nakedjen

And Now A Word From Our Creator

I am surrounded by shoes and more shoes (enough, certainly, to shoe the entire population of small children in Australia) and boxes and more boxes and honestly I don't know what possessed me to move house?  Oh wait.  Yes, I do.  I really and truly do.  A better house in a better location with a fenced back yard for the dogs.  A yard so lovely that Stella literally did back flips last night.  I am not kidding.  My dogs have never had a fenced back yard in their three years on this planet.  Now they do.  And I'm never going to be able to move them to a home without a back yard again. 

I am back, as noted, from my journey away.  I want to share all about that journey and I've been writing that blog post in my head.  But at the moment I can not craft it the way it should be lovingly crafted, so it will have to wait. 

Instead, I have words.  From my creator.  Or at least 50% of my creator as there was a certain Emily Gilmore who was also involved in my creation, as we know.  I wrote to Albert last week to ask him his thoughts about the current financial mess.  And the Presidential election.  I did NOT call him, as he mentions, because I know he's fuming and when he fumes, he yells.  He tells me he is not yelling, but people in California can hear him without the use of any electronic devices while he is standing in Baltimore that is how loud the man is yelling.  I thought an email would be better.

Still, you may want to cover your ears.  I'm surprised it wasn't written in ALL CAPS.  Then again I'm surprised I got an email at all?!?   I'm sure he isn't exactly his daughter's father when it comes to being computer savvy.  I'll be back with my own words soon enough.  Just need to figure out where all these shoes are going to go!

Dear jen, yes I am glad you didn't call me because I am pretty mad. This is the end of the financial system in the U.S.A., as we know it. There is no way that we as taxpayers can afford this. We do not know how they are going to value these securities or what the under lying assets really are. This may have been the biggest ponzi scam ever pulled on the American public. The total value of the housing market in the United States is 10 trillion dollars, which would be the total assets that are secured by this debt. The total debt outstanding on this is 70 trillion dollars. Where in the hell is the other 60 trillion dollars. These are supposed to be securitized debt similar to a bond. When that asset is sold the debt should be retired with it. It would seem to me that it wasn't and all this group of mortgages became was a fee-generating fund for the banks. In other words the assets did not exist and thus fraud did. If we consider what type of fees were generated off of this take 2% of the total of 70 trillion dollars and it comes to 1 trillion 700 billion not a bad days work at your financial companies. Somebody should be going to jail. Now with congress getting involved we are going to have twice the mess. I feel they just made us all serfs that work to take care of other people’s theft while we must struggle with trying to keep our own heads above water. What w3e must do is vote out the entire U.S. congress and replace with people who have the American publics interest at heart and not getting re-elected or K streets interest. Any retirement funds that congress has coming to it should not be allowed because of their complete failure on the above and many others. That is all I have to say on the matter for now.      Jen there are spelling errors and other grammar mistakes in this, if you use please correct. I love you, DAD thanks this was fun will give you an answer on the presidential race as soon as I can figure out if either one has a solution to the U.S.A.'s problems. Will get into that in my next E-Mail. Love again DAD

This Is About

I just can't help but watch this ad and think that we haven't changed or learned many lessons at all. 

When will we learn?  When will we decide, as an American voting public, that we've truly had enough lies, enough deceit, enough war in our name, enough corporate greed and enough trashing of our planet?

I'm weary of this election and growing more disenchanted by the day. 

I want to be hopeful, but I get the sneaking suspicion a lot of us are headed for another big fat disappointment. 

Vote with your head and your heart.  Please.

Off

I promise I'll be back.  Soon.

Thank Goodness for Mormon Sisters With Temple Recommends

We're in metrograde.  It's a term my dear friend Shannon came up with to describe Mercury Retrograde.  And it doesn't surprise me that we entered it and all hell is breaking loose all over the globe.  And yes, people, I realize that Mercury Retrograde is mostly in my own imagination.  I get it.  But I also know that every single time we go into metrograde, well, shit hits the fan.

So is it any wonder that since we are in metrograde and since I know that when we are in metrograde any number of strange things can happen and will happen and certainly do happen that when I decided that perhaps I really did want a new place to lay my head at night, a new mailing address, a new roof over the puppies' heads, that I decided to pull out the major artillery? 

"Heather, it's Jennifer, is your mother there?"
"Um, no, she's at the Temple."
"She is?  Why?"
"She went to pray for your new house!  Didn't you ask her to do that?"
"Um, well, yes I did.  But I didn't think she'd really do it?!"
"Well, she did.  She's there.  She's praying so you'll get it."
"Heather, that's why I'm calling.  It must have really worked.  I got the house!"
"Whoo hoo!  Of course it worked.  You don't pray in the Temple and not have it work!"

Now I know what you're thinking.  How absolutely hypocritical of Nakedjen to ask her Mormon sister to go and pray in the Temple for her.  For a house of all things.  A house!  The entire world economy is about to go completely belly-up and Nakedjen has her sister in the Temple praying about a house.  Just for her!

Well, people, it does feel rather hypocritical.  I didn't really believe that my sister, NeverNakedBeth, was truly going to go to the Temple and pray for me.  I mean I called her and asked her to do it, but I didn't think she really would?!  She's a busy mother with two kids.  She has umpteen meetings all day long.  She doesn't have time to go to the Temple and pray about a house for her sister and her two fur kids.

She did do it, though.  And it was exactly at the moment that NeverNakedBeth walked out of that Temple that I received the call from the new landlord telling me that I was going to be moving to a very lovely house.  A house without holes in the walls.  A house with insulation.  A house with a new water heater.  A house that has a fenced back yard for the dogs.  A house that can truly be our home.

We're moving on Monday.  Breaking all my own rules about contracts and metrograde, I signed the lease.  Bye bye crack house.  Hello happy home!  Thank goodness for Mormon sisters with Temple recommends.

Peep!

Is anyone else out there as concerned about the state of our national finances as I am?  Or are the rest of you just not paying any attention?  Or perhaps you just have grown tired of the sturm und drang and are concentrating only on things like cute bento boxes for lunch?

This bail out that we're about to give to corporate America, once again, is going to cost those of us who are not a part of corporate America (and I would guess that is quite a lot of us, perhaps millions even!) our futures.

I'm not kidding about this.  I wish that I was.  However, I'm an Aquarius. Besides dead people, I also see the future.

Here's how I foresee this overflowing bag of unwarranted money for old cronies: 

It's a game that has been played over and over and over and over in this country that allows the rich minority to gain and maintain its power and control over the poor majority.  For those of you who do not know, the Federal Reserve of America is an illegal private organization that prints all of our money.  Whenever they do this, print money, we, the American public, incur a debt to the Federal Reserve.  This debt actually is to some very wealthy European Bankers and not to any real Americans at all.

Nice, huh?

We are, all of us who think we actually know better, now just slaves to the American dollar and the folks who print it.  We must stand together and say, "Enough is enough!"   That blank check from George W. Bush to bailout Wall Street's bad debts is going to cost each and every American taxpayer somewhere between $2000 and $5000. 

If George W. Bush or any of the folks running for Presidential office were to ask you today for $5000 in order to bail out Wall Street's bad debts and in return was offering you absolutely nothing, no share in the profits, no promise of reform, no new regulations or oversights to avoid this kind of crisis in the future, would any of you open up your checkbooks and write him the check?

But that's exactly what Congress is doing.  It's exactly why I've got a migraine.  Why I am not sleeping at night.  Why I am prattling on about tripping on LSD.

I'm shouting as loudly as I can, but I know I am not being heard.   

I feel as if the world, the entire world, has gone completely mad. 

Don't Speak To Me Of Economics

In my effort to further ensure that no one in this country taps me on the shoulder and says, "Hey, Nakedjen, we've run out of all possibilities for a Vice-Presidential candidate, so you're it.  We're choosing you!" last night I think I came within inches of actually overdosing on drugs. 

Before you go calling the authorities, or worse yet, Emily Gilmore, let me explain.  It was a dark and stormy night and the floorboards were creaking....Oh, wait.  That's a completely different story.  Not this one.

It was a very stormy weekend.  Well, very is subjective.  We were not experiencing Hurricane Ike weather.  Or the floods that plagued Chicago last week.  So, um, well, not so stormy, I suppose.  Unless you're the newly transplanted girl from Santa Cruz, California who rarely sees raindrops falling from the sky and hardly ever sees lightening and whose poor dogs have never heard thunder until they arrived here.  Then, by everything that is holy and Mormon, we had a very stormy weekend!  Well, okay, we had a very stormy Saturday. 

Thunder and lightening and furious raindrops spitting from the sky.

With all of that, of course, the barometric pressure went haywire.  So did my head.  Absolutely haywire.  It didn't help, of course, that I also was having what I've previously referred to as john cougar melon clots coming shooting out of my vayjayjay.  Someone tell me that at some point in my life, perhaps even some time soon, john cougar and his melon clots are going to take up residence some where other than in my vayjayjay and not insist on throwing a rambunctious party that ruins a pair of my jeans every month?!

So last night, with the lower half of my body feeling a bit like john cougar had invited the creature from the black lagoon to his party and my brain starting to think that decapitation seriously might be the best and only humane way to take care of the tiny elves with their pick axes and crashing cymbals in my head, I went searching in the medicine cabinet for something that might ease the pain. 

Of course all I had at my disposal was some good old Bayer aspirin. 

However, PartyGirlStella has lots more drugs at her disposal.  Turns out she's been hiding her stash from mama.  I actually found a nearly full prescription bottle of Tramadol with Stella's name on it.  The very same Tramadol that had caused me to pass out and do a face plant in the doctor's office.  The very same Tramadol that provided an entire day of pain free sleep! 

I crushed up one pill.  I put a tiny bit of the crushed up dust on my pinky finger.  Oh, yes, the pinky finger dust trick.  I licked it off.  I fell into bed.  Those elves stopped with the pick axes.  They put down their cymbals.  And John Cougar and his Melon Clots decided to take the night off from the party they were having in my vayjayjay.  It was the most beautiful night of sleep ever.

Until I woke up.

And realized that the elves hadn't really put down their pick axes at all.  Oh no.  They just became stealth elves.  And carefully used those axes to pry my brain from skull.  Completely.  I have no idea what they actually did with it or where they took it, but I no longer had it when I awoke this morning.  It had gone missing.

I've spent the entire day trying to find it.  It's been a lost cause, really, because I've lacked the mental capacity necessary to even begin to find it.  Instead, I've looked at all these financial numbers on all these financial spreadsheets that I'm supposed to understand better than others and have laughed rather maniacally because each time I tried to even remember what it was that I was supposed to be doing, I had a hard time figuring out exactly where I was.

It's like those days after you come down from LSD.  Everything looks the same, but you know it's all put together just slightly askew.  And you also know that you're capable of putting it all back together again the right way, but somehow it now seems completely frivolous to put the world right. 

Actually, that's not far off now, is it?  These times seem more and more uncertain.  Is it too frivolous to perhaps wonder about the necessity to put the world right?

Hail Holy Light

...of things invisible to mortal sight.

Be well.  Be bright.  Be naked.  And know that I love you.

Better Get The Defibrillator Ready

Anyone who knows anything about me knows that I have had a rather difficult relationship with the man I call Albert, who also happens to be my father.  We not only share the same birthday, we also share some other similarities and some of them are not too endearing.    I look exactly like him.  There's no doubting that I am his daughter.  No wondering if my mother was having an affair with the milkman unless the milkman was a doppelganger for my father.  I inherited my bold sense of humor from that man.  As well as my unforgettable laugh.  I'm fairly confident, though, that it's from Albert that I also inherited my manic tendencies and my other brain disorders.    He'll hate me for saying that, as he believes his brain is perfect.  No one, actually, is more perfect than Albert, according to him. 

I believe I started calling him Albert when I was about four or five years old, I'm not exactly sure?  I remember we were spending the summer at a cottage on Cape Cod and all my cousins and relatives were calling him Albert and so it just made sense that I should call him that, too.  The adults all thought it was cute and funny at the time, but I never called him anything except Albert after that summer. 

I am the son that my father never had.  I have spent my entire life, truly, attempting to fill some sort of unshared plan that he had for me, something I'm sure was half made up in my own head, trying desperately to do everything absolutely perfectly so that he would love me.  I think that I can honestly count on just one hand the times my father has told me that he was proud of me or that I've done a good job or that he loved me.  If I got an A, it was always a question of why I hadn't gotten an A+?  If I won all the blue ribbons at the horse show, it was a question of how many points I was still behind on the year-end Championship awards.  I won't even bother with all the unsung and unnoticed things I achieved in my effort to please him. 

Eventually, as many do in this situation, I had a nervous breakdown.  And when I recovered, I realized that if I was going to actually live and breathe and walk on this planet, I had to do so on my own terms.  Not Albert's.  This meant, first and foremost, that I needed to figure out who I was and what it was I wanted in my life.   I had spent so much of my life living it to please him, I honestly had no idea what it would mean to just be me.  Thus, I spent the time in London, writing and going to all plays possible and coming to terms with myself as a creative person, not as a person bound for law school.

Of course I've spent the last twenty-five years chasing my creative dreams.  I really have done just what I've wanted to do at every turn and I have no regrets.  There were some very difficult and "come to Jesus" moments with Albert along the way, as he fought with me about the very me that I was finding and embracing, but I absolutely refused to let her go.

So it is kind of a shock to me that I have been spending the last month or so investigating not only law schools, but the application process too.  There is nothing more in this world that Albert wants for me, or has ever wanted for me, than for me to be a lawyer.  It is precisely because it has been his dream that I have walked in exactly the opposite direction for the last twenty-five years. 

I know in my heart I would be a very good lawyer.  The more I think about our environment, our planet, our food sources, our own health, the more I realize that while I know I can make a difference with just my voice and my willingness to stand up and shout, I also know there are important ways I can make a bigger difference.

Of course I am only pondering all of this. Just pondering.  Doing a little investigative research.  Seeing what it tells my heart as well as my head.  However, when Albert reads this?  I hope the defibrillator is nearby and ready.  Because for all of our differences, I don't want to be the one to have killed him with a heart attack.

And Stella Came Tumbling After

So I walk the dogs on long leisurely walks in the evenings.  We leave the house with no real set agenda and head in this direction or that direction and usually spend at least an hour, if not longer, wandering the streets of Salt Lake City. 

Often, I'll allow Stella to bring her orange frisbee with her.  She's quite determined to always carry it.  She will not allow Buddha to carry it, rarely allows me to carry it and will even hold it in her mouth while she's doing her very important business. 

Tonight, though, we set off without the frisbee.  Just Buddha and Stella and me.  Wandering the streets.  I am sorry, though, honestly that I didn't bring my camera.  Because I'm not sure you're going to believe me when I tell you exactly what happened on this particular evening.

We meandered back and forth up the hill to East High School.  The very same high school where they recently shot those High School Musical movies.  And this is the part where you're going to think I'm going to tell you that we bumped smack into Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens doing a dance routine on the playing fields and singing their hearts out supported by a cast of fabulous looking extras while the cameras were all rolling!  And that Buddha and Stella and I joined right in, sang right on key, and are now no longer in need of a wealthy benefactor because those folks at Disney are going to give us our very own special movie deal.  One that is all about an earth-loving, organic toting, vegan, altruistic NakedGirl who is selected as a Vice-Presidential candidate, actually wins, and takes Washington, D.C. by storm with her two black labradors in tow.  Of course there are special scenes about Stella eating the Constitution (she just loves paper!) and Buddha rallying for more short buses for the special needs kids.  It all ends happily with a Naked Love Fest on the White House front lawn with Putin, Kim Jong II and our NakedGirl.  Isn't life just beautiful?

Um, no.  That's not at all what happened. 

Instead, what happened is that the dogs were upset with me for taking them to a huge expanse of lovely green grass and not bringing the frisbee. 

It so happens that there's a rather steep hill at East High School.  A hill that's good for tumbling down just like Jack and Jill, if you're so inclined.  So I tumbled right down.  Rolled, actually.  And told Buddha and Stella to follow me.

And this is the part where, honestly, you're just going to have to believe me.  I promise to try to get those folks from Disney with all their fancy cameras and movie equipment to shoot us over there on the hill very soon!

They did it.  And when they got to the bottom and realized just how much super duper fun that was?  They raced each other back to the top and did it over and over again.  I just sat there and could not stop giggling at my silly dogs. 

I wish you could have seen Buddha, especially.  Stella, as we all know, is fearless and thinks absolutely nothing of bounding off the top of water falls to catch her tennis balls in mid-flight as she pummels into the water below.  But Buddha?  Not so much.

However, I think my special needs Buddha may just have jumped off the short bus and into the Winner's Circle for rolling down a hill of very green grass.   Imagine ninety pounds of happy black labrador rolling (yes rolling) back to stomach to back to stomach with his big old ears flopping this way and that and a smile so big that you can count all his teeth and his tonsils.  And imagine all of that rolling right over you because he thinks that will make it even MORE fun.  He took it so seriously that when Stella rolled into him by accident, he stood up and gave her a very stern reprimand! 

The very best, though, was when they'd both get to the bottom they'd look at each other as if to say, "Shall we do it again?" and then race like mad back to the top of the hill and go tumbling right back down again! 

Isn't life just so much better with dogs?  I mean, honestly, it just is!

In Memory and In Praise

I was totally shattered to learn of David Foster Wallace's suicide.  It is hard for me to understand, truly, how this is good in any stretch of any imagination? 

There are three literary Davids that I absolutely adore.  David Foster Wallace, David Eggers and David Sedaris.  In fact, I used to tell David Sals while I was still married to him that I perhaps should have married any of the other three literary Davids since they moved me so deeply with their writing and creativity.  I know that David Sedaris is gay, but when has that stopped me before? 

I have read every word, every single morsel of literary brilliance, that David Foster Wallace has ever produced and even plowed through Infinite Jest more than once because I believe it is even better than your very best Grateful Dead show.  No, really, it is.  You can open it up just about anywhere and have a truly magical and mystical experience.

I was first introduced the genius of David Foster Wallace by my dear sweet William who called me one day completely breathless and told me I had to run, not walk, and purchase Esquire Magazine and read his now famous article about tennis.  I always do what dear sweet William tells me to and will be forever grateful to him for this introduction.  What was frustrating to me, at the time, was the realization that up until that very moment David Foster Wallace and I had lived similar literary trajectories.  He had just left me standing squarely somewhere in the doldrums of Hartford while he catapulted into the stratosphere.

I devoured every word simply because I heard a voice there that truly spoke to me.  His piece on "The Depressed Person" was the first time I felt that someone had actually written about how I often feel and truly understood.  His article on Roger Federer was perhaps the most brilliant piece on men's tennis I have ever read.  Certainly our generation has other brilliant stars and great writers.  However, no other one has quite made me want to be a better writer, to capture the juxtaposition of pathos and humor in that self-deprecating way, the way that David Foster Wallace has done.

I will miss his words, his brilliance, his contributions.  I know I have lots of company who will also miss him.  This really should not have happened, but of course it did.