Category Archives: That’s How Life Works

The Artist Police

By Vicki Hughes Posted March 14, 2013

Part of being creative is doing something often enough to discover your own voice. Each of us has a voice so distinct, that they’ve invented very expensive equipment to discern it, much as they can read a fingerprint. Just as our vocal chords create a distinctive sound as we speak, our creative efforts also speak in their own voice. We need make no apology for that tone. It is what it is. Some have BIG BOLD voices, and others express themselves in the miniscule. Primary colors, or muted earth tones, everyone has their way.

It never surprises me to see how many painters there are in the world, or clothing designers, or movie directors. I know there’s such a wide variety of personal tastes out there to create a market or audience for nearly every style of those art-forms.

But until a short while ago, it hadn’t occurred to me how that is also true of writing, and books. I was at a local coffee shop, enjoying a latte, and my eyes ran over all the books on those shelves. Each of those books has it’s own particular readership. It dawned on me that I don’t have to write things that appeal to everyone! Lightbulb!

I have a particular style of writing that is a perfect fit for a certain style of reader, but it’s not for everyone. Even Harry Potter isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Painters like Picasso, Erik Wahl and Grandma Moses all appeal to a different group of art lovers. We should create what we like, what we want to share, and let the audience develop naturally.

There is a tribe for each of us, and our art-form (from painting, cooking, writing, gardening, needlepoint, building rat-rods or raising great kids.) Our creative efforts send out a vibration that resonates with the people who “get it.” We know because they nod their heads in agreement, saying, “Yes! Yes! That’s how I feel too!” That in turn, gives us greater confidence to continue, to try again, to face another blank canvas or a blank page, to risk it all again.

In my mind, people who put their own personal stamp on anything, can elevate it to an art-form. To be artistic is to go ahead and risk the exposure, to sign your name to your efforts, and own them. Artists constantly face their fear of doing it wrong, or imperfectly, or that they’ll be exposed as a total fraud. To some of us it is the greatest audacity to say, “I am a painter,” or “I am a writer,” or heaven forbid, “I am a fun, creative, loving mother.” We cringe back as if the Artist Police might pop out of the bushes, demanding, “Prove it!” Here’s a little secret. There are no Artist Police. That’s not to say there are no critics, because they exist everywhere, in every realm. But nobody is authorized to say who is an artist and who is not. You can’t afford to ignore your gifts for fear of a few critics. If some people can’t criticize your art, they will criticize your teeth or your car or your taste in Mexican restaurants. Trying to please those people will leave you curled up in the fetal position talking to the cat.

Move on, and do your thing, regardless. Let the critics criticize, because that’s what they do. We can’t change that. If you waste a bunch of time worrying about who is going to dislike your efforts, you’ll never get anything done. Speak in your own voice, whatever you do, and let your people show up, smiling and thrilled that you are their people too.

I remember being so inspired when I first discovered that Susan Branch didn’t even know she could draw until she was in her thirties! Here I was, looking at her books, in awe of her talent, as if she’d come out of the womb with those skills. But that’s not her story. She went through a sad divorce, and one day in the gloom of that reality, she picked up a pencil and drew something, and changed her life.

Sometimes we are very good at things we’ve never done before. That’s a great reason to try things as soon as possible, when the idea strikes. There’s really no way to know what we might excel at until we do a few things. This doesn’t apply to solely to crafty, traditionally artistic endeavors. Professional and personal efforts can reveal talents that we had no idea we possessed!

Sometimes we need to get unstuck by changing venues. Volunteer a half a day to work with a group of people you’d love to work with. Be teachable and helpful. You may have always worked in an office, but you’d love to work in a bakery, or you may have gotten bogged down in retail, but have a talent for working in the medical field. Sometimes it’s hard to picture ourselves in a completely different realm. The familiar can create it’s own orbit that seems to keep us circling the same old, same old.

Try something new, and branch out a little. Dip your toe into the water and see what you think. You don’t have to risk it all or go for broke. You are allowed to walk away if it’s not your bag. Maybe you will get so excited and inspired that you’ll completely change paths, or maybe you will discover something else you’re good at, which will give you some much needed momentum.

What would you like to try?

Salsa dancing
Snorkeling
Painting
Paper making
Graphic design
Pet grooming
Hair cutting
Stand-up comedy
DJ-ing
Gardening
Calligraphy
Poetry
Quilting
Book selling
Animal rescue
Weaving
Genealogy

Some fabulous full-time careers have been born out of a person discovering a talent they had previously left untapped. You’ll never know how good you might be at something until you try. You probably won’t be great when you first start, but if it’s something you truly enjoy, find a way to start a tiny habit so you can do it again, and again, and again. Repetition will help you gain new ideas and skills. Leo Babauta of www.zenhabits.net suggests starting the habit of flossing your teeth (which many people never seem to get around to) by just deciding to commit to flossing one tooth a day until the habit is established. It sounds like such a ridiculously small effort, it almost demands that we do it. Who can’t find time to floss one tooth?? How many habits do we fail to establish because we try to start too big, and bite off more than we can chew? You could draw one doodle a day, or sing one song, or be consistent with the kids on one thing, every day. Start small, and build from there, once you get the habit rolling.

When I bought some craft wire at Hobby Lobby and decided to try to make a pendant out of pieces of sea glass I’d collected at the bay, I wasn’t overly thrilled with my first attempts. I had no teacher, no books, just some raw materials and a couple YouTube videos, with the thought that it could be fun.

After several attempts, I discovered a few tricks, and then I accidentally made a couple pieces that I really liked. I couldn’t have duplicated them if you’d held me at knife-point. Slowly, I made a few more, and a few more, and the more I did, the more I learned, and the more I learned, the better my efforts got, and the better they got, the more I wanted to try. Now I have people who are special ordering jewelry from me!

Have you ever noticed how Mickey Mouse and Garfield today, look nothing like they did when they were first drawn? Why is that? The artist developed new skills, and developed new ideas about what they wanted to do with those skills. As we grow, so does our skill-set and the result we can achieve. As Anne Lamott says in Bird by Bird, it’s okay to have shitty first drafts. Everyone starts somewhere.

If you were going to give something a whirl, what would it be?

Undie Adjustment

By Vicki Hughes Posted March 12, 2013

To say that my husband has a thing for my butt would be like saying mice have a thing for cheese or moth’s for flames, or fat kids for cake. He simply cannot help himself. In nearly every photo or video he has produced in the twenty-eight years we’ve been together, you may rest assured my hind quarters will be included at some point.

Now that he has an iPhone I’ve grown increasingly paranoid. It’s just too easy to snap a candid photo. My only saving grace is that he is still very muddy about this fad they call the Internet and that wacky Facebook. If he ever gets a clue, I will need an app called “Remove My Ass” to put on his phone (he’d never know!)

I bring all this up to discuss one of my quirks, which is Undie Adjustment. When I get into bed at night, I like to sleep in either a light t-shirt or a nightie and my undies. He’s a commando guy. For the last twenty-eight years he has attempted to persuade me to do likewise, usually with a thinly veiled concern for my comfort, “You’d be so much cooler!” Uh huh.

I assure him, I am comfortable. The reason I’m comfortable is, I like my undies adjusted “just so,” where the elastic in the back is assigned a very particular spot in the hemisphere of my butt and I want them no higher and no lower. Like I said, it’s a quirk. So after I crawl in bed and wiggle around to appreciate the softness of the sheets and the fact that I have survived the day and been rewarded yet again with getting horizontal, I adjust my undies. I get them “just so” and for that moment in time, all is right with my world.

Which brings us back to mice and cheese and moths to flames. My husband and my ass. He is compelled to grope and examine it as soon as he gets in bed, and as you may have already guessed, this completely ruins my Undie Adjustment. The calibration becomes all caddy wompus and I lay there feeling like a jigsaw puzzle with three missing pieces. To his credit, he often tries to re-adjust them for me. But let’s face facts. Nobody else can adjust your undies for you. That might be the worst part of having no arms; never really getting your undies to your liking.

So we do the Undie Adjustment Dance almost nightly. I used to get mad. I’d say, “WHY do you have to DO that!?” Why indeed. Have you ever met a mouse? A moth perhaps? Mice have an uncontrollable urge for cheese, even when it is perched upon a steel trap. Moths beat themselves silly against hot lightbulbs and singe their wings in candle flames. It’s what they do. There’s really no point in getting mad about it.

I’ve learned to adapt. I let him have his nightly fun re-arranging my undies and then when the festivities are over I put everything back where it belongs. That’s how love works. I happen to know there are parts of his world that I have, on rare occasions, disrupted. Of course I only do it because it makes perfect sense to me.

I have a thing for putting his water glasses in the dishwasher. He drinks a lot of water. I find his glasses all over, and I assume (wrongly) that he is done with them. I put them in the dishwasher, where they belong, and then he gets parched searching for the glass he was sipping from only moments before I “hid” it in the dishwasher. This is somehow annoying to him, in spite of how obviously helpful it is.

We torment each other in these amazingly predictable and odd ways, and it’s somehow become the weird glue that’s made us stick. Occasionally one of us has a bad day and freaks out over the undies or the water glasses in life, demanding that the other one reform immediately. But then we laugh at the same jokes, recite the same lines from a favorite movie, or roll our eyes in ecstasy over really good blue cheese, and we decide to cut each other the tiniest bit of slack. The fact is, we aren’t going to change each other. Of course it doesn’t stop us from launching a try now and then, but really, twenty eight years is long enough to conclude that a track record has been established . You shrug, you kiss, you move on.

Why I’m Hell-Bent On Happy

Circle The Wagons!

By Vicki Hughes Posted March 11, 2013

hell-bent [hel-bent] adjective

Stubbornly or recklessly determined
Determined to do or achieve something

hap·py [hapē] adjective

Feeling or showing pleasure or contentment.
Having a sense of confidence in or satisfaction with (a person, arrangement, or situation)

Hell-bent and happy don’t usually hang out in the same sentence together. When I began to formulate the concept for Hell-bent On Happy, it came out of the recognition of a need. This phrase for me, captures the image of a dog with a meaty bone, determined to hang onto it.

We have to be committed to our happiness enough to learn how to power through the many and sundry obstacles, that I like to think of as the Asshats.

Asshats are simply circumstances and individuals, alone or in groups, who are counter-productive to experiencing joy, and the opposite of happiness. Perhaps you married one once. It happens. There are accidental Asshats, those who unknowingly participate in Asshat behavior, and sadly, I’ve been one of these on several occasions. But there is also a deeply devoted group of professionals. Professional Asshats who are not content to stay in their own company, and quietly carry on amongst themselves. They are zealous, and they recruit with fervor. They don’t think, “I’d like to be miserable, but it’s cool if you want to be happy.”

Misery doesn’t just like company, it likes crowds. It wants a huge mosh pit of cranky bastards to join into the fray. Us happy folk, we do like to hang around other happy people, but we need a bit of encouragement to get serious about it. Being happy and maintaining a sense of joy requires us to choose what we think and focus on. It calls into question three things:

How do we spend our time?
Who do we spend our time with?
How long do we spend time with them?

Happy people need the same hell-bent attitude towards their own happiness and well being that the Asshats seem to have for being and making others miserable. Both attitudes are contagious. I believe it’s a mistake to take our own happiness too casually, “Maybe I’ll work on it, maybe I won’t,” is not a philosophy for success. One of my mentors in life, Jim Rohn, said it so well. “Casualness leads to casualties.”

Being Hell-Bent On Happy gives me courage to speak up for myself and others who want to live a happy life. It reminds me that the Asshats don’t have all the power, or the right to spew their crap without a rebuttal. It gives me the bravery I need to call out the people who are militantly being a pain in the ass, or giving us all a twitch, and say, “We’re on a mission to be happy over here, and I think you’d fit better elsewhere!”

Whew! That made me nervous, just writing it! But it felt GOOD!

I had a similar experience at a business conference a few months ago. The conference was packed full of some of the best speakers I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard some of the great ones. One of the speakers was Marianne Williamson. This was a great opportunity, and I was really excited to hear her talk. Part of her excellent talk included the idea of approaching other people with the idea, “The love in me salutes the love in you.” I was jotting notes, and getting a lot out of it.

Unfortunately, just as she was getting into the meat of her presentation, the group of people immediately to my left and in front of me seemed to lose interest, and begin chatting amongst themselves, discussing where they would like to go for lunch at the break, and where they might go for dinner and lots of other Asshat behavior.

At first I simply found it irritating, and attempted to ignore it. But it soon became clear they were not about to shut up, and just yackity-yackity-yack about their own personal stuff. I lost my ability to strain forward to stay focused on the speaker.

By nature, I am not a confrontational person, and I don’t like confronting Asshats. They scare me a little. My nickname among my immediate family is The Nice Lady, because I’m usually so diplomatic! But my stress was going up, and the silent death threats I was sending these people were not getting through to them at all. Thankfully, some of the earlier speakers had driven home the importance of bravery, which I had taken to heart, and put on my own list of things to work on.

With a fearless glint in my eye, I scrawled in my notebook, “The talker in me salutes the talker in you, but kindly shut the fuck up.” I seriously considered handing it to the Asshat on my left. I looked down at it and I realized I was so pissed off, it was nearly illegible, and there was already enough talking going on, I didn’t want to have to explain!

So I leaned over, made intense eye contact with the Lead Asshat and said in a stage whisper, “I can’t hear the speaker because YOU are talking!” She got a funny, pinched look on her face, but lo and behold, she and all her Asshat friends shut the fuck up! I could feel the quiet people all around me doing a little victory fist-pump for all the folks in our section who were spending time and money to actually hear the speakers.

Sometimes to defend happiness, joy and other valuable virtues, you have to step out of your “nice” comfort zone. In my case, being Hell-Bent On Happy means developing a tolerance for a little more confrontation when necessary, to defend my happiness. A joyful life cannot flourish and grow in a toxic environment. I’m the person in charge of creating and managing my own environment. I’m a big girl now.

Hell-Bent On Happy People have to be okay with not being everyone’s cup of tea 24/7. You can’t be happy hanging around a band of Asshats. Either happiness is important enough to give some of our time and attention to, or it’s not. Hell-Bent On Happy People are stubbornly determined to be happy, experiment with bravery, join forces with other Hell-Bent On Happy people and to learn how to defend it when neccessary. Circle the wagons! The Asshats are coming!

Five Tricks For Overcoming Little Annoying Crap

You try and try, but they keep showing up.

By Vicki Hughes Posted March 10, 2013

Little annoying crap has the power to suck the joy right out of an otherwise lovely day. We’ve all done it; The client who no-shows, the person in front of us, who spaces out, and makes us miss our big shot at getting through the light before it turns red, the bill we thought we mailed , discovered when we pull down the sun visor to put on our lipstick. Little. Annoying. Crap.

Everyone has it.

The real problem comes in when we start giving it our undivided attention. We go from being stuck in traffic, to thinking our boss is an idiot, to thinking we will never get out of debt, to lamenting the complete deterioration of Western Civilization because everyone sucks.

Whoa! It’s just a traffic jam! It might be keeping you from a head on collision, or helping you miss the creepy (Did he just sniff me??) guy who likes to follow you too closely when you get out of the elevator.

Chill.

I have found a few little tactics I like to use when I feel myself boarding the Teeth Grinding Train.

1) Tell yourself this situation may be working to your advantage somehow. A traffic delay may save your life, or cause you to meet your new best friend, or find a fifty dollar bill on the sidewalk. If you can’t change it, choose to imagine something good coming from it.

2) Decide to be un-offendable. To do this, you can say, “It’s not me, it’s YOU!” I suggest in most cases, you do this silently. In other words, you remind yourself that the person making you feel bat-shit crazy is not doing it just to get under your skin. They would be doing or saying the same routine, no matter who was standing in your shoes. People do what they do because of who they are. Stop taking their actions so personally and remember; sometimes you’re the one driving people nuts.

3) Say to yourself, “Let’s just pretend that didn’t happen.” When you were five years old, you created countless new opportunities, futures and possibilities by pretending. You let your imagination do great things. You still can! I’m not talking about living in complete denial, I’m suggesting we choose to focus on what makes us happy instead of spinning out movie-length scenarios of how this one event is going to ruin our lives forever! When I say to myself, “Let’s just pretend that didn’t happen,” it frees up parts of my brain to notice things that are funny or inspirational or at the very least, neutral. Neutral thoughts are better than being dialed into the little annoying crap.

4) Distract yourself with something. Spending the weekend with a deaf uncle who blares the news 24/7? I suggest taking walks, offering to clean his birdfeeder, cooking some chili while plugging into your iPod and cranking your own tunes, or challenging him to a game of checkers. Distraction is a powerful tool. You can’t raise toddlers without it! Use it when you feel the Cranky Train leaving the station.

5) Don’t throw away the brownie because of a few annoying nuts. I’m not a nut person, but if you were to hand me a fudgy brownie with nuts, I would not be inclined to toss it in the trash. I would enjoy what I did like, and leave the rest. We can’t always guarantee that our brownies or our lives are nut-free, but we can choose to enjoy the sweet parts, and leave the rest.

Confessions of a Condiment Whore

This is just sad.

By Vicki Hughes Posted March 9, 2013

There’s nothing like packing up and moving your household to bring you face to face with your hoarding tendencies and housekeeping inadequacies. This past fall, in what I can only describe as The Bermuda Triangle of Bad Timing, I decided to move for the second time in two years, go on vacation, help our daughter move into the house we were vacating, and go out of state to get my mom to move her from Tennessee to Alabama, into the mother-in-law suite at our new house. It’s not stress that I like, it’s excessive stress.

All of this moving made me very aware of my foibles, quirks and assorted mental illnesses. I was faced with the damning reality that since 1986 I’d managed to transport a nearly empty tin of Safeway Allspice all over the United States, and not because I’m fond of kitchen antiques, but because I’m a Condiment Whore. In fact I’m a complete nutcase when it comes to spices, condiments, and anything pickled. I squirrel them away as if preparing for the coming Apocalypse of Seasonings.

This recent move once again confronted me with a can of hearts of palm that I can never seem to bring myself to add to a salad, “My God, what year did I buy that!?” I’m clearly incapable of throwing it away. Do you know what they want for hearts of palm? Using it is to risk ptomaine poisoning, but tossing it gives me the shivers. I have issues.

Our new house has a gorgeous stainless steel refrigerator, which is lovely to look at, but is significantly smaller than the typical requirements of a Condiment Whore. Would you like to guess from which side I inherited my food hoarding genes? Yes, from my mother…and we are now sharing a Barbie doll refrigerator. Yesterday we made the mistake of going grocery shopping together. We came out of the Piggly Wiggly as if we were each personally responsible for feeding the Pittsburg Steelers. What were we thinking? As we were loading things into the trunk I kept eyeballing her bags of groceries quietly thinking, “There better be room in that fridge for my Bud Light Chelada’s or her sour cream is getting the ax!”

A recently discovered challenge of having two women in the same house is that we both move things, but one of us moves the other’s stuff more. She KEEPS MOVING MY SHIT! I’ve nearly had a couple of breakdowns looking for, in no particular order: empty plastic shopping bags for dog poop duty, a wet Swiffer, maraschino cherries, horseradish, a plastic container for leftovers, tealights, and, God help me, my martini shaker.

After some very sweet quizzing on my part, I was taken to their maddeningly logical locations. Their new homes made perfect sense, but they were simply not where I saw them last. Coffee filters in the cabinet above the coffee maker? I thought they were fine sitting on the counter…Oh no. No, no, no. Logical.

Not only does she have a flair for putting things in logical order (spices, alphabetized “loosely” from left to right!) She is very neat. My husband and I are a bit neat-challenged. Or maybe I should say we have a higher threshold for the non-neat than she does. Either way, it’s a bit of an adjustment.

I have discovered things I truly didn’t know. The unsightly must be camouflaged. Electrical cords are the crazy relative in a Victorian novel, discretely kept out of sight. Everyone knows you have them, but nobody must ever see them. The plastic trashbag that lines the pedal-operated trashcan? It should be neatly folded over, into the can, in a tiny little cuff that can only be seen with a very high powered microscope. It matters not that my husband and I create a very American amount of trash every 24 hours, and this cuff-folding ritual will become a part time job for someone. Not me! I truly do not give a rat’s ass if the trashcan liner is visible on a trashcan. I’m pretty sure everyone knows there’s a trashbag in there. Why are our trashbags in the Witness Protection Program?

I kidded her the other day, saying I think she’s part squirrel, and everything is a nut to be hidden to her. I had no idea that daily living could have so many rules. Holy shit. For instance, did you know that used coffee filters and their grounds are to be thrown away before you leave the house, rather than the next morning when you’re ready to make more coffee? Me neither. File that away, you’re going to need it later.

The cushions for patio chairs need to be brought in nightly to protect them from the dew. This relentless attention to cushion maintenance may sound a bit extreme, but it also explains why the cushions she bought in 1994, when our daughter was five years old, look like brand new. I’ve bought a new set every year. You could safely perform open heart surgery on my Mom’s patio chair cushions. After a full summer of use, mine usually look like the reject pile after a trailer park yardsale. Sadly, I’m comfortable with my sloppy cushion behavior. I also admit that it’s oddly comforting when our now twenty-three year old daughter is sitting there on those same pristine cushions, sipping a mimosa on a Sunday afternoon. Comforting, and a little weird, like time travel to the nineties.

Adapting.That’s what we’re all doing. We’re learning to adjust to having three grown adults living with four dogs, and how we will manage to love and respect each other in spite of all our individual persnikitiness.

She whispers to me out of the side of her mouth, “I don’t know if you want to say anything to John, but MOST people wear shirts when they cook.”

Um, no. Actually I don’t think I will say a word, since he’s cooking in his own house. But your revulsion is duly noted! Dear God. I’m just thankful that he’s wearing shorts! When you’ve been married nearly thirty years to an Australian/Californian/Redneck carpenter, you have to expect a few etiquette adjustments. What he lacks in proper attire, I promise he makes up for in amazing BBQ chicken. It’s probably the mixture of marinades and dripping sweat that makes it special.

My Mom always compliments me on how easy going I am. I’m now starting to wonder if easy going is code for “sketchy low standards,” but I’m okay with it. My Mom is amazing. She is beyond accommodating, she wants everyone to be happy all the time, she offers to help me, and keeps the wheels of progress turning, preventing our new household from spiraling off into complete chaos.

When the adjustment period is all said and done, I may have to teach her the art of the perfect dirty martini. I’m sure she could make James Bond shed tears over the perfection of her martinis if only someone showed her the ropes. Then, when she asked me, “Is there anything I can do to help you?” I could say, “Shake it, Sister!” That’s help I need.

I know she’s intrigued with the whole martini thing. About a week after she moved in, we were in the kitchen together, and I’d mixed my nightly adult beverage. I poured it with a flourish into a blue martini glass. The frosty chilled edges just said, “This is wonderfulness in a glass.”

She looked furtively at me and asked quietly, “Do you mind if I taste it?” I smiled my evil genius smile and said, “Why, no. Go right ahead, but prepare yourself. I like booze in my booze. It’s boozy.” She took a tiny squirrel-sip and then coughed like Doris Day in a Rock Hudson movie. That will teach her to mess with my gin. I may have her condiment hoarding genes, but I got my Daddy’s drinking genes. I do not require my alcohol to taste like iced tea, a peppermint patty or a Snicker’s Bar. I eat my food, and I drink my drinks. But I am not opposed to a tiny snack in my drink, I mean, olives are condiments, and that’s how I roll.

Hellbent On Happy

Staying Positive and grateful in an imperfect world laced with random asshats