Things I loved

Here are some stickers I collected as a kid. I was sticker crazy! These are the smelly ones. The grape still smells like grape today.

I remember sending away for free stickers too. I have coca cola stickers in Hebrew which I thought was super cool at the time.

I found a lot of cat stickers, none for dogs. Hmmm.

Around 1986 I started to read Seventeen Magazine. I couldn't find a cover from that time so here's one from the 70's. I don't know if my mother threw out the box of my magazines I saved. I loved them and I loved fashion. I saved every dime I earned babysitting to buy clothes I wanted. It wasn't much at $2 an hour but I would always end up with one really nice outfit after many months.

Somewhere around college I lost the interest in all that and sleeping in and putting on my sweatpants and going out on the lawn to study seemed more important to me. I think my boyfriend had a lot of influence on that change. Looking back he probably loved changing that about me so that I was a bit less attractive to other men. Straight men aren't always the brightest...I went to a conservatory my first year, where we met and dated, and he was probably one of 10 non-gay men on campus. Oh well!

I moved to NY in 1991 after breaking it off with that fellow and for a long period of time all I can remember was trying to survive. I am racking my brain to remember what I loved at that period of time. Truth is that I can't think of a darn thing. I was very focused on school and working and not much else.

I adopted Olivia a few months after moving to NY and then six months after that I adopted Emily. I loved having those two silly girls. And while it is fun to have the kittens now, there will never be another two like them. It's just hard to explain.

After my break up with the only man I truly loved (completely different guy than the one from college), and then breakdown, I found karaoke. As someone who sang since she was three years old, first to Sesame Street, then to the records of the day that Mom would buy me, I saw this as my only hope to getting back to my normal self and off the floor. Somehow I found this couple who ran a very professional karaoke on Sunday nights at an Italian restaurant in the Village. The sound system was amazing. The singers that showed up were amazing and it was run like a show, not just some KJ who called your name and you sang and then he played some shitty records inbetween or sang all night mostly and barely called people up, like most hosts do. This was fun and like being at and in a Broadway show.

Going there once a week probably saved my life. It was the only thing I looked forward to doing and when I went I was welcomed and encouraged and made a lot of friends there. Yes, that IS me just a few years ago. Svelt from severe depression and posing with the fleet weekers who came in to sing with us.

The wife of the karaoke couple introduced me to India Arie's music which I found completely inspiring and eerily ironic because as it turns out, India Arie went through a similar man situation and spiritual awakening at the same time as me. I had never heard of this singer before being brought to her concert at the Beacon about two years ago, give or take, but much to my jaw dropping surprise, the songs she sang seemed to mimic exactly my very experience and many of the realizations I had just come to. The words to Can You Be A Part Of My Life are on the sidebar of my blog.

Today I love India Arie's music, reading spiritual books by Marianne Williamson and Eckart Tolle, Wayne Dyer etc...the color purple because beside white it is the highest color on the energy scale spiritually, my kitty cats, walking in the park, sushi, helping to bring babies into the world, the show Weeds, my passion for Israel, going to a live baseball game -preferably the Yankees, and well....

Well, I don't know what else. I wish I did. And that's what I will be working on figuring out this year.