Laughing...at myself..

Yesterday I woke up on the wrong side of the bed…
Yes, even Ms. Positive has those moments……
Two or three times a year, I will revel in my own mess…
It shores me up for the other times….
Anyway…

Yesterday was a good day for darkness…
It was cold outside…31 degrees in Florida…
President’s Day…
I was home alone…and could revel without an audience…
And I can usually only sustain my madness for a few hours…
So…I made the mistake of checking for book sales with my distributor…
Big mistake…
Someone had returned a book…
The room got even darker…
I was never going to write again…
I was done…writing was a waste of time…shoot I could already afford shoes and Starbucks…
How dare they…
I didn’t need this mess…

The day went on…
Things got a bit brighter…but my butt
Was still on my shoulder…
Rrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiingggggggg.
“Hullo…”
“Hi, is this Angelia, acVernon Menchan? The author I met at ZORA…”
“Hmmmph…I guess they are now calling me to return my books now…”
“Yes it is…”
“Well, Ms. Menchan, my book club would like to purchase your first and your second books for our club…that way we will be prepared for you third book when it comes out in April…”
“Okay…”
“Yes, ma’am I really enjoyed meeting you and I talked to my friend, who’d read your books and she was so touched by them. I presented the idea to my club and they are so ready to read your work.” Sunshine was peeking through still closed blinds…
“Okay, what do you want me to do?”
“Just tell us you will come to our discussion, tell me how to order the books and we will do the rest.”
“I will come…”
“You will?”
“Yes indeed and thanks, you can’t know how much this means, especially today…”
“Well it means a lot to us as well…”
“Thanks…” Doing the cabbage patch to the lyrics in my head, “It’s a bright, bright, sunshiney day…
acVernon Menchan
02/20/2007

Failing Forward...

We often see failure as this complete breakdown…
A total embarrassment…
Oh My God…what will people think?
What I discovered early on is that we all fail…
The key is to fail forward…
Fail Forward?
Yes…that’s what I said…
Fail Forward…
What that means to me is when things go wrong…
Don’t wallow, don’t give up…just move forward…
You can cry a bit…but only for a minute…
The writing game is absolutely a way to fail forward…
Any of us who has written a thing…
Knows this…we will be glorifying in our success…
Then along will come something…
Lack of book sales, lack of support, withering reviews…
But instead of getting out of the game...
We buckle down…sharpen our pencils…
Write again…
Get better…better…better…
Show them, “That’s What Up…
It has been said that the best way to show them…
Is to succeed…
Well the best way to show ourselves may just be…
To fail…forward…because what we gain is an appreciation for the…
Real successes…and a preparation for the next failure….because we
Know it will propel us forward…
At your marks, get set…
acVernon Menchan
02/15/2007

EXPECTATIONS...

Expectations….

How many women are waiting expectantly for her man to get her the perfect gift today…
Quite a few I’m sure…
I have seen this for years…
Whether I was living in the south, the north, Hawaii, Europe, wherever…
Women are anxiously awaiting their man to do the right thing…if only today…bring the roses, the candy, the perfume…please don’t forget…
I am married to a man who has never forgotten Valentine’s Day, Birthday, Anniversary Day…and that’s quite feat, considering a marriage of 28+years…when we wake up on the morning of whatever day…that’s when we celebrate….not at the end of the day…when it’s almost done…that way we can spend our day knowing we love and are loved…
Does that make me special?
Or him special?
Of course it does but only to us…
The less romantic truth is that we tell each other what we want…
Each of us reminds the other of important things…
We don’t play games…
Because when you play games…no one gets what they want or what they need…
This is not only true on Valentine’s Day but of many things…
Tell him what pleases you…don’t fake anything….life is too short for that and it leaves you unsatisfied and him confused….
When you go off or complain about something he hasn’t done…
When he’d never done it before…
One of the things that has allowed my marriage to endure is we allow the other to do…
What the other is best at…no weirdness about gender roles…
We just want the work done…
So at the end of the day…
We can be about the business of…
Loving, living, laughing…

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY…
acVernon Menchan

Knowing when to say when...

Knowing when to say when is vital, a friend and I have completed our friendship…
Sounds crazy, doesn’t it …but it’s not…we’d spent a couple years trying so hard to be friends…for me it was not saying many things, and having to not say things was hard, when the truth would have set us both free…
The end of 2006 found me incapable of the superficial…
Social masturbation, if you will…
I was cleaning out my closets, everything in there that didn’t fit had to go…
It was tough, I really like her…
There just wasn’t a thing to sustain us…
No real commonality…just hoping and arbitrarily using the word friend…without the heart or intimacy to back it up…relationship of convenience…who is zooming whom?

For the past couple months, we’ve had a couple of conversations…
Sound bites really…we are both busy women…I was done with trying to fit square pegs in round holes…I’d actually told her this…thought she understood…

Today she stood at my door, asking questions about things I would have automatically talked to her about before…
I felt her grasping for a connection…she had some time on her hands…
I was unable to connect, I had flown away…I felt a bit sad…but greatly relieved…because she had told me…more than once…
“I don’t have times for friends. I barely have time for myself…I’m a busy woman, I work people in when I can…”
I hadn’t listened, not at first, but now I got it…
Real friends always have time for friends…
Even when it’s not convenient, we make ourselves available…
Especially when we know the day will come when we will…
Need a friend…

acVernon Menchan