Life, Simplified - Part 4: Smile, Redux

I don't think there is one among us humans who has not benefited from being told of, or who hasn't stumbled across a technique or process or a trick that makes life simpler. Sometimes it's an evolution of steps in an activity that we tend to pare down into a more streamlined way, only to be shocked some time later when reminded of how we used to do it. Other times it's a sudden realization that we could do a task in a totally different way that shaves time or effort from our day. Or sometimes it's much, much bigger than that.

In a series of posts — because I think one post to cover all of them would just be too long ...like that ever stopped me before — I will highlight the things I have discovered on my own which have made life better.

A Life Experiment, Perhaps
It has been a couple years since I wrote The Power of the Smile, and a couple more years since I began applying that of which I wrote, and I want to present an update. Go ahead and read The Power of the Smile again (come on! I linked it twice!) and then come back here to finish. I'll be brief. I promise. Go. I'll wait.

Welcome Back
Life will always have its ups and downs. Setbacks. Triumphs. Love. Loss. Two years ago I waxed romantic about smiling and finding love and, well, that romance was brief. Though I couldn't keep the girl, I kept the smile and, I must say, my words then still ring true today. Plastering a smile on my face daily no matter in what mood I awake really is the key to smoothing out the day. I have changed jobs since I wrote about smiles, and my daily work stress is probably greater than it was as a valet manager, and I still grumble when things don't run smoothly or when the crap seems to pile on more quickly than I can shovel. But now I take several moments a day to step back from it, look at myself, and smile. It's absurd. It's not brain surgery. It's the stuff of sitcoms. And I laugh.

The practice of smiling truly has changed my life for the better. I feel happier even though the circumstances of my life have not greatly improved. Moments of inevitable anger or frustration at the obstacles in my life don't last nearly as long as they used to. I have learned not to dwell on them. I have learned to smile. If smile dopamine is pumping through my body, anger mojo can't take hold.

It's the easiest self-help in the world: Just. Smile.



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Life, Simplified - Part 3: Within the Circle

I don't think there is one among us humans who has not benefited from being told of, or who hasn't stumbled across a technique or process or a trick that makes life simpler. Sometimes it's an evolution of steps in an activity that we tend to pare down into a more streamlined way, only to be shocked some time later when reminded of how we used to do it. Other times it's a sudden realization that we could do a task in a totally different way that shaves time or effort from our day. Or sometimes it's much, much bigger than that.

In a series of posts — because I think one post to cover all of them would just be too long ...like that ever stopped me before — I will highlight the things I have discovered on my own which have made life better.

Have a seat. Ease your mind.
Women haven't had to figure this one out....

For about 46 of my 53 years roaming the planet, I had made life more difficult for myself than it had to be. Like most healthy, able men, I had followed the male social norm of peeing while standing up. It's easy, our underwear is designed for it: just open the flap, whip it out, and let it flow.

However, also like most men, I have terrible aim. And really, it's not so much about the aim, but more about the starting and the stopping. What with an eager surge at the beginning and a dribbling finish, we sometimes (usually) miss the bowl and manage to hit the rim. Or the floor. Or the wall.

I got tired of feeling the impulse to wipe the rim clean with toilet paper, often ignoring said impulse, and subsequently got tired of seeing the dried, yellow stains clinging there later in the day ...or week. Yes, I'm also lazy.

So, one day, in an amazing moment of brilliance, I wondered, "How could I make it so I don't have to clean my toilet so frequently?"

A strange voice, unfamiliar to me in the dark, echoing chasm that is my mind, the voice that is rational, pragmatic reasoning, replied, "Stop peeing on the rim, idiot." My rational, pragmatic reasoning voice doesn't think very highly of me.

"But how do I do that?"

"By placing the source of the stream below the rim, you moron!"

Of course! The pee can't get on the rim if it's never above the rim! That's pure genius! ...or common sense. I often confuse the two.

And so, about three years ago or so, I started sitting down on the toilet to pee. I haven't cleaned my toilet since!

I'M KIDDING!

But it has made my life remarkably better. I'm not having to clean my toilet as often, nor feeling guilty for letting so much time slip in between cleanings. And it's better for my friends because I sit down to pee in their bathrooms, as well. My aim is no better there than at home!

Guys, it doesn't make you any less a man to pee sitting down. Do it. Your girlfriend will appreciate it. Your wife will love you more for it. You'll love yourself for it. Your buddies will... well, they'll probably bust your balls for it publicly, but then they'll go home, look at their disgusting toilets, and realize you really are the genius in their circle!

Really. It will make your life better. It certainly did mine!



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Life, Simplified - Part 2: Go Juice

I don't think there is one among us humans who has not benefited from being told of, or who hasn't stumbled across a technique or process or a trick that makes life simpler. Sometimes it's an evolution of steps in an activity that we tend to pare down into a more streamlined way, only to be shocked some time later when reminded of how we used to do it. Other times it's a sudden realization that we could do a task in a totally different way that shaves time or effort from our day. Or sometimes it's much, much bigger than that.

In a series of posts — because I think one post to cover all of them would just be too long ...like that ever stopped me before — I will highlight the things I have discovered on my own which have made life better.

With a V8, You Can Really GO!
Back in the aught decade, when Oprah! was still on the air, the Chicago affiliate ran it twice a day: once in daytime, and then again at night after the local news. I was still married then, and we would lie in bed and watch Oprah! 'til we crashed, or until Nightline came on. On one particular Oprah! in 2005 or 2006 she featured one of her regular visitors, then up-and-coming daytime talk TV superstar, Dr. Oz. He came on and made the audience squirm by talking about things we are too embarrassed to talk about to our doctors, one of them being our poop.

I'll warn you right now, this post will briefly get a bit graphic, so you may wish to skip to the end and work your way back....

Dr. Oz talked about how some patients had asked him how their poop should be, what it should look like. He said that it shouldn't be hard nuggets, nor should it be really soft or semi-liquid. What it should look like, he said, is a semi-firm, long, unbroken, S-shaped poop. To my relief, he didn't show photos. And to yours, neither will I.

But I lay there thinking, "Mine aren't like that. They vary wildly from one far end of that spectrum to the other and back." He babbled on about the way to achieve the S-shaped poop, but it all sounded like much effort, and I fell asleep.

Flash forward to 2009, and my earnest effort to lose some weight and get into shape. I hired a personal trainer who tasked me with keeping a journal of my diet. Of course, he gave me guidance along the way, with a focus on balancing the food groups and cutting out the sugary and high-carb things. What I had not been eating with any kind of regularity prior to his influence was vegetables, but he changed that with a stern expression and some kindly advice. Soon I was eating vegetables in two meals daily.

And, before I realized it, I was making two poops daily that were perfect Dr. Oz S-shaped poops. So easy, and so regular! Dr. Oz was right — as were about a billion other doctors! A healthy diet is key!

But, after a while, I hit a wall vegetable-wise; there were (are) only so many vegetables I like or know how to cook, and it had become expensive since the portions on offer at the grocery stores always seemed to be more than I could eat in a week — especially if I was trying to vary the menu — and I was losing a lot of vegetables to mold and decay in the refrigerator. I had to find an alternative.

After reading lots of labels in grocery store aisles, I finally decided on the low sodium version of V8 Juice. Each bottle is a cocktail made of eight different vegetables (in case you didn't know why they call it V8), and the ingredients list — at least for a major brand — is pretty brief. There is some added citric acid, "natural flavoring," and potassium chloride, but they make up less than two percent of the whole. So I switched completely over from buying and storing and cooking and eating vegetables to having an eight ounce glass of V8 juice with every meal.

My body didn't miss a beat. I still squeezed out those S-shaped poops!

I included V8 in my daily food journals, and my personal trainer said nothing about it until I asked him. Though he said he would prefer if I cooked and ate vegetables, he had nothing bad to say about substituting low sodium V8 for vegetables on my plate.

So, eight years later, though I've fallen off the workout wagon, I still suck down a glass of V8 with dinner. It never gets old. I never get tired of it. ...or of easy poops! Sometimes I forget, and sometimes I'll go out for dinner that is light on the vegetables, to an almost immediate and uncomfortable result in the bathroom. However, it takes only about three days back on the V8 regimen to get me back in that groove.

I suppose, with all the money I've thrown in to V8 in all that time, I should buy stock in Campbell's or General Motors or whoever it is that makes the V8. It has certainly simplified my life and it makes my life better.



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Life, Simplified - Part 1: Let It Go

I don't think there is one among us humans who has not benefited from being told of, or who hasn't stumbled across a technique or process or a trick that makes life simpler. Sometimes it's an evolution of steps in an activity that we tend to pare down into a more streamlined way, only to be shocked some time later when reminded of how we used to do it. Other times it's a sudden realization that we could do a task in a totally different way that shaves time or effort from our day. Or sometimes it's much, much bigger than that.

In a series of posts — because I think one post to cover all of them would just be too long ...like that ever stopped me before — I will highlight the things I have discovered on my own which have made life better.

When It's Gone, Let It Go
From the moment I separated from the Air Force, I pursued a career in broadcasting and video production: earned my degree in Radio/TV at Southern Illinois University; two years later accepted my first career job at a very small-market TV station in southern Illinois (a stepping stone to fame and fortune); two years later jumped half a country away to a job at a TV station in Georgia; then to a cable outlet in the same town; then back to Chicago. In all, I spent 16 years in the industry.

It was perhaps two years or so into that career when I discovered I wanted to write. I was writing in my job(s) — a lot. As a matter of fact, the writing I did at work — scripts, mainly, for local advertisers' commercials — sucked up all my creative energy, so when I got home, all desire to write what I wanted to write was gone.

Flash forward to 2003 or so, and I had landed what was, for me at the time, a dream job: video production with extensive travel. While I was interested in the travel aspect mostly for the opportunity to see bits of the world, it was in 2003 that I capitalized on the hours of idle time on airplanes and started writing down the stories for which I had only previously scribbled notes. I felt like I was actually getting somewhere with my ideas! On top of that, I was still dreaming of the big time in video production while pitying the poor nine-to-fivers who went to the same job in the same place every day forever.

It all came crashing to a halt in April, 2009, when, due probably as much to my own pride as to the flattened economy, I was shit-canned from my "dream job."

I spent the next three years or so knocking on that career door which had been so unceremoniously shut. There were a few freelance gigs with the former employer, a few gigs picked up through a small network of similarly skilled folks, but in a glutted market that had gone stagnant, I wasn't making enough to support myself. But I was working, having entered the occupation of taxi driver. It was a new experience, being self-employed and building a client base and covering my responsibilities, but after a while I realized that taxi ownership was eating me alive — financially as well as psychologically. The hours were insane: 14-hour days, six days a week, just to make ends meet ...and I wasn't exactly making those ends meet. My debt was growing. I found myself longing to get out, even being happy with the thought of the daily nine-to-five in the same job in the same place every day forever.

But during this same period, I was writing — more so at the beginning. I had lost the momentum on the older ideas I had started, but was cultivating new ideas. I was creating! And I had made the realization that I could return to acting, my other passion, which had lain dormant for more than a decade. It became my primary creative outlet, and my writing tapered off to a trickle.

Still, in this period is when it hit me: I was doing things I wanted to do! It wasn't the career I had chosen that was fulfilling me, but it was in indulging my passions. My career leaving me opened my eyes to the reality that I had been living to work when it should have been the other way around. All those poor nine-to-five saps had been doing it right all along!

So I stopped letting my career drag me along, digging my heels into the earth, hoping for it to let me back in. I just let it go, stood on my own two feet, and watched it shrink to a dot on the horizon.

It took a couple of years. I had to get out of the taxi, so I took whatever I could get. It had been five years since the layoff; the economy had turned back around and was improving. Jobs were to be had once again. There was a false start with a photography company, then two years in a tenuous existence with a valet company who provided shitty pay and no benefits before I landed the perfect, mindless, benefits-rich, nine-to-five existence that leaves me time to my passions.

It has been a slow, grinding re-start to get my writing rolling, but it's coming along. I recently put about a week's worth into a screenplay idea I had a decade ago. I've joined a Facebook writers' group and have already submitted two-thousand words to participate in their challenges. I feel like the Tin Man in the land of Oz whose creaky joints need a little bit of oil, but then he's soon whooping it up with a scarecrow and a lion.

The new job doesn't pay a great deal more than the old, and doesn't make life much easier, but my new outlook makes living with myself much easier. And that makes life much better.



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Homeless At Home

I spent more than one-third of my life in the family home in the town where I grew up. For 19 years and change, I had the stability and familiarity of roots in the same patch of earth through the better part of my formative years. My siblings, all older than I, had been coming of age and leaving the nest slowly but surely, one at a time, throughout my childhood, scattering to nearby suburbs, still close to home, yet leaving me the lone bird. But, mere months after that 19th birthday, it was my turn to fly; I departed for adventures untold in valiant service to my country. And then, four years later, my Air Force career voluntarily cut short after the first contractual obligation, I moved back in with Mom and Dad. And my sister. And her kids. She had moved back home about a year before I left, pretty much the catalyst to my leaving in the first place. But there I was.

But I wasn't done adventuring; college, then a career in broadcasting that took me all over ...uh, two whole states. But always, I had that thin tether reminding me where home was.

And then love reeled me in and took me where? Home. Back to Chicago. Close to family once again.

But then things started changing, started falling apart. With Mom gone for some years, Dad finally sold the house, the home, my roots. What a strange feeling to see it there, nestled between the other homes I had grown up in-between, my home, but not my house, not any more. My boyhood home, the place where my biography starts. But now it's somebody else's home.


The boyhood home ...and the boy. And his sister, Marie,
far right, who passed away in 2014; and family friend,
Gloria, who moved to Florida a thousand years ago.


But that was okay. I still had Dad, and he was in the river house he had bought as a fixer-upper project that, once he had fixer-upped it, he and Mom had moved into. But then Mom was gone.

And then, though he had held up pretty well for a long while, Dad started falling apart, physically. He sold the river house, and another branch of my roots was severed.

And then he was gone, too.

Then my marriage withered and died. As a matter of convenience and economy, I moved to a town much closer to where I plied my trade, where I flexed my career muscles, where I buried my head in the sand of work, where pain and loss could be kept at bay.

And then the career left me. I found myself frantically treading water, working the only job I could find at the time, with a roof over my head, but no place that felt like home. None of my siblings lived in the town that had raised us any more. Sure, we were all scattered about the Chicago suburbs, but that one suburb that held all of my cherished memories was now devoid of all tangibles that were mine. I had nowhere to go to that I could call "back home."

I guess it happens to anyone who flies the coop and lives his life away. The wake one leaves eventually restores, and the stilled waters forget the rushing force that once cleaved them. Homes are sold, folks move on or pass on, and strangers occupy their void.

In the broader sense, Chicago is my "home," will always be my "home." Meet me in St. Louis and ask me what my hometown is. "Chicago," I'll say, because you've likely never heard of the puny suburb that actually calved me. But within that home town there's no place that holds me, no point in the earth to which I'm tethered. When I think about that, it makes me sad. The suburb where I live now is only where I live, now. I'm here only because I had to move out of the post-divorce apartment because I couldn't afford the rent any longer because my career quit me. My current apartment is my pad, but it's not my home.

I'm single. I'm unattached (again). Save for having just started a job where I once again have a track to retirement, I could live anywhere in this country I want to. But I can't think of any place I want to live. Chicagoland is the default because most of my surviving siblings are here, and I've lived in Chicagoland for all but 12 years of my life, and I'm here, now, so it's convenient. But where to live in Chicagoland — or outside of Chicagoland, for that matter? I couldn't decide if my life depended on it.

Ask me where I most want to live in the world. My answer?

Home.

Fade to Grey

There's always a gloom following the close of a show. Actors expend a lot of time and energy preparing for a production, be it a run of one performance or of hundreds. There's the audition process, which can be very easy (cold reads from a script) or very stressful (prepared monologues and repeated callbacks); and then there's the rehearsal process.

In my personal experience, rehearsals last anywhere from four to six weeks, usually nightly five or six days a week. During that time, an actor spends two or three hours each night with the director and the rest of the cast, and a bond forms, a somewhat familial connectedness between and among members of the cast and the director. Inside jokes are created that can last in the minds of each involved forever, and are recalled to the strange looks from unwitting company at the raucous, seemingly unjustified laughter.

A small group, a handful of people, or a throng apply themselves to the common goal of opening night and the performance run, each sharing in the joy, the stress, the exhaustion, and the exhilaration of gestating this baby through to its birth.

And then it's over.


The cast, crew, and director (seated) of End Days, by Deborah Zoe Laufer. (photo: Josie Rivera)


Though friendships have formed, each goes his own separate way into the gloom. The next step for one may be another show, but with a different group of people, with a different director, perhaps at a different venue. All needs to be learned again: names, lines, movement, inside jokes. The next step for another may be quiet evenings again for a while. But, whether jumping back in or laying low, the let-down is real. The depression has weight. It's withdrawal. Coming down from the heights of energy flow, adrenaline rush, the flush of the audiences' adulation — or at least their polite applause. Stepping out of the warm glow of the lights, of the focus of attentive eyes seeking to be entertained and hoping to be enthralled.


Nelson has some questions for Arthur. Julio Knapp (left) and Tony Gasbarro. (photo: Josie Rivera)


My most recent turn on the stage, in a fun comedy-drama called End Days, just ended this past Saturday night, and I'm going through the typical stages of withdrawal, however there's a strange feeling of abruptness with this one. The past two productions I was involved in — two different summer runs, a year apart from each other, of a comedy called Lounging — were three- and four- weekend runs (15 and 20 performances), respectively. At the time, they seemed to go on forever, but — suddenly — they stopped. End Days was a two-weekend run of only seven performances; in comparison to the summer shows, it feels like we were chopped off at the knees.


Sylvia "encourages" the family to pray. Left to right: Emily Hosman, Julio Knapp, Tony Gasbarro,
BethAnn Smukowski (photo: Josie Rivera)


So, on top of the usual feelings of withdrawal, there is the feeling of having been cheated out of a "complete" run.

Regardless, it's done. Whether it's on to the next show, or laying low for a while, I'll keep you posted.



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I Don't Know What I Should Title This Post

Here it is, March of 2017. I have allowed to happen that which I vowed I would not: I let a full year lapse between posts at Farrago. It's quite an embarrassing thing for one who calls himself a writer.

Perhaps my life is ultimately uninteresting even to myself. Time spent sharing the mundane turns of my personal pages seems more and more time wasted — mine and, especially, yours.

But I'm a "writer." I'm supposed to write, if for little more reason than to practice, and to publish, in the form of blog posts, for others to see, to critique and, hopefully, to share.

There is passion, and then there is discipline. Passion is the drive to do something because you enjoy it; discipline is what keeps you doing that thing when the passion wears thin. It's not that you don't enjoy doing it anymore, but rather that you've likely found other things to do that you enjoy more. Passion's fickle nature is what reveals to you how little discipline you actually have.

But, lately, I have found my thinker rather devoid of thoughts. In my blogging heyday I used to seize upon a thought and it would fester within me until I had the keyboard at my fingertips, and then it would fly out of me and into the internet! I used to seize upon so many ideas at once that I couldn't hold onto them all, and some would fall away into the dark morass of my brain cave, never to be thought again.

But now? Something broke. That light bulb that would pop on several times a day seems to have burned out. Even in this most remarkable social and political ass zit time of our lives, I don't have a single thought to lend to the discussion.

And so, just feeling lately like I must write, I come to realize my blog has lain dormant for more than a year, but a year with several highlights about which I should have written:

--in May I applied for two different jobs within the State of Illinois

--also in May, near the end of the month, my sister, Pam, age 64, passed away due to complications of congestive heart failure and a DNR; she is the second of my sisters to die, and less than two years after the first

--in August I faced the financial onslaught of the litany of repairs needed on my 2002 Nissan Xterra, and began the hunt for a new(er), more reliable car, a somewhat less daunting financial onslaught

--in mid-September I signed the loan for a 2014 Ford Focus at Carmax; so far I am very pleased — both with the car, and with the experience of buying from Carmax

--in late September, having given up after nearly three months since the applications, I received a call to interview with the State of Illinois for an office coordinator position at Elgin Mental Health Center

--in mid-October, after waiting three weeks to hear from the State of Illinois, I finally received a job offer to the position for which I had interviewed; I accepted, and they set a November 16 start date


And there you have it. Six stand-out pages from the story of my life since last I wrote here. I hope you will come back. I promise the next post won't be another mundane diary entry. I just make no promise when the next post will be. I've left too many of those unfulfilled over the past few years.



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