Well, I’m pretty sure I’m going to Hell now.  ‘Cause there is a Hell, according to the guy from Portlandia when he was in Easy A – “we recognize that there is a Hell… right below our feet, above the Orient.  It’s there.” Not exactly the most P.C. way to explain where Hell is, but it gets the job done.

Anyway, the reason I mention that there can only be one Highlander is because my brother from another mother Sam compared me to Highlander in that I was a sick girl at work (still am, kinda) and I had to email out the company’s holiday card and no one else could (well, WOULD is the better word here) do it, so Sam said “there can only be one!  sick girl that mass emails the holiday card that no one’s going to read anyway.”  Highlander references just get you thatmuchcloser to my heart.  Not that Sam could be much closer, since he’s been jammed in there for the past ten (10) years.  So many memories with that one… fisticuffs, snowboarding, beer pong tourneys, dog park visits, hikes, bike rides, brewery tours, birthday parties, giant squid discussions, best hug evers, inappropriate quotation marks, illegally downloading music (hey – this is FOREVER ago), mocking hipsters, watching things move when they shouldn’t have been moving, lots of moving, laughing so hard at next to nothing… my best buddyroo.  Love him like WHOA.

There can only be one – SamJam!

I got a moustache tattoo!  On my finger.  Here is a picture:

That’s AnMar’s yellow coat on my chair.  I love that coat and I love that AnMar never seems to want to wear it because I want to wear it ALL THE TIME.  Btw, AnMar got the same ‘stache.  It was actually her birthday present from me, along with a pair of TOMS with moustaches on them to take part of Mo’vember.  I also bought a pair for me because a) I need to have everything AnMar has and b) mosutache shoes?  Uh, hell to the yes!

Rich and I stopped seeing each other.  It was hard to have that conversation, but I took a deep breath and told the truth.  We are both adults and we will both be better than fine.  He’s an awesome guy and I will never say anything negative about him because there is nothing negative to say… it just wasn’t the right fit.  So.  There’s that.

T-Day I didn’t really do a whole heck of a lot… went to Jimmy’s mama’s house with his boys, then over to the Young house for more stuffing than you can shake a stick at and a whole boatload of pie.  Literally, we could have loaded a boat with the pies.  Ohhh, the pies… and then the annual Guesstures smackdown that pits child against parent, friend against friend.  Our team won, mostly because we are awesome (have you met us?  No question.) and also because most of us have known each other for a long time and get the facial expressions, etc.  Rachel and Ken were hilarious in their daddy-daughter verbal abuse.  It’s really not Thanksgiving unless you hear “BAM!  WHAT?!  You gonna CRY old man?!”  Just sayin.

ClickCom’s solid.  We’re growing and making things happen.  It’s a cool time to be involved in digital marketing, what with the whatsits and the who’s your fathers.  I like LinkedIn more and more, especially because via LinkedIn I get to all these cool Mashable articles that then direct me to these awesome design sites that have the top 20 images of The Avengers.  An airbrushed Iron Man?  Um, heck yeah!

OMG!  The dog split her tail open TWICE from wagging it too hard into stuff.  I kid you not, this dog is so g.d. happy that she wags hard enough to cause damage to herself.  So, while we were trying to control the bleeding, we had to try and keep her not-as-happy, which is ridick.  She also was smelling real bad, but I didn’t want to bathe her while she had a busted tail, so I finally gave her a bath last night and now she doesn’t smell like a foot.  Quality!  She is also the best darn snugglebunny on the face of the earth.  Last weekend AnMar was sleeping in (as she so richly deserved to – poor chick has to be AT WORK at 4:45 a.m.  Not to make bagels, hallelujah – incidentally we both worked at Bagelgate in previous lives, who knew?) and so I laid down on the couch to read and Cap’t. Snugface came all up on me and laid down and this is what I got a picture of.  So.  Adorable.

In other adorable news, I got to baby-sit for Jeremy and Shannon for her birthday.  Owen’s three now and Oliver just turned one, and omg omg omg they are so seriously presh.  Super cereal presh.  I love them.  I told J & S that I want the little one.  What?!  They have two!  Don’t be greedy!

Okay.  Enough for now otherwise I’ll sit here and write out every scheme I have to make more money before Christmas (steal wreaths and re-sell – what?  Is that bad?) and I won’t blog for the rest of December because I’ll have written a novel here.  Thank you, faithful reader, for checking in and seeing what’s new in my world.  There’s only one of you (hey D!), but I love you the most.  :D

Oh – one last thing (I SWEAR.) – this is the night that determined that we needed the ‘stache tattoos -

Adorable little creepers, aren’t we?

Daddy reading me the funnies. I think I'm two here?

This is what I remember about that day:

I watched him take his last breath, and then it seemed so horrifying and final.  I kept waiting for him to breathe.  I left Chapel Hill and drove home.  I got in bed with Haze and didn’t move.  I couldn’t cry.

This is what happened:

I went to my home group the next day and talked about it, and I kept talking about it.  I kept talking about him.  My sister came out and stayed with me and we went to the memorial.  He was cremated, he is now in a box in my step-mom’s living room.  For four years now he has been in a small-ish box.  It is impossible for me to wrap my head around the fact that his whole body and breath and soul are now in a box in South Carolina.  He is too big for that, I think.  Anyway, I couldn’t cry.  Not at the memorial, not when I saw him in a small-ish box, not when I saw my brother and sisters cry or heard my nephew’s voice break when he read something that meant something to someone.  I just couldn’t.

After all that:

I kept putting one foot in front of the other.  I listened to Iron & Wine to make me cry.  I did lots of crossword puzzles to keep him with me in memory.  I tried to emulate his voice and say things he used to say.  I keep lots of moustaches around because they make me smile and think about his ‘stache.  I can cry sometimes.  Not a lot, but sometimes.  I miss him.  I wear his Giants sweatshirt because even though I don’t know much at all about football or the Giants it makes me feel like there is a part of me that is still him.  I’m half his.  I know because I got his nose (thanks Dad – not) and his loudness and his willingness to talk to anyone at all.  I just wish that I had more time with him.  I go through this every year.  I think about how someday I might get married, I might have babies and he is not here with me for that.

Don’t get me wrong.  It could have been so much worse and I am always going to be grateful that we had time to know each other in adulthood, in recovery.  I love him so much and I really miss him.  And it happens every year, and this year I didn’t even get it until after 12 p.m., so that’s a bonus.  It must be getting easier?  I just never want to forget anything about him, even though I know I already have.

Well anyway, Daddio… You were an awesome granddad and a solid guy, and I am lucky that I got to be your kid.  You taught me more about myself than I could have ever learned without you.  Thank you for all those lessons and the ones that I’m going to keep learning that I know you’ll have influence on.

This is the song that got me through the worst part, the part where I couldn’t cry and I couldn’t move and I just felt like a big hole was in the middle of my chest:

That's not his baby, BTW. He doesn't have kids. That's my co-worker's totally adorable baby.

This is mean David.  Kidding, he’s not mean.  Not most of the time, anyway.  Sometimes he threatens me with legal action because I share funny things he says with my co-workers, but I think that he’s mostly kidding.  He’s also my workout buddy, we meet at the Y every morning because we’re part of the “sexy people club” that goes and sweats before the sun comes up.

He doesn’t cook and that means that he has great taste in restaurants.

His hair is really soft, and sometimes (if he’s in a good mood) he’ll let you pet him on the head because he knows that his hair is really soft too.  Honestly, if I had hair that soft I’d be rubbing on my hair all day.  It’s that kinda soft.

He absolutely refuses to Eskimo kiss AnMar, which I think is hysterical.  Mostly because AnMar attempts to Eskimo kiss him as often as possible, and sometimes he puts his hand right between her face and him and it’s really funny because David’s also really tall, and AnMar is not, and that just makes it better.

One time we watched the movie “Closer” together – I don’t know if you’ve ever SEEN “Closer”, but there’s a lot of sort of uncomfortable-to-watch scenes in there, especially if you’re with your tall best fwiend workout buddy.  So we watched it anyway, and he had to ask me several times if I wanted to turn it off because I would just burst out “Oh my God I’m sooooooo uncomfortable right now!”

Anyway, David would for sure be on my pirate ship.  We’ve gotten really close, he and AnMar and I, and we’re like a really warped version of the 3 musketeers, with less saving people and valor and more coffee shops and laughing so hard your stomach hurts and you feel like your face might fall off.  He’s that kind of friend.  When he’s not being mean.  :)

Seriously though, I think that meditation gets a bad rap because it seems like it can be really complex, and maybe for some folks it is, but for me it’s about sitting down.  And shutting up.  FOR ONCE, EMILY, JEEEEEZ.  (back to being nice to myself.)

I’m not that into visualization or guided mediation, I don’t want people to tell me how to breathe or when to breathe or what to focus on.  I just want to sit down and shut my face.  Because I never do that in real life.  I am always going 599 miles an hour and can’t seem to find more than a half second to just sit and shut up and breathe unless I’m actually sitting in a room with a bunch of other people doing the same thing.

I guess I need to make more room in my sched to sit down and shut my face, because Lord knows I need it.  Ask anyone… ask Erin, because she said last night “um, Emily, maybe you should start every conversation with ‘I talk really fast and I make a lot of bad jokes’…” See?  They know.

1. Wealth without work

2. Pleasure without conscience

3. Knowledge without character

4. Commerce without morality

5. Science without humanity

6. Worship without sacrifice

7. Politics without principle

My friend Jason and I are trying to find an apartment together, and I hate apartment hunting. 

**Number one, I have a pitbull which is on everyone’s do no admit list. 

**Number two, filling out applications only to wait on a credit check that comes back DENIED is a super bummer. 

**Number three, I always get excited about a place and then find out one of the first two… and yeah. 

Then I have to get back in my car, play some soothing tunes, and cry quietly on my way home… BUT – I just got the call that we got the apartment we were lookin at yesterday, snap snap!  We are the two least likely folks to qualify for an apartment that’s as nice as this one, yet here we are movin in!  I would be doing my little vicotry-over-the-man dance, but I’m at work and it makes little to no sense. 

I’m figuring that the living sitch will be a piece of cake cause Jason’s a chef and I like to eat.  Once, we went to his apartment and in fifteen minutes he had made this risotto thing with canned veggies and spices that was WAY better than anything I’d eaten in like… 4 days.  So I’m pretty excited about that.  Plus, we’re members of a small secret society.  And we have extortion plans.  Things are lookin good here.

It’s not like I don’t WANT a house, with a yard and all that for the dog, but for the time being the 3rd floor next to the tennis courts apartment with Jason is lookin pretty fly… from the tandem seat view, anyway.”

So what had happened was…

Jason now lives with his girlfriend in a house somewhere.  I know it’s in Charlotte, but I’ve never seen it.  We rarely see each other anymore, but I will always have a place for him in my heart.  He was a huge part of my world while I was going through a LOT of loss.  I am incredibly grateful for the role he played in my life.  We never moved into that apartment, btw.  I ended up moving in with Superdave, then with Sarah in Plaza-Midwood, then with Ben, then into the condo with the Hazerton, Dexerton, and Jaimerton.  Soon enough, it will be just me and Haze.  And who knows?  Maybe that is exactly how it is supposed to be.

100 posts.  I’ve changed a lot over the past 100 posts, but mostly I’d like to think I’ve grown a lot.  I think I’m probably a skosch nicer than I used to be.  Just as goofy.  Maybe a bit more conscientious.  Hopefully less of an a-hole.  Expanded horizons.  Maybe some wrinkles… for sure some dangly earrings – which, btw, were totally foreign to me when I started this little corner of my world.

It’s weird to think I’ve sat here 100 times and typed little blurbs about what’s going on.  But, I’m weird, so it all works out.  Sidenote: my office is FREEZING.  WTF is that?

Nowadays, my prayers tend to be more action-oriented.  I pray through meditation, as strange as that might sound.  I pray through hugs, through text messages, through yoga positions.  I pray with my body, my mind, and my soul.  I pray with aspirations for loving-kindness and compassion.  I pray by not reacting when I hurt, when I’m angry, or when I’m scared.  Those are all prayers.  I pray by holding the door open for someone else – small good things are prayers.  I don’t see anything wrong with that, and it keeps me in line with what I believe the next right thing is.

I have someone in my life that I admire very much, whose spirituality and way of life deeply move me and inspire me to continue on my own path of spiritual growth.  He has a blog as well, and this entry in particular – You’re not in my prayers… You are my prayer – spoke volumes to me.  I appreciate his candor and style of writing, and I also appreciate his honesty about himself.

We are not perfect, but we are all spiritual beings.  Today, I am working on making you my prayer.

सभी के लिए प्यार और दया, करुणा और सभी के लिए सम्मान, सभी के लिए पीड़ित से स्वतंत्रता