Open to Everything

Three weeks into my yoga practice, I have become a completely different person. Not that I was not mellow, but I am mellower.

I take an anusara yoga class, and my instructor is an artist/yoga instructor who forces us in the most gentle way ever to do more than we think we can. The first week with her I was sore in places I did not know that I could be sore! The following week, I got my leg well close to my shoulder and did not feel a bit of pain. She has a never say never approach, and I just go with the flow. She did a difficult pose, and I said a little bit aloud that I was not going to be able to do that. She said that we were not having a competition, but that we have to be open to at least trying everything.

My body and my mind are open to everything. In terms of my art, I am still tabula rasa, but the new ink is smeared all over my head like henna.

My blogging is like yoga too. I am way past baby steps, I am walking...

Tabula Rasa

Whatever I did, I do not know in terms of what keys I pressed on the computer. All I know is that I lost approximately 10000 words on the novel I have been working on. I was not sure about the direction, so maybe this was a sign, like I have a chance to go back in time and change fate. How many times in your life do you have the chance to go back and change everything? Well writers are a special breed because we are always going back and changing things, but with the kinds of thoughts I was having maybe it is a good thing that I can go back smarter with these characters. I had just begun writing out of sequence, so those pages do not bother me that much, but the pages that led to those hurt me a lot more. I just have to pretend that I have been given a chance to do better and go with it...I cannot stop working on this piece, I have too much personally invested in it...

Lachrymose

Lachrymose, just left MoMA, after seeing Le Notti di Cabiria. I do not want to give away any of the story, but there is a scene with a hypnotist...there is a part where a man says to Cabiria that we all are pure and innocent at heart, that there is romance in all of us--he did not say it like that but that is how I heard it. He said that we wear masks of cynicism. I think we do, we all say that we do not need love but the minute we meet someone who makes us change out minds we are all suckers. I have a cut out piece of paper that reads love makes fools of us all.

I think it does, and that it is the best part of all of us. That love has the ability to take us all out like a two bit gangster. It roughs us up, hangs us over a fish tank with piranhas in it and breaks our bones and hearts. But it is still the thing we all crave and go after blindly. Maybe because I am a violent romantic, but don't we all know it is true?

As long as out of it we can stand on our own two feet and go on like before...

Pink Granny Panties

I did not know it was National Underwear Day until I saw it on the morning news. Let's see, I am peeking...actually my hot pink bra strap is peeking at me. I also know I have on pink granny panties. No thongs for me, I like to feel my butt covered. Cotton too. I love colors and patterns, but cotton and my butt must be covered.

What are you wearing?

Pornology New York

In the span of a few months, I have been bombarded by sex in New York. On the cover of New York magazine, in plays including My First Time and my most recent installment CineKink's Pornology New York.

Everything I see as a writer hopefully contributes to a better understanding and sensibility to me with writing about sex. There was a scene in the CineKink feature that I cannot even describe because I am not sure what the man was doing to his girlfriend, except to say that it really looked painful.

And she loved it even though she cried and was visibly in pain. Pain for her experiencing it and me watching it! But when it was over, he said to her who loves you? She fell into his arms with ease and cried, at which point he was so tender and loving to her. You really have to trust someone in a situation like that. I guess you really need to love them and know that they love you because could it be any less?

How lucky am I to live in a city that is so sexually saturated media wise as an erotic (and romantic!) writer?

Post Rainy Sunday Brunch

Look at me--first I was not posting, now I have two posts in one day!

I had brunch at the Mercer Kitchen, a lovely lamb sandwich and a molten Valrhona chocolate cake that was so delicious that I almost was ashamed to eat it in public. I covered my face with my hand, and could not stop moving my feet out of my flip flops with each forkful.

But I digress--

I was sitting in the dry Mercer Kitchen (wet like crazy outside in New York City even though it was not supposed to be that bad with the threat of thunder storms) next to a man who travels between Miami and New York, and is such a regular there that he kept beckoning the hostess over to talk. Now the interesting part is I saw out of the corner of my eye that he had raised his glass of Fiji water to a woman who was sitting in the adjoining hotel lobby. My mind went crazy, as much of a Francophile as I am I ignored the French woman on my other side who was saying that she had been in New York so long that when she went to France they told her she could not speak French anymore--even as I am planning on going to Paris and am working on my French...I wondered if the man on my other side had had a long standing flirtation with the woman in the lobby? When he raised his glass, she looked at him bewildered. I was not sure if she was nervous or what. I kept an eye on their progress--he seemed to have stopped worrying about her and was talking to the hostess who he asked could he bring dessert and coffee into the lobby? The hostess said that he could only bring coffee. So with a grimace he took coffee solo into the lobby and sat across from the woman there with his cell phone. I actually scooted over in my seat to see what happened. But it was not until I was leaving that I saw the woman sitting lotus posed on the couch laughing with him.

That was a classic scene for an hopeless romantic, wasn't it? Kicked my inner Anais Nin into effect too because Anais was a brilliant diarist and people watcher. I think I have done a pretty good job in this post--oui?

Post Venus in Furs

I have stopped feeling so angry and I am happy to post. I am online working on my novel in progress. Met another writer yesterday who wrote a novel after her mother died and it occurred to me that I have created a thing of love and originality that happened after my mother died.

I can still do it, I will continue to do it. I have been writing like mad. But honestly, my inner Anais Nin has been inhibited. I am not sure what is bringing that on, but I am working to push past it. I can get down and dirty like all of the rest!

I am about to have brunch in the city--so many places around me I have spent part of the morning writing--a pretty sexy scene not physically explicit--maybe verbally explicit?

Definitely!

Maybe settling down with a good meal will make my mind wander...

Have you ever read Venus in Furs? I was reading the first few pages in a used bookstore cafe and was it only me who was laughing my head off? Although it was nice to see Sacher-Masoch instead of de Sade. I wish I had had the nice Klimt cover though!

Rage

Not any happier today...

Gratitude Tuesday

Temper, Temper

My temper reared its lovely head in a piece I wrote and shared with some people. I knew when I wrote this poem I was angry. I mean the words I used made it pretty simple "selfish," "bastard," "you(accusingly)."

But the response that the people who read it had to it made me realize that there was even deeper anger there than I had imagined. I was really mad at this person. The anger had been submerged in my mother's death, but it was deep and came out on the page so that the comments that I got made me reevaluate what I had written.

It was very angry and I am grateful. I will take anger--rage as a muse any day. I wrote my piece with more than a bit of a temper and I allowed for my own therapy and recovery. I began several pieces in poem and prose that are helping me to get even more of this out.

I am not watching my temper...

Gratitude Tuesday

Sustenance

I am writing my first Gratitude Tuesday in a long time. I am grateful today for physical and mental sustenance. Particularly mental. When my mother died, I knew I was going to continue to write, but I was not sure where I would find the inspiration from.

I have been startled to discover I still experience joy, happiness, passion--intense good emotions. I am able to take their sap and use them.

I am also able to utilize my sadness. Writers at the end of the day are leeches, we suck the sap out of every experience, every movement--everything. I have never been ashamed of the things that have inspired me or the things that I have utilized for the sake of art.

It is art at the end of the day, isn't it? Whatever medium. A blog, a novel in progress, the new feelings you have for another person...all of it is art right?

I am grateful...

Sharing 101

My mother always told me to be careful when you get comfortable talking. It is like its own sort of intoxication. One second you are talking about simple things, the next you are telling someone what color underwear you have on.

Well I did not reveal that, but I did let someone read a peek at a new project of mine that I realized was a bit racy. Nothing terrible, nothing that Anais Nin would not have be proud of! This guy that was sharing with his work, so I shared with him. I never share my work in progress. But I did. And it was liberating, it was okay to share with him and it was okay for him to share with me.

Then I let another friend read it. Now I am not so anxious anymore, I want to show someone else.

I think I was afraid of not being perfect, I have to learn to throw that inhibition out. I got input which was even better. I really probed both people.

I hope they are still my friends!

Baby Steps

I have forgotten how to blog, and yet I am going to try again. I might have even stopped, but I came back and saw that CeeCi said "Please don't."

Thank you.

The world remains the same, even though my mother died. At first, I was not even sure how people could be happy--hadn't they gotten the memo?

My mom was the sort of woman who could get out of any storm.

She did not get out of this. It is like losing a mom and a superhero. Yet even in her demise, she was the most potent and amazing woman I have ever known.

I miss her.

She was the one who told me about sex at a young age and started the obsession with it. She knew that I liked to write about it and certainly talk about it.

She was fine with that.

My mom was my best friend and my inspiration and it is because of her that I am going on.

Without her.

So I am back to the land of blogging.

Baby steps, baby steps...

Here I Am

I won Script Frenzy.

I lost a loved one.

I could disappear...haven't I?

The Frenzy

I went to a screening for my friend's film short. Why did I feel like a nerd? I was the only person looking at the screen. I am not sure why the other people were there. I wanted to see the film which I discovered was in a foreign language. I needed the director (my friend) to translate to me from the French above the music and liquor rising like heavy steam.

Images from the film are still with me. I feel brazen to want to create one for myself, but then I never said I was not brazen. Since I have to develop the script the day that I begin writing, I just have been collecting ideas. I asked a friend to write down a phrase that she said in the midst of conversation. She understood. Why I love my artist friends. They understand the madness. The frenzy.

Gratitude Tuesday

Re-

I am back on a Tuesday of all things! I am happy for the prefix "re"--rebirth, redo, reincarnation, reeverything.

There is a second chance for everything.

I am preparing myself for Script Frenzy. I will still blog, but that is going to be my focus. I am sucking up life right now for the visuals that I think film requires that I need to write down. I am going to have to write my eye. Exactly what my eye sees which is a challenge and a pleasure at once.

I am going to reinvent the way I create. Wish me luck!

Missed Gratitude Tuesday...Again

So many things have been going on, and I am the type of person if I do not write about it right away it is lost.

I am aglow from new friends who embrace their inner Anais Nin in their e-mails and IMs. One should be so lucky to have friends like that...

...and I am. Tuesdays have become a day that does not embrace me having the time to blog--maybe I can anticipate my gratitude on Monday?!

I started working on yet another new story. But better yet, I picked up an old one I had not worked on with new inspiration.

I am glowing and full of all kinds of gratitude!

Missed Gratitude Tuesday

...I am going to continue next Tuesday. I want to keep some decorum. Life has been so hectic...I want to keep something still...

Babycakes and Babeland

I was wandering about the Lower East Side. I am a native New Yorker, but do not think that means I do not have to HopStop certain parts, or discover somewhere I have not been like Columbus. I knew I had to get to Babycakes for their amazing spelt and gluten free chocolate frosted cupcake tops--I did not realize that the rest of the world feels like me and thinks that is the best part of the cupcake hands down. I want to go there now, but I am in the East Village and it would take a while to get there...

This is a lovely irony. I am all for planning my sugar shopping, but when I wandered into Babeland on Rivington Street, I was the chica who walked out with a bottled water. I was salivating over the erotic books there--instructional and fictional. But I walked out with room temperature water with a pink Babeland label. The cashier was lovely, said to me there was a rip off coupon on the bottle which I almost used for my $1.60 water. But then had a change of heart. Decided to save the coupon for a rainy day.

Both of us were glad I made that decision...

Gratitude Tuesday

Quirks

In my I Heart Memes post, CeeCi mentioned my semi addiction to Tori Amos...

Her new album came out today, and it is the new soundtrack in my head. I cannot even begin to describe how good the album is. I am the sort of girl who usually does not love an album until I have heard it a few times. I have never met a Tori song I did not like. The lyrics, the voice, the sounds. What a sensation.

I read years ago in an interview in Rolling Stone, Tori Amos said that she was an acquired taste like anchovies. I remember my first Tori album was "Boys for Pele." Let's just say my mother does not like anchovies. No matter how low I played the album she would hear it and tell me to turn it down more.

A crush of mine once asked me to waltz to a remix of "Hey Jupiter." I was just getting to know him and I don't dance much so I said no, but it was once of the most romantic things a guy has ever proposed to me.

There is a Tori album that is the soundtrack to infinite parts of my life. Even when her words cannot be literally translated for me, I find something I feel in them and am captured.

Maybe Tori is one of my quirks--among many! Thank God for them because if we were all the same we would be nothing.

The Grindhouse Rules

I saw Grindhouse last night with one of my adventurous friends, who also went with me to see Les Anges Exterminateurs, and I laughed until my face was stained with tears. It was so over the top that I could not help myself. I laughed during Les Anges as well--because of the over the top sex in place of the violence.

Everything is over the top in the movies. At least Grindhouse was supposed to be. Someone was reading New York, the Sex and Love issue which of course I read (the coolest thing I discovered there was X Tube). The article about the rare species aka New York City virgins reminded me of an idea that is being fed to me in every "literary" book I read, and by other writers that the only way New Yorkers know how to connect is by being physical. This idea disturbs me, but as I am laughing my head off about extreme sex and violence in the movies I have seen, I think about a line from Joni Mitchell's song "People's Parties." "Laughing and crying, you know it's the same release.”

Maybe those tears on my eyes were for the still that it is so easy in this city for people to feel awkward about sex. I am 32 years old, and I am talking to friends who still cannot have frank conversations about sex. Friends who cannot say fuck--what the fuck is that? In Grindhouse, there were fucks on top of motherfucks, and it was annoying because cursing is like a fine liquor--good in small doses. How can you not be able to say fuck, while fucking other people? Because to me getting to know someone’s body before getting to know that person is fucking. It’s not making love until there is love involved. Call me traditional or whatever. I am disturbed by people who can be so hypocritical. The people, who smirk and grin during gratuitous sex scenes on the screen as if they have never had it, cringe at real emotion and love seeing blood everywhere.

Is trying to connect with people in New York City really such a grindhouse drama?