's Freezing!!!)

What Do You Want From Me?

As the blog has newly been relaunched, I feel like... brand new. I never go back and look at old posts, mostly because I will feel extremely self-conscious about the things that I write. Good and Catholic, you don't rehash the grief you feel over your cousin's death. You're supposed to just let it be. Overrun you like a kind of ferocious weed until you're consumed and immobilized it.

That's the polite thing to do.

I'm tired of being polite.

But I have to ask... what do you want from me?

I'm a nice, good girl. But that hasn't served me so far. Now I want to write posts that help me take apart my grief, not just of my cousin's death and Mom's illness but all that's been lost from that. While I was busy being a puddle on the floor... so much was lost. But now, I want to lay it out, like when a mechanic is fixing a Vintage car, and examine and inspect and then fix all the things that are broken...

And then put it back together.

I think that's the only way you become free from things.

I just wonder - because I'm a self-diagnosed people pleaser - is that what you want from me? I like this being a give and take, I love your comments, I love that this blog is something you relate to and I don't want you to be disappointed when you read a post.

I notice when I write something honest, truthful, raw, people will read... one person read for 171 minutes last week... but hardly anyone will comment. No comments as others read for 5, 10, 20 minutes.

"What are they thinking? Am I too much?" I am too much for them? I am. I am made of scary little scars that are all on the inside. I should only write happy posts. Put a smile on it. Keep the uncertainty on the inside. That would be for the best.

Who am I doing this for? I thought I was doing it for me. But maybe I'm really doing it for you.

So what do you want from me?

No, really, I'll do it. But you have to tell me. Do you want to talk about figuring your life out after it's thrown you a maddeningly huge gut punch? Can I talk about my cousin's death? Does it make you feel uncomfortable? Sometimes I think you guys think I have it more together than I do. It might be my fault. Sometimes, I'm very rah-rah. I need to tone that down a bit.

All of this started to gently cross my mind as I opened a Facebook and Twitter page for the blog. A lot of people started following me and I think I became shy... a little freaked out. To combat the uncomfortableness of that, I have to be witty, asurbic, sarcastic.

You wouldn't know the girl who writes on that Twitter account writes here. That girl is the me with the mask. She hides behind a wall, she dangles a sparkly ball to distract you from cousin's who are murdered and lives that are turned upside town and cousin's that have brain cancer and life choices that will break your heart and mother's that are sick and court cases and do we go for the death penalty?

Maybe going for the death penalty would be impolite.

I'm wrestling with this... I know people like me on Twitter but that girl... she's having a ball but she's not going to grow and change. She's not going to make the big decisions that I am determined to make this year - I think I want to leave Los Angeles. I think I want a new job. I know I want to live without so much fear and responsibility.

My cousin has brain cancer now.

I want to do the things he's wishing he did. And that is either the most brutally honest thing I have ever said or the most damn selfish or maybe it can be both.

Everything, all these thoughts, doubts, feelings came swirling around yesterday when I read the most beautiful essay on grief by someone who had lost his daughter.

The author spoke of how, after you lose someone unexpectedly, you become consumed with fear.

"Maybe what I’ve learned more about, for better or worse, is fear. I think I can pretty comfortably say I understand fear. I’ve learned to understand fear in and out... I live in fear. I’ve learned how randomly things can go wrong, horribly wrong, and I fear that moment, I fear that moment coming into existence. Logic be damned, it terrifies me."

I found myself nodding, yes, yes. That's how I feel. In a matter of a few paragraphs, the author had boiled down exactly how I feel... a feeling that seems to elude me as I try to turn it into words.

When I am in that uncomfortable place, I gloss it over with a lot of humor. I'm straddling both worlds.

I haven't faced the deep dark fear like the author expresses. You have to be in club to get it. You don't want to be in the club. But it's when... if terrible things happen with no warning and they are so terrible and so terrifying and so unspeakable that just NO ONE will speak of them -- how to you ever feel safe again?

How do you not just completely collapse and fold in on yourself? So nothing can touch you. Or hurt you. Yes. This is deep. Does it scare you? Will you not love me if I speak of scary things?

I can tell you this: I have lived like that and I don't WANT to anymore. But it's like, after something truly bad happens, your blood gets stamped with the "fear" DNA and it just corses through you becoming part of your whole being.

I guess what I'm saying, (Get to it, girl), is I need to talk about those fears more. I know that is everything that is holding me back in life. It's like I have the knowledge that life is short, that you better live it now because Good God, how fast it can be gone in a day.

And that is in one hand. And in the other is what I am going to do with that knowledge. Every week, through an adventure, I am trying to move the needle as they say... push it closer to the life I want to live and away from the life of fear.

Do yo want to hear about that?

What do you want from me?

***

What Do You Want From Me?

All You Need Is Love (and Sex and Cheetos), But Right Now, Mostly, Love

You guys cannot believe how it makes a girl feel to throw up a blog post after a year plus of not blogging and get hundreds of views, so many amazing comments and emails.

I feel like I stepped on a scale and lost ten pounds and you know how frickin' excited that gets me! I have so much to tell you guys, that I'm not just overwhelmed by all the love but all I have to fill you in on.

Today, I'm going to make it simple. I just want to talk about the intention of this blog and what got me back to blogging again. Um... my life sucks. In a way I thought it would never suck again after sucking so bad a few years ago.

It I might have let it continue to suck because in this case it was sucking to a less degree than last time that I did not realize the accumulative suckiness until I took stock in my life.

It was 4 weeks ago when my Mom told me my cousin had brain cancer. One week later, she was in the hospital and really sick herself.

I could add to that that I am currently jobless, boyfriendless, a bit of fat-ass-ness but that all seems to pale in comparison to these new set of circumstances.

When my Mom told me about my cousin, I started crying. That heaving crying that is really ugly, that starts with tears streaming and pretty soon you are making noises that most resemble a braying donkey but you are so lost in the words that you just heard that you have no room for self-consciousness or even sense to protect the person that is watching you be consumed with sadness.

I would like to say that I thought about my cousin, would he live or die? How was the surgery? When will we know the pathology?

But instead, I cried out, "I don't want to live in L.A. anymore."

If you think that is selfish, don't worry, being Catholic meant that I relentlessly flagrated myself for having such "all about me thoughts."

But later, when I really thought about it, say sitting on the floor of my Mother's hospital room floor for days on end, I realized there was some deeper meaning to my outburst.

What I really meant was, "I don't want to live this way anymore." Maybe there's a way you don't want to live - in a relationship that no longer makes you happy, in a job that doesn't appreciate you, scared about finances, upset that life doesn't seem to be as sparkly and fun anymore.

Because I am always looking in, hashing and rehashing, what was said, what does it mean, like I am some kind of CSI investigator of my own words and thoughts and intentions, I dissected it even more. I knew, had I been told, as my cousin had, "You have a brain tumor the size of an apple in your head and you could die" (which is probably not what the doctor said or he has a really bad bedside manner that he needs to work on, but that is kind if the gist)...

If I had been told - I would be very unhappy with what I had done with my life so far.

And let me tell you, that a realization like that, is a kick in the balls, even though I have no balls, but I have had many boyfriends that have balls say there is no feeling like it and that's what I had - a feeling that hurt so bad it could not be ignored.

It's like - you find out your boyfriend/husband/girlfriend/wife is cheating with your best friend and NOW here is the kicker - YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT and that "doing something about it," is going to CHANGE YOUR WHOLE LIFE.

Like for me, I will either ignore this new found information and change my life because I can or I will bury my head in the sand and just move forward and hate myself, years down the line, because when I was young and able I could have changed my life but didn't and now there is this girl that comes from hospice care to feed me through a tube and during the commercials for my favorite soap opera, I think back to how with just a few FEARLESS changes, my life could have been AWESOME.

You feel me? So what I am saying is: I gotta fix my life. And the last time I needed to fix my life, doing those adventures once a week - whether it was pool crashing a five star hotel or indoor sky diving made me feel so SUPER STRONG that I could take on ANYTHING IN LIFE.

And I did and life was awesome. And that's what I want back. But not just for me but for anyone feeling this way.

In fact, I'd love to hear some ideas, for you and for me! They don't have to be huge. Just something that, if you did it, when you lay your head on the bed that night you might feel giggly and proud of yourself. So far mine are: get in the car and start driving until you can't drive anymore and then stay the night in that town, get pink hair (haven't pulled that one yet), redecorate your apartment in one day (this is something I have been dithering about on for years and BAM! I'm going to do it like I'm on some HGTV show), jump out of an air plane, go water skiing, over come fear of water before jet skiing...

Got some more adventures for me???? Write them in the comments section and I will add them to the bowl!

All You Need Is Love (and Sex and Cheetos), But Right Now, Mostly, Love