Back From the Dead

It's been a while.

I would love to regale you with tales of new sexual exploits, fortunes won and triumphs achieved ... but the real reason I haven't posted in more than seven months is one long, boring, mundane, never-ending

MID-LIFE CRISIS.

I started out 2011 unemployed, and that was both a blessing and a curse.


But it was nothing compared to rejoining the workforce.

I got a job. A job that I didn't want but took anyway because it was the only bus in sight to hop on. Riding a rickety bus filled with bad smells and vagabonds seemed smarter than joining meaner, smellier vagabonds in a homeless encampment under the 10 freeway.

So I sucked it up and trudged into a dirty, claustrophobic office that reminded me of my dad's hoarder house. To distract myself from the monotony, I started blogging again ...

... and then it hit me. If I scratched out the name of the company I worked for at age 24 and substituted the name of the new company, every career lament I'd written 15 years ago still rang true. As did the constant theme of loneliness and disappointment.

Life at the new job was bad.

Turning 40 was worse.


Forty forced me to face what I didn't want to face:

• Still single. 
• Never married. 
• Never pregnant. 
• Nearly 12 years past my last serious relationship.
• Five-and-a-half years past my last roll in the hay.
• And in a job that seemed precisely as awful as my first real job out of college.

So I did what I always do when life seems hopeless ... munch on Snickers and Cheez-Its.

And look for a new job, since I now change jobs almost as often as I used to change men.

Flash forward another few months.

Lucky break! Another new job.

I built the new New Job up to be the Second Coming of Jesus, like I used to do with every new New Boyfriend.

I used it as an occasion to end life as I knew it. I left my apartment of seven years, said goodbye to 15 years of trendy West L.A. foolishness and moved to staid, laid-back La Canada Flintridge, where people talk about their kids and football instead of their auditions and plastic surgery.

I hoped I'd meet a NASA/Cal-Tech nerd, fall madly in love and live happily ever after.

So far, I haven't.

I've just worked a crazy amount of hours, availed myself too freely of the free M&Ms in the office kitchen and gone through my annual deep, dark, holiday depression.

So I'm back in familiar territory. Working too many hours. Trying not to be a bitch, but not quite succeeding. Popping thigh seams in my yoga pants as the pounds pack back on. And wondering if I'm really going to grow up to be the little old lady (or big, fat, diabetic old lady) who dies alone surrounded by cats.

Fortunately, the other side of this familiar terrain is being good at eventually climbing off the pity pot and putting myself back together:

• Antidepressants. Makes me queasy and flatulent, but better than the alternative.
• Yoga. Hard to do downdog when you're 50 pounds overweight and farting, but I'm showing up anyway (whether the person on the mat next to me likes it or not).
  
• Meditation. Forcing myself to count 20 breaths and think at least one happy thought that doesn't involve premature death.
• Weight Watchers. Eating three times my daily Points allowance, but at least I'm keeping track.
• Creative expression. I've decided it's time to stop moping and write.

I'm resurrecting myself, and that means resurrecting my blog.

Next installment in the High-Score Diaries coming soon...

How I Spent My Full-Year Vacation

For one year and 11 days, I have been a statistic. A statistic called out of work, unemployed, mad-as-hell-and-forced-to-take-it-evermore. And truthfully, it's been one of the best years of my life.

What have I done in my year off? I've rediscovered the real me: the me that's not bitchy and stressed out to the point of breaking.

I made Weight Watchers a top priority and lost about 60 pounds.


I joined a running/walking club and trained for my first marathon. I finished it, in a torrential downpour, in 7 hours, 15 minutes and 41 seconds.


I spent time in prayer, meditation, yoga and contemplation, thinking about who I am, who I want to be, what I want to embrace and how I want to change.

I took this blog off life support and started writing regularly again.

I joined an online dating site and began the arduous, humbling process of putting myself back out there.

I kept myself afloat financially and managed to pay all my bills on time.

So why am I telling you all this?

Because today, I am expecting a job offer. The CEO has already signified I'm his top choice, my references have been checked, the recruiter has already presented my salary demands. Today, I am having a second interview with the VP of Sales, and unless I cuss her out or sprout horns, I'm almost assured an offer letter.

And, unfortunately, rather than feeling elated, I'm feeling kinda sad.

It's not that I don't want to work. I do. (Something about watching Maury Povich say, "Terrell, in the matter of four-month-old Laqueesha, you ARE the father!" makes me want to go flip a burger, scrub a toilet, dig a ditch, write a white paper, anything to be employed again.)

So yes, I do want to go back to work. But I don't want to go back to the unhappy, out-of-hope, fat bitch I became over the course of my last few jobs.

I've made myself a promise.

I won't.

Even though my year-long vacation is (presumably) over, somehow I've got to hold fast to the real me and bring her back into the workplace without letting the workplace demolish the fragile, new, healthy life I've created.

I can't lie. I'm scared.

(I'll post in the comments when I find out for sure whether or not I've got the job. And then I'll start my next chapter, which I've tentatively entitled Slutapalooza.)

---

Please "Like" Don't Be a Slut on Facebook or follow on Twitter.

How 'Nita Got Her Groove Back

My blog is starting to whisper to me again, like a love song on a summer breeze.

I don't feel pulled to jump back into the long, strange saga of Conspiracy Theory just yet, but I do feel pulled to write. That's a good start.

It's hard to believe that it's been a month since my last post, but it's been one of the best months of my life.

I'm starting to get my mojo back.

Freed of the stress of three years of jobs that I hated, I'm free to remember and partake of things that I love. Like yoga. I'm seven weeks into a consistent, three-times-a-week practice, and my back, neck and hips are starting to thank me.

I'm two-and-a-half-months into "Sugar Sobriety." I made a promise to myself – and kept it – that I would not eat sweets or desserts at all, unless it was a social occasion with friends. It's made life so much easier. No more making excuses for eating tubs of Trader Joe's Peanut Butter Cups. The weight has been pouring off of me. I'm 17 pounds lighter since May, and 29 pounds lighter since I went back to Weight Watchers last spring.

I've been cleaning up my very cluttered home office. It was a treasure-trove of bad-job nightmares. Notes from job interviews (before I took the jobs that turned out to be duds), receipts from boring business trips, performance reviews that made me question what I was doing with my life. Even piles of audition "sides" from three years ago, when I pulled the plug on my acting dreams, went back to work and started shoveling chocolate down my throat as a panacea for the pain.

Last week, I actually booked and shot a student film that came to me out of the blue. The experience underlined and punctuated a lot of the reasons I stopped acting (playing a loudmouthed tollbooth operator named Laronda, no racial stereotyping there), but it still felt good to know that I could shake off the rust, win an audition and shoot a scene.

And I finally decided to tackle the elephant in the room: the fact that I'm not dating at all and haven't been in a serious, committed relationship since I broke up with Brown more than 10 years ago. I joined a support group based on the Calling in the One book, so I'll be spending the next seven weeks really discovering what I want in a relationship and what's holding me back from having it.

I'm looking forward to actually being able to talk about new guys I'm dating and new lessons I'm learning, instead of merely resurrecting the Ghosts of Boyfriends Past in an effort to understand how I could have been so stupid or why I ever dated so many pointless, abusive jerks.

Blog Interruptus

It's been nearly five weeks since my last post. Pretty ironic, since my one-time and future goal is three posts a week.

But there have been lots of reasons. Some excuse-making and some legitimate. And some that I haven't publicly aired.

1. I don't feel like it. Somewhere along the way, my blog went from being something I loved to do to something I "had" to do. And that took a lot of the fun out of it for me.
   
   
2. Woe is me, I'm unemployed. Two months ago, the dream-job-turned-nightmare let me go. I couldn't write because I was too busy crying, stuffing my face and watching reality TV.
   
   
3. I'll start writing again when I get a new job. Counter-intuitive, I know. What better time to write when you have 40-90 extra hours in your life that aren't be sucked up by a useless and demeaning job? But in my case, I've found that I'm more productive in all areas of my life when I'm busy. Sloth comes naturally when the opportunity arises.
   
   
4. Is this blog worth losing two of my closest friends? I've literally lost two friends over this blog. The first was someone who revealed a shady side to me after reading my blog (who I haven't directly confronted), and the second was someone who was incensed that I wrote about a three-week relationship I had 19 years ago with the man she's now married to.
   
   
5. Dear me, what if a potential employer, an imaginary boyfriend or my dad sees this? I consciously made the decision early on not to hide behind a screen name, but let's just say my courage wavered a bit when I Googled myself and saw "Don't Be a Slut" as the top link.
   
   
6. What if Conspiracy Theory sends me an acid bomb in the mail? It's taken writing these first few posts to get me to realize that after all these years, I'm still afraid of Conspiracy and his rage. I know I'll get past it, but in the meantime, it's easier not to write about him.
   

For months, I've tried to stuff all these fears and doubts and nagging things down and just force myself to write, but that's actually counter-productive. I started this blog as a healing process for myself, as a creative project where my writing talents were under my own control, and as a way to help other women (and to my surprise, some men as well).

That's still my goal.

But I've decided to stop trying to whip myself into shape where this blog is concerned.

Over the last month, I've made some really big changes in my life. I've taken beach days and let a lot of the job bitterness go. I deleted Sudoku off my computer and eliminated chocolate from my kitchen cupboards. I'm walking every day and going to Weight Watchers every week. And best of all, I've resumed my yoga practice, another something that I used to love to do and that became a "should" that I never got around to.

And in that spirit, I know that my blogging consistency will come back when I'm back in touch with how much I love this blog and how important it is for me to release my demons from the past by reliving them, writing about them, learning from them and then letting them go for good.

Thank you for sticking with me through my less-than-consistent posting.

I'll get back to Conspiracy Theory in a few weeks, after I shore my spirit up with additional yoga and beach days.

Long absence explained

It feels like a billion years since I've blogged. My personal life has been in a tailspin. Or, to be more accurate, my professional life has been in a tailspin. And since I don't have much of a personal life, when my professional life is on tilt, I am on tilt.

And honey, I have been on a full-blown, woozy, dizzy, shouldn't-have-eaten-that-damn-cotton-candy-before-I-jumped-on-this-stupid-ride Tilt-a-Whirl.

I won't bore you with the gory details, except to say, remember my rosy, hope-filled post of three months back about my glorious new job?

Not.

Not even.

Hell no.

Wrong turn.

Oh sh#t.

And a thousand other cuss words come to mind.

I've been working an absolutely insane amount of hours, 10-15 a day. I took 2 days off the entire month of January. As in one Saturday and one Sunday, what most people call a weekend.

But that's not the worst part.

I work for an asshole. The biggest horse's ass I have ever had the displeasure of working for in my life. Someone so cartoonishly asinine, I will one day shamelessly lampoon him in the most ridiculous situation a writer can ever conjure up for a hated buffoon. One day, I will roast and skewer this dude so badly in a piece of fiction I will laugh myself hoarse and pee my own pants while I type. And I'll include just enough real-life characteristics that he'll know it's about him. And I'll send it to him, along with an autographed picture of my middle finger.

Or maybe I'll just send him a sincere thank-you note, because I had an ephiphany.

As someone who has had a lifelong history of verbal abuse and of surrounding myself with abusive boyfriends (until I just gave up, got fat and stopped dating), I developed a pattern. A pattern of believing all the bad things people said about me. A pattern of believing that when other people dissed me, it was somehow all my fault.

And for a split second, two days to be exact, I started believing Asinine. I started believing maybe I wasn't good at my job. Maybe I didn't have what it takes. Maybe I could have or should have done something better to win Asinine's respect.

And then, in the midst of a fitful sleep, which has been an all-too-common occurrence as of late, it hit me.

None of what Asinine was saying was true.

Very little of what was going on is "my fault."

I'm not to blame because some dumb asshole treats me badly.

I deserve better.

Funny how the life lessons repeat in every area of your life until you "get it."

Before I get back to the past, a life update

I'm sensitive to the fact that this blog is called "Don't Be a Slut," and that the implied promise is that I will talk about love, sex, heartbreak and relationships. But before I can get back to writing about Number Two, I have to write a little bit about today.

The last 90 days have been a roller-coaster ride of emotions:

• I started a new job at the end of July, full of hope, full of promise. I hoped it would get me out of the house, out of sweatpants, out of the refrigerator. But most of all, I hoped this would be my dream job.
  
  It did get me out of the house and out of sweatpants, but go figure, they had a fully stocked kitchen filled with free food. And while it wasn't a horrible job, it just felt drab and claustrophobic, disappointing and depressing. Not my dream.
  
  
• I broke up with a girlfriend who I deeply, dearly love. Or she broke up with me. Or we mutually broke up with each other. That happened in August, and it's 1,000 times worse than breaking up with a boyfriend. It's as inconceivable as cutting ties with your own sister.
  
  The jury's still out on whether we'll be able to patch things up and be friends again, but it's been ROUGH. I think about her every day, especially on the weekends.
  
  
• I quit my new job. In the midst of despairing over my career and mourning my damaged friendship, I got an email. A friend and former freelance client wanted to get me into the environmental startup he now works for. A couple weeks and one lunch later, I got the job.
  
  So yesterday was my last day at the new/old job and Monday, a new adventure begins. I'll be the only marketing person in a sea of environmental experts, and it's going to be a challenge! A lot of responsibility, a lot of work, a lot to learn and a lot of hope. I really believe this is the start of my new life.

So that's where I am, and that's why it's been so hard for me to put butt in seat long enough to blog. I'll get back to Number Two soon!

Detour to the Present

I finally, finally, finally ... after two years of fruitless job searching ... have a new job. And this new job represents a new chapter in my life. It closes the books on what has been a difficult, dull five-year stretch that felt like it would stretch on into infinity.

It started in 2004 when I left my first real job as a marketing writer. I worked with a great group of people who are still my friends to this day ... but five years ago, all I wanted was out. I was tired of writing about software; tired of writing lame executive memos about why the last round of layoffs was good for business; and most importantly, just plain tired from working all day, then doing acting classes and rehearsals until late in the night.

I thought that when I got my much-kicked-for-and-screamed-for severance check, I'd finally be free to become the great actress I'd always dreamed of being.

I spent three years chasing down every silly, insulting black character girl role in Hollywood, no matter how small, no matter how no-paying, no matter how unfulfilling.

As the time and the money ran out, I started freelance-writing from home. I got paid once a month ... whenever the guy's wife felt like cutting checks ... and they were constantly trying to nickel and dime me and squeeze me to write for free. I was making less than I made 10 years ago, back when I was a secretary.

It was time to do the unthinkable, go back to work. Put acting aside for a paycheck. Again.

So I took the first job smoking, working full-time from home for one of my former freelance clients.

The last two years can be summed up as ... writing boring copy ... watching Oprah ... procrastinating writing boring copy ... eating chocolate ... lamenting the fact that I was stuck writing boring copy ... more chocolate ... going to church and praying for an end to writing boring copy ... more chocolate ... no jobs to apply to ... reality TV ... big, hiccupy crying jags ... more chocolate ...

It was a life lived alone in sweat pants with holes in the thigh seams. I almost died of boredom and bitterness, not to mention the shame of gaining back the 90 pounds I worked so hard to lose in my early thirties.

And then, finally, on my birthday, a ray of hope. In the form of a Monster ad that sounded like it was written expressly for me. I dashed off a cover note and a resume and hoped for the best. Two weeks later, I donned pantyhose for the first of three rounds of interviews. Two weeks after that, a job offer. And finally, next week, I begin my new life.

Back in an office. In real clothes with buttons and zippers. Around people. Engaged in challenging tasks.

It's the end of Five Years of Sloth, and I couldn't be more excited about the possibilities.

Michael Jackson's Final Gift to Me

I've spent the last few days living on YouTube, watching Michael Jackson videos and Michael Jackson live performances. Reading and re-reading the Los Angeles Times. Glued to CNN. And to my surprise, grieving.

I was a casual fan, at best.

I didn't know Michael Jackson. I never saw him in concert. I only own one Michael Jackson album. (Dangerous, not Thriller.)

But I always liked him, from the time I pointed to the Jackson 5's Greatest Hits album cover, and announced to my mother that when I grew up, I was going to marry Michael Jackson.

Thriller hit when I was in middle school. Michael was everywhere, and like the rest of the world, I was hooked.

Over the years, I read a few different biographies and caught wind of all the unfavorable tabloid fodder. I faithfully tuned in to the Oprah interview, his 1993 "I am not a criminal" avowal of innocence and the dastardly 2003 Martin Bashir interview that ultimately spelled the end of Michael's brilliant career.

I mostly avoided his child-molestation trial, finding the whole thing distasteful and incredibly sad. I couldn't quite bring myself to believe the charges, and true or false, it was a lose-lose situation. If the charges were true, it meant Michael had abused the world's trust and done irreparable harm to his youngest fans. And if the charges weren't true, it meant the world was truly an evil place, where greedy, rapacious vampires could tear a vulnerable and beloved figure to shreds and get away with it.

As I dove head-first into the barrage of coverage over the last few days, I was struck by one thing: that as brilliant as Michael was in so many areas and in so many ways, he lacked true self-awareness.

In his teens and twenties, he wasn't able to look in the mirror and see the good-looking young black man that everyone else saw, and we all know how that lack of awareness turned out.

More telling, he seemed unable to put his childhood in the past where it belonged, centering most of his adult life on reclaiming, reliving and ultimately being consumed by his "lost" childhood.

I guess Michael's final gift to me isn't his music or his otherworldly dance moves or even all the memories of my life that are tied to my memories of him.

It's the realization that self-awareness is a gift that no amount of money can buy. That there's something inherently marvelous in being able to face your demons, push past your past, get over what your parents did or didn't do, and ultimately live a life that includes joy and peace.

I'll never moonwalk or sell 750 million albums, but I can walk in self-awareness.

I wish Michael had been able to do the same.

My Take on the Recession

Check out my guest post on one of my favorite blogs, Saroj on the Issues. Saroj asked a variety of folks from all walks of life to talk about how the recession has impacted them personally. Here's what I wrote:

The other day, while watching the evening news (something I try to avoid these days), I saw a sobering statistic – that unemployment in California is now in double digits. I instantly burst into tears.

Why?

I have a job I hate. And thanks to the sucky economy, I can’t quit.

Read the full post here: The Recession: Anita