J IS FOR JITTERBUG

Well, fellow bloggers I do have more to report on the SSDI front, but it shall wait until tomorrow. Maybe the next day. If you are not caught up to speed on the old news, then you need to backpedal and read I IS FOR INSURANCE, and I am calling a time out. Those two posts should catch you right up. In the meantime...

Leanne over at From Chaos Comes Happiness chooses a theme word each year instead of doing resolutions. I can get behind that better than resolutions. I think I might have written out resolutions in junior high school once and then quit that. Why? Because I had zero follow through on them. I realized, even then, I was going to do what I was going to do. Period. Aaaaggghhh. However, this embracing a word thing... I do like that. For instance, one of her words from a previous year was create. I thought that was a fine word to wrap yourself around. I like verbs. They are very proactive. This year she chose believe. Another verb. Then she indicated various areas of her life that wanted to push some of that belief into and watch some action happen.

My friend Mary the Food Floozie announced yesterday (quite late, actually) that her word was going to be nurture. I almost fell out until I realized that some of that nurturing was going to be self-directed. She is one of the most nurturing people I know. It is all give give give. So, nurturing your own spirit, in addition to others gets a thumbs up.

Becky over at Farmgirl Paints was talking about how she normally feels bleak during January. In a recent blog post she said that she didn't feel that way this year and that instead of feeling stuck on survive, she had found the thrive button. Thrive. I liked it. I didn't think of it myself, but it was better than anything I was coming up with for myself. The best I had wrangled in was persevere, and that still felt like a lot of work. Whereas with thrive, it feels alive. Growing. Flourishing even. Persevering feels like your neck deep in molasses, but you're going to keep moving anyway. Nothing is going to grow in molasses, let me tell you. Thrive. Much better word.




The definition of thrive:

1: to grow vigorously : flourish
2: to gain in wealth or possessions : prosper
3: to progress toward or realize a goal despite or because of circumstances

Ding ding ding. I think we have a winner. So, thrive it is.

To that end, the email campaign is on to get my Big Idea off the ground. The first step is the website and I need all of the help that I can get! I have already emailed everyone in my contacts list. Naturally, as soon as I was finished my mother came in and pointed out that I had made a typing error. Spellcheck didn't catch it, because technically it wasn't wrong. I typed "be" instead of "by" in one instance. Bah. So, there is a sentence that begins, "They do this be," instead of "They do this by." Of course there is. If you have received the aforementioned email and not sent it out yet, please make the adjustment. If you have already sent it as is. Oh well.

I shall be going through all of the blogs that I follow looking for email addresses. You can save me some time by sending me yours. How do you do that?

You can leave your email address in the comments. Or you can email at rarichards68@gmail.com your email address, and I will send you the corrected version of the email. You need not change a thing. This is me being proactive and thriving. Please copy/paste and send it to everyone you know. The idea is to cast as wide a net as possible. We then want them to send it to everyone they know. It may take five throws for it to get to someone who actually has valuable information for the site. But, it will never reach that person unless everyone continues to cast. So, throw that net.

And for all of you who were worried that Social Security had dealt me the knock out punch, in the immortal words of Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing, "No one puts Baby in the corner."


I dedicated this bit of footage to Phoenix on Thursday, but the song is really speaking to me. And I like this video better than the original. I think that we all have the capacity to be heroes. All the right friends in all the right places. When you have that, big things are going down.

Click here to watch it if you missed it the first time.




image found at www.weheartit.com

LANDED UPTOWN ROCK AND ROLL GOODNIGHT

Once again, it is Sunday evening and my inspirational music post is still on the iffy side. That means I am typing, but I am not at all certain that I am happy with what will come out. I like to have a rough draft already cued up in my head before my fingers start tapping away on the keyboard. That isn't the case, so this might be a bumpy blog.

I honestly don't know how I feel about the video for this song. I really like the song. I think that video can be a powerful tool. I am not convinced that they made the most of it here. However, I don't flat out hate it, either. So, I am going with it. As I said, I like the song. Ben Folds does a mix of really depressing stuff and some really sweet stuff. I think one of his best songs is The Luckiest. I really love that one. Maybe I should have checked to see if there was a video for it. Hmmmm. Well, it is a bit late now. I have already dinked around long enough on youtube. I do like this one. I think that it has a happy ending. And I like the part about that feeling you get when suddenly you see through all of the crazy or the crap in your life to what is true. It is like all of the clouds lift and you come back down to earth. Of course, you didn't know you were living in outer space until the clouds lifted, and you realized that you got lost somewhere along the way, and you had floated up into the ether. Regaining your clarity is a huge relief. So, here is the video. As I said, I think it could have been done with more finesse. But that is just my point of view. Still a great song.



Okay, now that we have that out of the way, let's talk 80s. MTV. Videos and what made it all so freaking awesome. I almost went with this artist last week and I didn't. He had so many excellent videos that I just couldn't get a handle on it. I am not sure that I am really any better equipped this week. The only difference is that I have had some more time to think about it and let it backburner on my brain. Are you scared yet? Good. I do think I might be able to tell the story for having let it gelled a bit. However, you must always take into account that anything 80s is still the perspective of a teenager coming out of an adult's mouth. I am still sticking with my refusal to research anything policy. It is all about how I remember it. If you remember it different, please say so in the comments, that is what they are there for... at least that is one of the reasons they are there.

So, Billy Joel came on the scene before MTV and videos. I think that Piano Man might have been his first big song. Of course, Just The Way You Are was also very popular and also preceded MTV. The thing about Billy Joel is that he always struck me as the "working man's singer" no matter how famous he got, or how much money he made. I don't know if it was the New York in him or just that he is/was a very down to earth guy, but he always had this Regular Guy feel about him. Of course, songs like My Life and You May Be Right only fueled that conviction. And he never came off as pretentious. I am going to post a video that pains me a little to watch because of the 80s fashion. But the song knocks it out of the park.



This is so hard because so many of my favorite Billy Joel songs precede 80s video. For instance, Only The Good Die Young is one of my favorites. There is no video for that. There is concert footage for it, but I am really trying not to use that as much as possible. Anyway, Billy Joel survived the blast into the 80s and learned how to embrace video. In the beginning, his style was very much like it was before: the working class singer who liked to rock it out. That was what you saw in the above video and what you are about to see now. Only this video was history making...



Billy Joel is still our blue collar rocker. However, he got more than he bargained for when Christie Brinkley agreed to be a part of his video. It was the first step in our very own love story. Sort of like Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Except I think Billy Joel is better looking than Charles. Unfortunately, both stories ultimately ended in divorce, but that is skipping ahead. Back in the 80s, it was pretty heady stuff. Billy Joel, blue collar rocker, marrying supermodel Christie Brinkley was pretty darn awesome. He wrote a song called All About Soul while he was married to her that is one of my all-time favorites. God, I love that song. And they have a daughter together.

Well, the other side of Billy Joel is that he writes songs like Allentown. He wrote that one back in the 80s about the lack of jobs in Allentown, PA. There is another one called The Downeaster Alexa that is well worth the listen. He isn't all love songs or "I wanna rock" songs. He also wrote this one that can and does make me cry when I listen to it...



Yeah, I know it is concert footage. You get what you get. In this case you do get to see him in his element at the piano. And this song doesn't lend itself to a lot of jumping around. Because they did all go down together. And you take that shit seriously.


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I'm calling a time out.

Do you ever pray for patience? Me either. I quit that in junior high school. I learned that if you started praying for patience, you suddenly started getting your patience tested at every turn.

Have you ever railed at God? I mean seriously told God off? Kind of like "we are breaking up because I am sick of you letting me down." These conversations can happen silently with a lot of fist raising. Or loudly with a lot fist raising. There might or might not be crying involved. You might be so broken that you are on your knees and aren't able to raise anything, but you are silently letting God have it. You and God are done. Kaput. Calling it quits.

Every now and then I will have these sorts of conversations with people, and most folks admit to having a break with God. At some point, they reached a place in their lives and they gave God what-for, so to speak. I suppose you could call it a crisis of faith. I am always surprised when someone says that they have never been there. Unless they don't believe in God at all. But that is a whole different story. That always makes me think one of several things...

1) They are lying. They have totally been there, but they think it makes them look weak or like lesser Christians to have had such a conversation with God. If I think this is the case, I somehow like this person a little less after this conversation. This always makes me sad.

2) They are totally in denial. In fact, they might be still having this conversation with God even now. I feel compassion for this person. They need to let this out and feel it.

3) Uh oh. I don't want to be the one to tell this person that they somewhere in their future, when they least expect it, they are going to get sucker punched in their solar plexus. That will be followed up with an upper cut to their jaw. And before they can process that, someone is going kick them from behind, and they are going to hit the ground so hard that they won't be able to breathe.

You see, no one is exempt from the hits that life hands out. Life hits hard. And if you haven't been hit. It is just a matter of time. And that verse in Philippians about God not giving you more than you can handle (4:13) is really comforting when you're not the one lying on the floor unable to draw a breath. It is awesome when you are the one holding the Bible trying to comfort a friend. However, when you are the one who can't breathe or move, all you want to do is punch the person who is reading it to you. That is, if you could lift your hand off the ground. However, if all of your muscles have become rubbery, elastic, and you can't feel your extremities, so that isn't possible, it makes you pissed. And you don't want to hear about God. In fact, right now you are really pissed at God. And that is when the breaking up with God that I referred to earlier kicks in. When you are lying on the floor, mad as all get-out. For the record, there usually isn't a Bible-toting friend around quoting verse. You are alone. Alone and angry.

I've said it before, but I will say it again. This whole Big Idea thing was not my idea. God put this idea into my head and has been filling in all of the blanks on that paper. None of this has been my idea. Yeah, it has been coming out of my head. I am taking that to mean because God must think that I have the skills and tenacity to make it happen. So, while I was lying on the floor (metaphorically) railing at God yesterday I was angry on a whole bunch of levels. One of the biggest was that I didn't see it coming. This whole idea was not mine, so I had an expectation of it running smoothly since someone bigger than lil ol me was at the helm. I also was really looking forward to getting my life back.

After my meltdown yesterday I thought a lot about Job. Almost enough to get out my Bible and read the story again to get the details. But I think I remember it well enough for my purposes. Job lost everything at least once. His whole family. His property. Maybe a second family. Eventually, his faith was rewarded and he didn't lose everything in the end. The story is about having faith and pushing forward even when you lose everything. Over and over. I don't remember if it says that Job dropped to his knees and railed at God. He probably did. That is a very human reaction to a terrible situation. But, then he got back up and remained a man of faith.

Faith doesn't mean anything in good times. Anyone can have faith in anything in good times. Faith in yourself. Faith in God. Faith in whatever. So long as it is going well. Having faith in something, in anything, is having faith in bad times. So there really is no faith without a crisis of faith. You can't say that you have faith until you take that punch to the solar plexus and land facedown on the pavement. You can rail at God all you want. You can break up and call God names. That is fine. So long as you recognize that God wasn't the one that sucker punched you. That was life. Then you go back to being in it together to win it and pull yourself off the pavement. You can't just lie there forever.


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