Films I Have Loved

Pretty in Pink

*sigh* DUCKIE. period.

Goodfellas

Yes. You're funny, and in the way you'd shoot me for saying.

Donnie Darko

Dude, I HATE the Easter Bunny now!

The Godfather

What IS a cannoli?

Gone With the Wind

I wanted a Mammy

The Breakfast Club

I loved the nerd til he talked about that damn elephant lamp.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

SEVEN! seven?

Seven.

Lust. Gluttony. Pride.

Back to the Future.

Daddy issues? I thought the Professor was hotter than Michael J Fox. Perhaps it was his intellect?

Casino

Do people REALLY ask for an amount money by saying "This much" with your thumb and forefinger?

A Clockwork Orange

Where can I get a mask like that?

Risky Business

Thighs like my boyfriend. 'nuff said.

A Few Good Men

In Jack Do I Trust.

The Wizard of Oz

Life imitates art. Always falling for "straw men".... you know...If he only had a ....(things are a changin;!)

Eat, Pray. Love

The beginning - and continuous - transformation of moi.

The Hangover

I don't wan't to go to Vegas! I don't want to go to Vegas.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

The best reason to NOT do drugs

Leaving Las Vegas

Why NOT to become an alcoholic

Natasha Bedingfield - Soulmate (Live from Abbey Road)

Soul Mate

One of my favorite excerpts from the book “Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert is when Richard explains what a soul mate is to Liz as she sits crying and sates,“I seriously believed that David was my soul mate”

The reply:

“He probably was. Your problem is you don’t understand what that word means. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and they smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you and they leave. And thank God for it. Your problem is, you just can’t let this go. It’s over, Groceries. Daivd’s purpose was to shake you awake, drive you out of that marriage that you needed to leave, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light could get in, make you SO desperate and out of control you HAD to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master and beat it. That was his job, and he did great, but now its over .”

The first time I read this passage I had to keep going back. And I have gone back to it, probably twenty times since. I read it out loud, the way I thought Richard would have said the shit to me. It was such a raw, brutal truth, and I thank Elizabeth Gilbert for it every time I read it. I had to keep going back because my eyes were filled with tears – I couldn’t see the type on the pages of the book, and my breathing was heavy and laborious because I couldn’t breathe though my nose from he sobbing. I kept losing my place in the passage and had to start again. But that was OKAY. I wanted to get this. I NEEDED to get this. For as much as I thought he was my soul mate,, I needed to understand that he was not.. I, like Elizabeth, believed a soul mate to be something more, something different, the other half of me, the person who completed me. But Richards defining of a soul mate fit the men in my life. They all served a purpose and I hope I served a purpose for them. His definition rang more true than any other explanation of a soul mate I had read.

I haven’t changed as a person or as a woman. It’s just that now I am beginning to understand and love myself. That’s not an easy thing to do, and it sure as hell isn’t an easy thing to admit - that at one time you didn’t love yourself,

and to acknowledge the things you’ve done

and said because of that?

That at one time

I couldn’t have possibly felt complete

without someone else.

I’m not like that any longer.

It doesn’t mean that I want to be alone,

but it means that I don’t feel the need

to have someone beside me –

just to have someone beside me.

I want someone there.

I think someone deserves to have the depth of love

I am able to give.

Do I want a soul mate?

No.

I want love.

I want vulnerability.

I want dialogue

And companionship.

Shared thought

And Quiet reciprocation.

Affinity.

And Passion – intellectual & physical.

No, I don’t want a Soul Mate.

I want

The partner.

The lover.

The Companion

Who’ll continue growing with me.

Someone who recognizes their imperfections

And can forgive mine.

Who isn’t afraid to let me see

and know them completely.

Someone that trusts my love is strong.

Someone that feels how the strength of my love trusts.

I know my layers.

I’ve seen them peeled back and fully exposed

from pain and happiness,

love and sorrow,

loss and gain.

From one continual bad circumstance into another,

My own terrible choices and

a little bit of dumb luck.

I know who and what I am.

Doesn’t mean I am going to stop growing.

I am not perfect.

Hell, I don’t think I would even want to be.

What fun is there in perfection?

I am not looking for perfection.

Thank you to my soul mates, (as in Richard’s definition) –

Thank you for the reflection.

For showing me what held me back.

For bringing me to attention so I could change,

For tearing down my walls

& smacking me awake.

For breaking my heart so new light could enter.

For making me desperate & out of control.

For revealing another layer of myself to me

& then leaving.

You’ve helped build the Goddess I have become.

Thank you.

Healing that transcends Beyond Time (Ambient mix)

Loss of a LIFE

Today I learned that my cousin lost her father. Last week a childhood friend lost his mother very unexpectedly. Almost seven years ago I lost my own father to kidney cancer. An expected loss is no less painful than an unexpected one. And even though death is inevitable and we all know it will happen to those we love and to us, the grieving must still take place.

This morning when I contacted my cousin to give my condolences, I experienced that same awkwardness we all experience upon hearing about the loss of a life of someone we love. I didn't know what to say - words seem so shallow and unmoving. They just aren't able to convey an empathetic understanding of what it will mean to my cousin, me not having lived her experience with her father, will never understand the full impact of the loss she is today experiencing. I only hoped she could feel my hearts love enveloping her pain and comforting her in the only way I could being more than 200 hundred miles away, and that is with thoughtful prayer and love sent to her with my mind and heart.

As I thought about her father and the man he was (I should have blogged about him so I could have written about the man he IS, now its too late for that) my own father came to mind. I thought about and how she and I, each being a part of them, will always have them with us in some sense. She had said to me that her heart is broken and she is in shock. Both of which I knew and experienced.

I said to her I knew this, and that he was such a good father and grandfather and husband. He had a beautiful, quiet, reserved spirit about him and he was a very good Godly man. I expressed to her that one of the comforts me for came in moments after my fathers death when I would wish that he were still alive to so they could have met him. I would find myself saying to new people in my life "I wish you could have met my father, he was so wonderful". And in saying that to others I began to understand the depth I had been blessed to not just have known him but to have given the awesome opportunity to have been HIS daughter. The sadness of his loss never goes away but time allows the pain time to release into more - maybe appreciation, maybe understanding, but its no longer just pain. I told her that I know my dad is still with me in so many ways because I, Yvonne, partially defined who he was. My rebel spirit, my outspoken persona, my wit and sarcasm, my tenderness - all inherited from my father. I am my fathers daughter. And she is his.

I told her to allow her heart to be broken. Let the love they had heal that.

I told her to miss him, but to tell him she misses him.

I told her to be in chock, but know it will pass with acceptance.

and then I told I loved her. Those were probably all the words she really needed to hear.

You can go home again!

You Can’t Go Home Again….Really?

As rush-hour transitions into Friday evening and most of us Cincinnatians commute to our homes, gratefully submerge ourselves full-fledged into the weekend, my commute “home” will take on new meaning. It will consist of more than 576 miles of concrete and rebar, meandering through the Great Smoky Mountains, into Cherokee, North Carolina and ending in Covington, GA., my childhood home.

Yeah, I like the scenic route.

I am going back to visit high school friends, neighborhood shopkeepers, an elementary school bus driver and the week-old grave of a mother whose children I watched every Friday night for years. All of whom I became reacquainted with, after more than twenty years, on Facebook.

I want to drive the red dirt road to “our” five acres of GA Pine and lakefront property. I want to see the “House That Built Me” (thanks Miranda Lambert), walk the trails where I drove my go-cart and mini-bike, and stand on the dock where I caught catfish with my brother and my brood of boys (I was the only girl in a circle of five friends). Oh, and eat a Sunday meal at Henderson’s, where they’ll serve up aforementioned catfish, hush puppies and coleslaw like no other! And sweet tea…can’t forget the sweet tea.

As I reflect upon the people, places and events that molded me into the person I am continually becoming, I am grateful for my experiences and the lessons I have been able to draw from because of them. I learned perseverance and diligence from my best childhood friend’s family, headed by a single mom – like me - with four kids, working her way through nursing school at night, who still allowed me to go to Braves baseball games, college theatre and sleep in her king sized bed with all the kids, cooking me grits and bacon every Saturday morning. I learned how to love and accept those “different” than me, after witnessing one Clan Rally in the town square. I learned the importance of independence and responsibility by taking care of my brother. I learned how to swim, recognize poisonous snakes and endure hour-long bus rides in the GA heat. I learned the true meaning of Friday Night Lights, that a one-armed man can makes the best pot of Brunswick Stew and that no one can take me away from me. If I don’t allow it.

Sometimes I wonder where I would have been in life had I not left Covington. Who would be my children? Would I even have any? Would I have married my high school sweetheart? Would we have divorced by now? Would I be less progressive? Would I be more narrow-minded? Would I be wishing I had left home in search of something “greater”? Would I have found it?

Thomas Wolf’s George Webber stated “"You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time — back home to the escapes of Time and Memory." I disagree with Mr. Webber. His “can’t” indicates a reason to not even try. I think we CAN go home again. I think we SHOULD, lest we not forget ourselves and stop giving gratitude from where we came.

So, go home again. I have.

Actually, come to think of it, home’s a place I never left.