"This Train Is Bound For Glory" By Terry Mcmillian (FULL)

Direct response marketing - who knew?

Under the heading of “Old Dog Learning New Tricks” I am listening to a weekly internet broadcast called “Internet Marketing for Smart People Radio”. The link to each broadcast is sent to me by http://www.copyblogger.com/, to which I subscribe because they have great tips on business writing and sales writing and a number of other writing for money styles I am exploring. Currently, I am trying to master the basics of direct response marketing so when I launch that new money making website I keep dreaming about, I will actually make money.

Unlike mass media marketing (think of all the Coca Cola jingles you know) or direct marketing (a mailbox full of junk you didn’t ask for and intrusive calls by people you don’t know selling things you don’t want), direct response marketing tries to match a product with people who are actually interested in the product and who are willing to respond in some way to let the seller know they are interested. Sounds kind of civilized, doesn’t it?

To practice direct response marketing on your blog, you must include all sorts of things. Here are the six major Must Dos:

Direct response marketing tool #1: Speak with authority. That basically means know what you are talking about. I’m mostly talking about my life, so I’ve got that one down. Most of the time.

Direct response marketing tool #2: Be likeable. I am uncertain how to accomplish this. If you are my friend, you either like me or you are kind and if you aren’t my friend I guess you read this blog because I am going through some of the same things you are. Either way, this doesn’t seem like something I can cultivate.

Direct response marketing tool #3: Bring commitment and consistency to your blogging. Ooops. The consistency thing has not gone well so far. I’ve been too busy kidding myself that I can make a living at $15 an hour. For those of you who follow my woes as a free lance writer, you will be thrilled to see that this is up from $10 an hour…

Direct response marketing tool #4: Social proof. What a new century phrase that is! It means, get people who like what you write to tell other people about your blog so they will visit it and read other things that you write. The radio show today said you should ask people to do this, so I am now asking you to send this post and my blog site address (http://unedame.blogspot.com) to two other people. Then we will see what happens. I am also to ask you to “follow” the blog if you enjoy what I write. I am minding my teachers and asking! I even have a button for you to advertise the blog on Facebook and Twitter. Very mod of me.

Direct response marketing tool #5: Reciprocity. I am supposed to give you compelling content so that you will be interested in what I have to sell. Unfortunately, I have nothing to sell at present. If any of you have ideas to get the money rolling in, please feel free to comment! Meanwhile I will try to write compelling content.

Direct response marketing tool #6: Scarcity. I’m afraid I nodded off at this point and am not sure what it refers to. There is only one of me, so I can assure you I am scarce. Perhaps they were referring to the use of the old-fashioned “limited time offer”.

Now you know what I know about direct response marketing. I am serious about asking you what I could sell online. I love to write for myself, I have a lot of stories to tell, but I am so busy writing 500 word articles studded with key words for real estate sites, travel sites, and legal sites I am not squeezing out much for myself.

In the meantime, if you visit Copyblogger, be sure to tell them I gave them a plug!

It's been one of those weeks

Back in the day when my daughter was about five years old, I had a good friend with two girls, ages 5 and 7, who was trying to balance a career as an assistant district attorney with motherhood and marriage. Her observation was that as long as everything went as planned, it was completely worth the effort, but if one thing went wrong, down went her carefully constructed house of cards. The “one thing” could be anything from a sick child to a husband’s out of town business trip to forgetting to do the laundry and having no clean socks. Those of you who have been there can relate.

We’ve had a spate of that “one thing” this past week and David and I are going glassy-eyed coping and trying to stay centered enough to know that it will all work itself out eventually. The downhill slide started Halloween weekend with a quick sailing trip to Offat’s Bayou. Offat’s Bayou is a really nice anchorage right behind Moody Gardens on Galveston Island. There is plenty of room to anchor out and a small marina for anyone who wants electricity. We’ve been down there only twice since we moved here, but enjoyed the trip tremendously both times. Weirdly, both trips involved stormy weather, but even the bad weather was fun because 1) it was warm weather, 2) we know the waters around here really well, and 3) Raven sails wonderfully regardless of the weather. We joined some other Cape Dory owners on the trip, had a dockside party, and enjoyed ourselves very much.

Unfortunately on the way home things began to unravel. David started sneezing and coughing with a bad cold and Hobbes, the cat, peed all over the settee, which was completely out of character for him. Then as we approached Redfish Island, the exhaust coupling sheared off, filling the cabin with diesel smoke! We turned off the motor and sailed in toward the channel on 22 knot winds with no problem, but called Tow Boat U.S. for a tow down Kemah channel to our slip. The next day it was clear Hobbes was in a bad way, having peed all over his bed and not even moving to get out of it. The vet confirmed diabetes and dehydration and our very sick cat spent the next 5 days in the cat hospital. Now he is home, being hand fed, dosed with insulin, and placed periodically in the cat box, since he is still very wobbly on his pins. In the meantime, David suffered through his cold and then generously shared it with me. I am still hacking, but better.

The cabin is a wreck. I haven’t given it a good cleaning since before the Offat’s Bayou trip. There are piles of clothing and mislaid boxes on one side, bare wood on the other settee since we had to take out the one the cat peed on and haven’t had it cleaned yet, and a third of the cabin sole is walled off by seat cushions to make a “cage” for the cat. Meantime I cower at the nav station trying to earn enough to pay the vet bill. Even as reasonable as the vet was (very reasonable, considering all the time and care they gave Hobbes), it was $700 at the end of the day, which consumed every dime I made this week.

So. We are very, very tired and feel as though we are truly living a Matrix-like life on a real Nebuchadnezzar. I have always sympathized with Cipher and for today at least I wish I were plugged back in eating a phantom piece of steak.

Work Lessons

I’ve been floundering in the sea of self-employment for about four years now. The good news is, I have stayed afloat and I am learning how to swim. Here are four hard-earned lessons self-employment has taught me:

1. Don’t take it personally. When my services are not chosen, it can feel as though I have been personally rejected. I finally realized that my services are pretty much like a widget on a shelf. If a potential buyer is looking for a widget, the buyer will pick me up and examine me. I’m red, but the buyer wants blue. I am 120 volt, but the buyer wants 220. I am 2” in diameter, but the buyer wants 2.5” in diameter. The buyer puts me down and picks up another widget. There’s nothing wrong with a red, 120 volt, 2” widget. It’s just not what the buyer wants. Note to self: it is not all about me.

2. Face mistakes and learn from them. It’s easy for me to cringe when faced with my mistakes. Looking back, they seem so obvious. Most of them stem from impatience or fatigue or carelessness or misunderstanding. Most of them could have been avoided, if I had just paid attention. It’s very unpleasant for me to realize I have cost myself a job because of a character flaw or oversight. But that unpleasantness causes me to be much more aware the next time I am in a similar situation, and eventually those mistakes teach me to take a different and successful approach. Note to self: pay attention.

3. If you aren’t the right price, they aren’t going to buy you. Back to the store: it doesn’t matter if I could get $35/hr in 1990. It’s not 1990. I can price myself at $35/hr all day long, but unless the market will bear it, I won’t get it. I’m the same type of buyer: I am absolutely not going to pay $4 a roll for paper towels when I can get them for $2.50. Note to self: price to the market.

4. If you don’t have the right skills, they aren’t going to buy you. Not only do you have to have the right skills, buyers have to know your skills are desirable and worth paying for. That’s why tech skills sell so much better than language arts skills. Most English speaking people (myself included) think they speak and write terrific English, whether they do or not. Most people who don’t speak English as a native tongue know they need help with their text, but really have no way of knowing whether your English is terrific or not. By contrast, everyone knows whether or not they have tech skills and everyone knows they are worth paying for. Note to self: get more tech skills.

Temping has a new face

When we first arrived back in Texas, I knew what I wanted to do: I wanted to temp. I liked the idea of working for a company for a few days, a few weeks, or a few months, and then moving on. Temping seemed to offer a perpetual honeymoon with any employer, that shiny new period when work is interesting, people are polite, and office politics and company viability aren’t things you have to deal with.

To my dismay, I discovered that temping, as I defined it, no longer existed. Instead of interviewing with the temp company and then being sent out on assignment, I found that most jobs being offered were temp to hire. Naturally, since they were looking for a long term employee, those companies wanted someone with more experience and background than I had. I have plenty of experience and background, but it’s all language skills and legal-niche experience and background; there just aren’t all that many legal firms looking to hire an estate planning paralegal on a temporary basis. As you would expect, nobody called. What to do?

A friend of mine called me about online work and directed me to a site called oDesk. That’s where all the temps had gone - online! Since finding oDesk, I have also found a site called Elance, and I’m sure there are others. To get started, I posted a profile, set an hourly rate, and started scouring the jobs listing. Jobs were listed in every sort of category. Thankfully, “technical writing” was one of them!

Potential employers from all parts of the globe post job notices for everything from copywriting to SEO to blog posting. The jobs are short term, long term, and everything in between. Most of the pay rates are laughable (paying less than $5 an hour, and obviously targeted to the third world) and some of the job descriptions are questionable, but there are enough reasonable offers to keep me fairly busy.

As time goes on, I am accumulating a whole new set of skills – not my work skills, but my skills in managing my time and dealing with employers from all walks of life. Many of my clients speak shaky English (granted, they speak much better English than I speak Arabic or Russian, etc.) and have different mores. I have made lots of mistakes, but I learn from each mistake. I am learning not to take rejection personally (I hit on about 1 out of every 20 applications) and I am learning what new skills are in demand.

I like working online. There are some drawbacks, like the fact that my office is the boat cabin, and the fact that I spend one to three hours a day applying for jobs rather than working. But it’s great to be temping, just as I expected.

Telling Stories

I subscribe to a dot com that is written for bloggers and other professional writers. Today’s update was somewhat unexpected. The message was about a forthcoming book that will focus on stories of political oppression in Burma. The point of the article was that here in the western world, for the moment anyway, we blog with impunity while the Burmese who blog do so at their own risk. Yet, at the risk of their lives, they struggle to tell their stories. Why do they take the risk?

Telling stories, whether about the clan or the individual, fact or fiction, is an ancient and universal human activity. I am fascinated with the act of storytelling, with the connection forged between tale-teller and audience, with the transformative power of narrative. We tell stories over the phone, on the porch, at funerals and weddings, in books and on blogs, in movies and in song lyrics, even in our advertisements. We tell our tales to our spouses, our children, our friends, and our casual acquaintances, to unseen audiences and corporate entities. Stories make connections among us. Stories are arguably the source of all art – an art form that does not make a connection doesn’t last long.

The stories we love best are the ones that give us a glimpse into our own lives. Think how the pleasure of hearing about someone’s vacation trip is increased when we’ve been there, too. When we add our stories to theirs, we enter into dialogue, enjoying the opportunity to mix and match our experiences. We can enter into dialogue with current acquaintances, or, through the power of the written word or film, with people in distant lands and distant times. We come away from those conversations satisfied, content, and affirmed.

In the context of storytelling, social networking begins to make sense. In our tweets and Facebook entries, in our blog posts and emails, each of us reaches out to everyone else, to tell our stories and to listen to the stories others share with us.

Some stories are hard to hear: stories of pain and death and disappointment, stories of sorrow and regret, of abandonment and loss. But when we allow others to tell us those stories, we give the gift of presence and compassion. When we truly listen to painful stories, we help the tale bearer shoulder the load and we give the relief of being heard. When we are heard, we can begin to heal. Ask anyone who has suffered through a divorce and whose friends picked up the phone to listen, over and over again.

Perhaps that is why some of the Burmese people take the risk of sharing their stories with the rest of us. They may want to educate or inform, but most of all they want to connect, to let all of us know what is happening in their lives. Theirs are the painful stories, the ones that heal when they are told.

The Hood

Boaters tend to walk up and down the docks and visit with each other the way I remember the grown ups walking up and down the street in the evening when I was a child. I think it has to do with the lack of a private drive; to get to your boat, you have to walk down the dock. As you wander by, everyone who is out says hi and stops to chat, offers you a cold drink, asks you if you have this or that widget, if you know how to fix this or that broken whatsit, or if you’re going out (on the bay) this weekend.

Liveaboards range from young families with children to oldsters whose bodies and boats are decaying at about the same rate. Among our acquaintances who are actively working while living aboard are two canvas makers, a hotel builder, a boat salesman, a teacher, a hospital worker, an IT contractor, a trial lawyer, and a jewelry maker. Among those who no longer work are those who want to cruise, those who like to sail the bay, those who haven’t got a clue, those who’ve just returned from cruising, and those who just like to sit on the stern of their boats every evening and watch the world go by.

There’s not much privacy in our little world, because everyone knows someone else, everyone has a story to tell, and when you tell your friends, they tell their friends, and pretty soon the entire marina knows and enjoys your saga. Of course, every story gets better if properly embellished. If yours is dull, it will be fixed.

There’s the foreign fellow who has been told in no uncertain terms by the INS that his visa has reached its sell-by date. Because of his age, he needs crew in order to leave. Evidently he is so incredibly irascible, no crew has made it past Galveston without jumping ship. I’ve never met him, but when I’m out walking the dog and he peddles by on his bike, we wave.

Then there’s the oldster who, although pretty much blind and deaf, set to sea for Mexico some months back. The coast guard returned him to our shores, boatless. His friends organized a boat rescue, set off for mid-Gulf, and returned towing his home. He is now busily engaged in fixing the damage he sustained and making plans to leave again. No one is worried. There are folks around here who have been fixing up their boats for ten years and aren’t close to leaving. No one minds; it’s the dreams that count.

In search of glass or wood or paper or cardboard or...

According to a friend of mine who is a chemist, plastic begins to react with food in a matter of minutes, meaning that food becomes contaminated with greater or lesser quantities of chemicals, depending on the food, the temperature, and the type of plastic used to make the container.

Minute amounts of these substances, if not eliminated from the body, will build up over time. What may not be toxic in small doses or eaten a few times may cause harm in larger quantities or when eaten over a period of years. We don’t know what health conditions, if any, different levels of different chemicals may produce or inhibit. Did you know that arsenic used to be a beauty treatment (it gave you lovely skin)? Then it was discovered that the body does not eliminate arsenic. It just builds up to that final, fatal dose. Terminal beauty, indeed.

Since these questions are of concern to me, I decided to quit buying food in plastic. After some weeks of grocery shopping with this in mind, I have to tell you I am shocked at my lack of choices. Try to buy food not wrapped in plastic! Even when I buy fresh produce from the bins, I have to put it in plastic bags. The only cheese I could find that wasn’t wrapped in plastic was Edam, still cheerfully packaged in red wax, or Laughing Cow, its neat little triangles wrapped in foil paper.

Consider bottled water. It sits in plastic for days or weeks waiting to be consumed, and it sits mostly in warehouses and on grocery store shelves, not in a refrigerator. I decided to buy Perrier, which I remembered comes in glass. I found that even Perrier has a plastic option – and that is the only Perrier option in Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer.

I decided to store food in glass and was amazed at the prices I was asked to pay (and all the glass storage containers have – you guessed it – plastic lids). So I went back to my old practice of saving good jars for leftovers and buying only a few of the nicer glass storage containers for use in the microwave or for those leftovers that need to be frozen. Peanut butter jars and spaghetti sauce jars with wide lids and the squat little salsa jars make great storage containers for leftovers – and they’re free!

I have found that it is possible to decrease my exposure to plastic contamination, but I have to be persistent and inventive. To eliminate plastic containers from my life I’ll have to move to another country!

Plastic, plastic everywhere

I remember laughing at a line in The Graduate, many years ago. The hero, Benjamin, is home from college and is trying to get a handle on life. His home life is absurd, his parents are absurd, his future is murky, and he is surrounded by people who all seem to be as alien as Martians. At his graduation party, Benjamin is cornered by an inebriated guest and told that the secret to life is plastic. It was a great joke and I laughed, taking it as yet another comment by Mike Nichols on the absurdity of the society we live in. Now, of course, I see what that advice was about – the guest was telling Benjamin how to get rich.

Plastic, in the late 60s, was the coming thing. It was cheap, indestructible, and could be molded into any shape you could dream of. No longer would you break your shampoo bottle in the shower if you dropped it. America was sold.

What did we do before plastic bags? We put produce into small paper bags. We put our accumulated purchases in large paper bags. We reused those bags all the time – to take out trash, to wrap parcels, to line cake tins, to make hand puppets, to line the kitty box and the bird cage. And when they were discarded, they rotted (moist paper in a land fill decomposes in a matter of weeks). We had cardboard boxes, glass bottles, and wooden crates.

Now, over 40 years later, plastic is ubiquitous. It remains cheap, indestructible, and incredibly versatile. There are a lot of issues with respect to its use (pollution, land fill, the ever expanding “continent” of floating plastic in the ocean, the fact that, in general, it takes 1,000 – yes, one thousand – years for it to disintegrate, etc.) but we’ll leave those issues for wiser heads.

What concerns me in this particular blog is the fact that we may be poisoning ourselves by buying and storing food in plastic. I’ve known for a long time that I shouldn’t microwave food in a plastic container or put hot food into a plastic container that’s headed for the fridge. For years I’ve refused to buy milk in plastic containers because the milk just tastes funny.

What I didn’t know is that the chemicals in plastic begin to react with food stored in it in a matter of minutes, regardless of the temperature of the food or drink.

Online Work is Working Out

I have to report a crashing lack of interest in my grant-writing career. It sprang up, flourished in the zero-oxygen world of non-profits for a brief moment, and died of exhaustion. I simply stopped getting up, dressing up, and showing up, which pretty much put a bullet in the head of my ambition.

Face it – I have a very small amount of ambition for anything that becomes tedious, and seeking grant writing opportunities became tedious fairly quickly. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but I wither fairly quickly without encouragement, and I got very little encouragement in this endeavor. I put it all back on myself. I’m just not someone who thrives on meeting and talking with people. In fact, it wears me out in a hurry.

So I decided to axe the people part of technical writing and just do the writing. I haven’t made much, but I’ve made 100% more than I did at grant writing!

There are days, like today, when I spend far too much time indoors, at the keyboard. I have been below this entire day, ignoring pathetic looks from the dog and my own eye strain as I apply, apply, apply for writing jobs on the internet. I just finished a series for a friend’s new magazine and sent those off. She likes the articles, which is great, but they’re freebies. Great practice, no money. My hit rate online is now about one in 20, which overall isn’t the worst. The money has, finally, begun to increase. If I can just be patient. If I can just trust that this is, finally, the forum that best suits my talents.

The wonderful thing about working online is the fact that I communicate almost entirely by the written word. I don’t have to hurdle the obstacles of age or physical appearance, nor do I have to appear sprightly, competent, and grateful for employment. I’m not much good at any of that. Of course the bad news is that to date the gigs don’t pay much and they don’t take long to do.

I have finally started exploring other online writing options as well. What on earth takes me so long to move out of my comfort zone? I guess it’s like anything else – I have to be miserable enough to take that leap.

I have got to walk that dog.

Gluten allergy causes depression?!

I've had a good week, thanks, I think, to chemicals ingested. I discovered this past summer that an intolerance to gluten was responsible for my periodic deep depressions, into which no light could shine. Within a week of eliminating all forms of gluten (and they are legion) from my diet, I popped out of a three month depression and could move forward. The next psychological toxin to take hold was anxiety. Granted, I have a lot to be anxious about, personally, professionally, and as an inhabitant of this world, but my anxiety was such that all I could do was stand in the metaphorical road bleating in terror. I hardly accomplished anything at all between bursts of existential terror. Then I read somewhere that a magnesium deficiency could cause anxiety so I bought a calcium-magnesium chewable. Next I discovered a homeopathic remedy in Kroger, of all places, for "stress due to work." About three days into these two remedies, the anxiety peeled away. All the rational causes for my anxiety are still with me, but the anxiety itself is either absent or so reduced I hardly notice it. The result? I am able to move forward.

I've finished my website (www.funding-finder.com), I have three clients (no money, just three clients), and have started to connect to a whole group of people, to have conversations and do work that matters to me and generally to feel a part of something again. I have actually made a friend in the area, and what a blessing that is! Like a dog that turns around three times before settling in for the night, I am scratching my blanket and beginning to settle into my life here.

Sharing a few fears

My bright idea when I started this blog was to do a little therapy for myself by writing down my struggles and successes and insights as I slog through the last half of my 50s and beyond. I know there are people out there who share the same frustrations and joys. Lately, however, there have been so many frustrations! I hesitated to share only the bad stuff, but I seem to be drowning in bad attitude these days.

My loudest problem is my failure thus far to earn my keep. I got hired as a paralegal last fall (my profession for over 20 years before we left on our adventures) and I was more or less happily resigned to working at that for another 10years, until Social Security and Medicare kicked in. Then I was fired. What a blow that was! Not only that, but since it was in the 90 day no-fault period, they wouldn't even tell me why.

It was such a huge rejection, I have just been stunned, paralyzed, and completely unhorsed. I know, rationally, that I have the same talents and skills I have always had, but it took me two years to get that interview (and I only got it because of a friend) and then - wham.

I have started several businesses over the last three years and none of them has produced much income. I do good work, but have a heck of a time marketing my services. My current attempt is grant writing. So far I have one client - for no pay (it is, after all, my first professional effort).

Every day, including today, I have to take a deep breath and put myself out in the world and put a lid on the voices in my head that tell me failure is just around the next bend. I keep trying to remember all those inspirational stories about Abraham Lincoln and others who made failure an art form until they finally hit on the right path. May this be it! I am running out of money, time, and courage.

Wisdom initiation

January 8, 2010

David and I had a wonderful discussion this morning, based on reading I did last night in Richard Rohr’s book “Adam’s Return.” Rohr was talking about the necessity for initiation in attaining wisdom. I read that as experiencing an ego death.

Based on reading I have done, ego is absolutely necessary for the development of a healthy psyche. The picture I have is of scaffolding that surrounds a building. The scaffolding is necessary while the building is being built. It’s sort of an exo-skeleton. But once the building is built and the mortar is set, the scaffolding is no longer needed and it is dismantled. The building stands alone. However, the scaffolding has been a part of the building from the beginning. To someone who doesn’t know the process, it would look as though part of the building itself was being dismantled.

To wrench that metaphor into human experience, when the ego is no longer necessary to hold up the building, it needs to be dismantled. However, since the ego has been with me from the beginning, I think of it as being an integral part of myself, rather than as a building aid. Therefore dismantling it (which is done gently, not with dynamite) is scary and painful to me. I don’t realize that the ego is not me, but simply a tool given to me to use, just like my mind and my emotions. It takes time to realize that I am not my mind, not my emotions, that they are parts of my human experience, but not my essence. They are wonderful tools, and terrible masters.

David and I discussed whether we had suffered the shamanic death of initiation. Both of us agreed that our divorce experiences had been that. I went into that experience as one person, and came out on the other side a different person. My next question was whether we experience more than one initiation, and I think that answer is yes – there are big ones and small ones. All my initiations involved “giving up” what I thought was essential.

Going to school - I gave up my family and its security
Going to France - I gave up my country, my language, and my customs and that security
Getting married - I gave up my freedom to act only in my best interests; I CRIED on my wedding night, I was so upset to be losing “me” and so afraid to trust
Having a baby - Talk about giving up freedom!!!
Getting divorced - I gave up my hopes and dreams for our future; I gave up my innocent trust
Being a single mom - I gave up my interests for the interests of my daughter

Each release was painful because of my fear and lack of trust and blindness, but each release brought such joy! To revisit my list:

Going to school – I made friends, I learned to read, I gained independence
Going to France – I got to travel, I learned a language, I gained independence
Getting married – I made a life, I lived with my best friend, I experienced being loved for the first time, I learned to cook, all of which was joyous
Having a baby – her every breath was my joy
Getting divorced – I learned who I was and how far I could be pushed, I owned my strength, I enjoyed my freedom, I discovered spiritual paths that deeply nourished me
Being a single mom – I enjoyed every second of being a mother to my daughter; in addition to that, parenting gave me focus and purpose

I think I can count remarriage to David as an initiation experience, even though it was very peaceful for me. Since our marriage, the theme continues to be to part with what gives me security, to part with things, to part with people, to part with the known.

I am currently struggling with letting go of possessions. I have to remember that regardless of the amount of fear and pain I manufacture when I let go of something, every letting go brings amazing relief and joy and freedom. Right now, my letting go centers on my possessions in storage. If we would get rid of all of that, we would be free to live without jobs for the rest of our lives. We would have to live incredibly modestly, but we could do it.

Bit by bit, I am able to release my possessions, but it is a very slow process. Mostly I clutch each item as though it were essential to my next breath. Only time seems to weaken the psychic bonds to my “stuff.” I finally gave away about 3 bags of clothes a couple of months ago and didn’t feel any attachment at all. This was true even though many were outfits that were connected to hugely important events or periods in my life, which is how they escaped the first cull six years ago.

Although I grieve each parting to some extent, I rejoice in how light I feel as each thing is released.

Here’s the kicker – the last thing I will release is my body and my life. What will the upside to that be?

I have no idea how people write short posts.

When Plans Fail - Get a New Plan

Things are not turning out as planned. In fact, plans are not turning out as planned. The former plan was that we would leave corporate jobs for the Great Unknown and that somehow, Oprah-like, a new life would fall into place. Well, a new life has tumbled into place, somewhat like an avalanche of scree, but it hasn't been Oprah-like. You know, follow your heart and all the doors will open.

Here was (is) my agenda: I wanted a stress free job in a small community. I wanted no commute, so I could make dinner before 7 p.m. I wanted to know my neighbors and have a group of friends to have over for dinner or to go camping with. I wanted some meaningful involvement in the community in which I lived, which would be small enough that my involvement would actually blip the radar. I wanted enough money to pay the bills. I wanted to live close to my daughter and be part of her everyday life.

Here is what I got: I got a series of employment efforts (non-profit manager, free lance writer, real estate agent, professional organizer, estate administrator, personal assistant) that paid little or nothing and into which I put a tremendous amount of effort (and stressed myself out, each and every time, trying to translate effort into money). I got no commute, but I ended up travelling about 28,000 miles in trailers and on this boat and made a series of acquaintences but only one long term friendships. I have blipped no radars on any subject. I continue to watch a financial hemorrhage that has slowed but never stopped since I walked away from my 18 year job. My daughter lives in NY and I'm in Houston (after travelling over the years from Dallas to Brenham to Galveston to this boat, and on the boat from Galveston to Maine to the Bahamas to Corpus Christi, and somehow, unbelievably, to Houston).

I also got nights on an empty sea lit by a hundred million stars. I got brilliant sunrises, marshy coasts, ports of all descriptions, and the ability to set an anchor. I got an intimate knowledge of small spaces and came face to face with my material lust. I learned what I could do without and I learned what I have to have.

Now I am sitting at the dock in my magic boat with my husband, my almost 14 year old dog and my almost 16 year old cat. My husband is working marine retail and I have worked at Wal Mart and been fired for the first time in my life after trying to re-enter my past profession. I have no idea what I am doing. I am in the middle of reinventing myself 3 years shy of my 60th birthday.

Stay tuned.