Monday Melody: Beautiful Day (U2)

Posted on September 7, 2016 by luckyotter

I’m featuring this song a second time, because it has special meaning for me today and the message — that beauty and grace can still be found even when everything has been lost — is profound and so important, especially to those of us who have often felt (and feel) so lost.

Original post:

The early 2000’s weren’t exactly the best time for popular music. Sirius, Youtube, and EDM (for the most part) were still in the future, and radio rock, though still ubiquitous, was well past its prime. The airwaves were full of interchangeable post-grunge, nu-metal, Britney Spears, and unmemorable R&B and rap. But there were a few gems that stood out all the more because they were so rare. One of those gems was 2000’s “Beautiful Day” by the supergroup U2–this was one of the last great rock songs.

From the Wikipedia entry for the song:

According to Bono, “Beautiful Day” is about “a man who has lost everything, but finds joy in what he still has.” Blender interpreted the song and the line “it’s a beautiful day” as “a vision of abandoning material things and finding grace in the world itself”

The heart is a bloom
Shoots up through the stony ground
There’s no room
No space to rent in this townYou’re out of luck
And the reason that you had to care
The traffic is stuck
And you’re not moving anywhere

You thought you’d found a friend
To take you out of this place
Someone you could lend a hand
In return for grace

It’s a beautiful day
Sky falls, you feel like
It’s a beautiful day
Don’t let it get away

You’re on the road
But you’ve got no destination
You’re in the mud
In the maze of her imagination

You love this town
Even if that doesn’t ring true
You’ve been all over
And it’s been all over you

It’s a beautiful day
Don’t let it get away
It’s a beautiful day

Touch me
Take me to that other place
Teach me
I know I’m not a hopeless case

See the world in green and blue
See China right in front of you
See the canyons broken by cloud
See the tuna fleets clearing the sea out
See the Bedouin fires at night
See the oil fields at first light
And see the bird with a leaf in her mouth
After the flood all the colors came out

It was a beautiful day
Don’t let it get away
Beautiful day

Touch me
Take me to that other place
Reach me
I know I’m not a hopeless case

What you don’t have you don’t need it now
What you don’t know you can feel it somehow
What you don’t have you don’t need it now
Don’t need it now
Was a beautiful day

Narcissistic Parents

Posted on September 7, 2016 by luckyotter

Blog of a Mad Black Woman

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Thought for a Tuesday.

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Freeing myself from my past by making peace with it.

Posted on September 5, 2016 by luckyotter

makepeacewithpast
Credit: Me

I woke up earlier from a very odd dream. Unfortunately, I didn’t post about it right away, so the details are a little fuzzy, but I do remember the gist of it. At first it made no sense to me (most dreams don’t right away), but when I realized it wasn’t to be taken literally, it began to make perfect sense.

I dreamt I was on vacation with my MN ex. I don’t know where we were, but it was on a beach somewhere. We were renting a beach house. We were getting along very well (!), and at some point I felt this outpouring of love for him. In real life, I feel nothing but a strong dislike and disgust.

Inspired by my loving feelings toward him, I told him I’d like to make things work with him again. I apologized for my part in the destruction of our marriage and the ways I’d hurt him. I prompted him to do the same. He was hesitant, but he agreed, and made amends for all the terrible things he did to me and to our family.

“Let’s just let the past stay in the past now and start over, as if we just met,” I said, and he agreed to let bygones be bygones.

When I woke up, I actually laughed, because I have no loving feelings toward my ex whatsoever. I have no desire to resume any kind of contact with him, ever. He’s still as evil and hateful as he ever was and has grown worse over time (I know not all narcissists are evil, but THIS one definitely is!) and has zero conscience or empathy. I also know that in real life, there’s no way he would ever be so agreeable and cooperative, even if I were to suggest such a crazy thing.

I scratched my head trying to decipher what this meant. Obviously it wasn’t really about him. Slowly it dawned on me that in the dream, my ex represented either my inner child (who I’ve spent years rejecting and denying) or my past. Either way, it doesn’t matter, because both bleed into each other. My inner child is my past, and my past is my inner child.

Slowly I’ve been learning to develop empathy for my inner child and stop pretending she isn’t there. I’m actually learning to love her and appreciate her because her heart is so huge and she is so genuine and has so much love to give. I’m learning to incorporate her gifts into my everyday life. It’s not easy and sometimes I still pretend I can’t hear her because I’m still programmed to feel ashamed of her. But I’m hearing her more, and realizing she’s not some pathetic, weak, immature little brat, but she is the real me–the one who never got to grow up because her spirit was squashed when she was so young. I’m mature enough now–and also armed with the truth about what really happened to me–to know how to use her gifts, or at least start trying. When I was a child, her gifts only brought me shame and I had no idea how to use them (and wasn’t allowed to use them anyway), so I rejected them.

In the process of learning to love the real me, I’m also learning to accept my past, and finally move on from it.

For as long as we can’t make peace with our past, we remain trapped in it.

The Apple Festival, Hendersonville, NC

Posted on September 5, 2016 by luckyotter

My daughter and her new beau Zach (a really sweet 22 year old guy who is showing NO red flags so far) told me they were going to the annual Apple Festival in downtown Hendersonville, North Carolina, which is only a few exits south of me on I-26. They asked me if I wanted to come. I had some chores to do, but I said I’d join them later on.

Henderson County is one of the biggest apple producers in the country, and the Apple Festival is basically a big street fair where the apple growers come to sell their harvests of apples. Just about every variety of apple is available, sold out of makeshift stands. There are also food stands, arts and crafts, a few rides, and a concert in which local musicians perform that’s held at night (I didn’t stay for that). It’s pure Americana.

Downtown Hendersonville has a lot of cute mom and pop stores and small art galleries, and on every corner are bears — not real bears, but full size bear sculptures painted in creative ways, most with landscapes or other decorations painted on them.

The last time I’ve been to the Apple Festival was in 1995, when my kids were just toddlers. For many years, it was eclipsed by Bele Chere, a huge street fair which was held every summer in downtown Asheville from 1979 to 2014. Now the Apple Festival is THE street fair in this region.

We had a lot of fun. I didn’t have a lot of money to spend (most of it being spent in Florida last week), but we walked around and looked at the local arts and crafts, and I stopped for an apple slushie and all three of us shared a funnel cake (which was so filling it turned out to be my dinner). You can’t go to a fair and not have funnel cake! And of course, I bought a bag of apples to take home.

“How to Be a Gentleman” and “How to Be a Young Lady” — mandatory reading for Millennials?

I don’t like to drive after dark because I have such terrible night vision, so I left just before sunset, while the kids decided to stay longer and then go out to a movie. On the way home, I saw the most incredible sunset (which rivaled any I saw over the Gulf of Mexico last week), unobscured by trees or mountains. I grabbed my camera and took a picture of it while driving back home on I-26 (I DO NOT recommend doing this!)

Outside my bedroom window.

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Lucky Otters Haven has a new look.

Posted on September 3, 2016 by luckyotter

Boredom isn’t always the devil’s playground. Sometimes boredom is so intolerable it can lead you to desperate actions to rid yourself of its special kind of pain–actions like, hmm…getting falling down drunk, hitting the mall and buying a bunch of stuff you don’t even want, sleeping the day away, eating an entire roll of chocolate chunk cookie dough, watching Internet porn, having sex with strangers, building a giraffe made out of toothpicks, crafting a voodoo doll of your narcissist ex (hey, if anyone has ever done this, can you post a picture of it, pretty please?), or…remodeling your blog.

So that’s what I did. I’m too scared to change my whole theme yet (I’m still on Twenty Ten) because of my (probably irrational) phobia about losing everything or the slightly more likely nightmare of my blog becoming FUBAR, or at the very least, all my Shares and Likes disappearing. But t I did make some pretty drastic changes within the same theme: the title font, the background, the header graphic, the sub-header, and the color scheme.

I think this look is more eye catching and the fonts and font background colors easier to read. I also think the new sub-head (up in the header graphic) fits my new focus–while I still will cover personality disorders (especially Cluster B disorders), narcissistic abuse, and healing, I realize that only about 60-70% of my posts have much or anything to do with those topics. I cover a lot of other topics that interest, inspire, or entertain me too, and have been doing so for awhile. So I wanted a sub-header that might attract followers and readers who just like general purpose blogs that have a lot of different kinds of content.

I also took the apostrophe out of Otters, so now the title is Lucky Otters Haven instead of Lucky Otter’s Haven. I think the look is cleaner, and it isn’t ungrammatical either, because I know I’m not the only otter here swimming up from the dark and murky waters of a traumatic past. I kept the word “borderline” in there because it’s an important part of this blog’s focus and my recovery, but it’s far from being my only focus. I wanted to draw less attention to BPD being an affliction, even though it is (BPD is to Marburg Virus what NPD is to Ebola) and more to the unusual and sometimes surreal vantage point it gives me when looking at myself and this crazy, horrible, and wonderful world I find myself a part of.

I hope everyone likes the facelift and new attitude. Please feel free to let me know if you think it could be even better or even if you hate it. I do listen to suggestions and unlike real otters, I don’t bite (well not usually, anyway).

On September 10th, this blog will be entering its Terrible Twos!

I can hardly believe it’s been that long and at the same time, it seems like I’ve been doing this forever. That’s next weekend. I’ll be doing a big post about all the changes Lucky Otter’s Haven has gone through since its inception, including screenshots (thanks to The Wayback Machine) of what this blog has looked like over time since September 2014.

Meet and Greet: 9/3/16

Posted on September 3, 2016 by luckyotter

An AutoZone commercial actually told me what was wrong with my car.

Posted on September 3, 2016 by luckyotter

I know the watermarks on the black background kind of ruin the effect here, but it still made me scream with laughter when I saw it.

It’s hard to wrap my head around this, but a commercial actually solved a problem I was having.

Or might have.

About two weeks ago, I stupidly left the gas cap on the back of my car while I was filling up my tank and then forgot to screw it back on. I decided, since there’s a little door over it and some kind of metal flap over the hole, that I didn’t need to go buy a new one.

Everything seemed fine until about 3 days ago, when that blasted “check engine” light came on. I had flashbacks to when my dying Ford Taurus’s “check engine” light wouldn’t go off for over two years so every year at inspection time I had to go through the unbelievably complicated process of obtaining a waiver from the DMV and spend about $200 or more to get that waiver.

I fretted and fumed and gnawed at the hard keratinized skin on the sides of my fingernails over the sudden appearance of the “check engine” light. I prayed it wasn’t something like the cylinders misfiring, as was the case with the old Taurus I finally sold (that car had 6 cylinders and “ran” on about three of them). But other than that unnerving engine light, everything seemed fine. The engine wasn’t bucking or stalling or having trouble getting started in the morning and besides, a full tune up was done just before I bought this car last March (it’s a ’99 Toyota Corolla).

Yesterday on my way home, I heard an AutoZone commercial. It empathized with me about how traumatizing the “check engine” light can be, and then it told me it could be caused by a missing gas cap.

Hearing that was like finding out that a swollen mole you thought might be cancer is just a garden variety mole with a pimple hiding under it. Dare I hope? I rushed over to the nearest AutoZone (there’s one on my corner) and approached a friendly looking staff member behind the counter.

“Is it really true a missing gas cap can cause my check engine light to go on?” I asked the man at the counter. “Your commercial told me that’s what it could be. Is it really true?” I continued, excitedly. He must have thought I was a complete idiot but I didn’t care. I just wanted my problem resolved and thought he might be my man.

“Yes, it’s true, because without it, oxygen can get into the fuel line and interfere with the engine’s running, ” the smiling (or was it smirking?) clerk informed me. Then he presented me with a new gas cap for my car’s model. It came in a tiny little cardboard box and everything. I was told I’d have to run the car for about 50-75 miles before I could expect to see the engine light go off. In a day or so, I’ll let you know if it worked.

8 good things about fall.

Posted on September 3, 2016 by luckyotter

Alright, fine. I hate fall (see my last post), but it does have a few redeeming traits. I can name them on one hand plus three fingers. See? I can be fair.

The end of flea season. If you’re a pet owner, you know exactly why this is important. Especially if you’re sensitive to their bites, the way I am.
No more blisteringly hot, humid, days that make you feel like you’re covered in glue and cause your hair to frizz up and your clothes to stick to you like ColorForms™, and cause tempers to flare.
No more bugs.
You don’t have to mow the grass anymore. Or at least you can mow it a lot less.
Halloween is kind of fun, and Christmas always turns out to be nice, in spite of the dreaded, over-commercialized “holiday season” that precedes it starting around Labor Day.
You don’t feel guilty about sleeping in on weekends, or get that awful feeling that you might be missing something because you wasted your day lying in bed.
Pumpkins are overrated and taste like garbage, but they do look sort of bright and happy sitting out there on a patch of grass covered with leaves. Gourds are nice too.
The smell of wet fallen leaves, fattening baked goods (except pumpkin pies, ew), and fires.