Your Thoughts Now...v5

it is cold and raining outside much like autumn weather and all i want to do is curl up in my bed with my books and my notebooks and my mac....the heat of the machine is great on my lap because the radiator in the room isn't working very well.

i keep thinking about what a colleague told me on the shop floor yesterday as i was saying my goodbyes to various people before i left. she told me 'my dear let me tell you that all your dreams, all that you've ever wished or hoped for will come true. happiness will be with you - trust me'. 24 hours later her words are still ringing in my head - this after my nightly prayers asking for comfort and reassurance. it couldn't have been more blatant a sign.

her kindness made such an impact on me - more than any material gift anyone could have given me as a parting gift. it reminded me that the things most valuable really can never be bought.

it also reminded me that gifts of incredible value can come not just from the ones you love but sometimes from complete strangers as well.

i keep hearing it in my head....'my dear let me tell you that all your dreams, all that you've ever wished or hoped for will come true. happiness will be with you - trust me'.

not a bad playlist in my head i say.

Jagged Little Pill

is the album of my life.

i know every lyric of every song - well almost. including 'your house' which was a hidden track in the original CD pre-Ipod days.

when it first came out, it officially became the anthem album of all the angry, angsty, depressed and vengeful. i guess the janis joplin pop equivalent of my generation.

'hand in my pocket', 'you ought to know' and 'ironic' were constantly on repeat in my head.

then i got into psychotherapy, got medicated a bit. the same way we go through music depending on what's going on in our life, the album was relegated to the bottom of my CD pile.

i completely forgot about it. then ten years after it came out, alanis re-made the cd completely re-doing the arrangements using an acoustic approach.

i didn't know what to expect. when i bought it, i stared at the packaging for some time trying to recall how MUCH I LOVED this album. strangely, i was frightened a bit remembering how incredibly angry i was with myself and with life when i loved this album so much.

except at that point, i wasn't angry anymore.

it took me a few days to unwrap the CD and when i finally summoned up the guts to listen to it, i realized alanis had grown up with me.

the acoustic arrangement gave the lyrics a whole new feel. it was as if, the angry woman gave way to someone who was wiser.

it was a world of a difference - those two versions. its like two different women: the first was someone who just discovered her power and was enjoying inflicting it on every person. the second was someone who finally recognized that real power is acceptance of the fact that occasionally we will be powerless, but it will be alright because, as with all things in this life, good or bad, everything will eventually pass.

when a woman is 25, she rages and demands for the world to accept her on her own terms. when a woman is 35, provided she has learned to live a little, the woman has accepted herself on her own terms and no longer gives a damn whether the world feels the same way.

that is the difference between the two versions of both albums.

or maybe, in the absence of anything better to do, i am trying too hard to justify why this album just won't quit my playlist. ever.

Only Love Is Real

thinking about the new book i am reading about 'many lives, many masters' by dr. brian weiss.

he's a pyschiatrist who's a super hotshot in the medical world in his field. and the proponent of reincarnation and past lives based on the groundbreaking psychotherapeutic treatment he embarked on with a patient that set him on this course.

because of his reputation as a firm scientist, he has escaped the ridicule that would have been likely to follow him. instead, he has opened the door to people opening their minds to the thought that while we all would like to think that we have only one life to live, we actually have many - one after the other.

the basic tenet is that we are all essentially spirits aiming to achieve the highest level of spirituality. we are all then sent to live physical lives because each physical life teaches us lessons. in order to progress to a higher spiritual state, we MUST learn our lessons and not learning them means being sent back progressively over several lifetimes until we learn. and that the physical state is the lowest state we can ever be in because unlike a soul, the physical body cannot transcend time and space.

albert einstein knew this in his soul before anyone else did. only someone who was tapping into the wisdom of the infinite universe could ever have realized time and space is relative from the point of the universe where you are standing from.

i imagine that einsten is now in a spiritual level further on than many of us.

this is not a wisdom alien to us, from way back thousands of years ago. all religions have their own tenets about reincarnation including that of christianity. it was only erased from the bible by then emperor constantinople and his mother because they feared it would make people complacent and not repent for their sins if they were allowed to believe that we make up for our lack over a course of many lives instead of just one.

i've always believed in reincarnation ever since i was a child who stumbled across it in my readings. yes - i was a strange child who read about many things that were very strange for a child to read.

it's as if this knowledge has always been part of me - and reading about it made intuitive sense to me. when i read about it, i just knew without a shadow of a doubt about its truth.

many times in my life, i meet people for the first time and we feel as if we've known each other forever. some that i meet first time, i intensely dislike for no reason - as if this person had hurt me before and i was being warned by some supernatural signal to stay away.

many times i experience the sense of having been somewhere before, though i have only been there the first time. of knowing, a certain moment had happened before and sometimes even recalling the previous times when i remember that a certain moment had happened to me before, twice or even thrice.

and it's not just me. everyone gets it too. everyone gets their own moments. some are more aware of it than others.

the book also says, over the course of many lifetimes, the same people are often with us. sometimes changing roles, in one life they are our father and in the next our neighbor, in the next our lover. their roles alter depending on what lessons our souls need to learn.

sometimes though someone appears in our lives whom we have never known before. but everyone we meet is pre-destined. NOTHING and NO ONE in our life is a coincidence. what we do with them, how we choose to treat them, what we experience with them whether we learn from them or to distance ourselves from them is OUR CHOICE.

and in the choices we make, we weave our own karma that will determine the circumstances for our progressive lives. ultimately, our life and our future lives will be woven by our own hands, dictated by the choices of our own hearts.

controversially, it also says, our souls choose the next moment when we will again be re-born. and when we will die. and that we actually choose who to be born to.  perhaps, every lifetime is meant to begin with the lesson of acceptance - for as physical beings we always believed we can never choose our parents thus, who we come from. and it is a startling concept to actually be faced with.

that dying is one experience of indescribable immense peace, freedom from any kind or state of pain and luminosity.

that when we die, our souls move to a place where we converse with other souls, where higher spirits tell us what we learned in our lives and what we still have yet to learn. then after our soul is ready, we are again re-born: at a time of our choosing and to parents of our choosing as well.

it also says, essentially, we are all souls linked together into a common universe.

above all, it says nothing ever really lasts in every lifetime - not disease, not war and not even death. when we die, only our souls and love remain.

ultimately, it says, only love is real.

even if you will never believe in reincarnation because you won't or can't understand it, surely you understand and believe that in the end - ONLY LOVE IS REAL.

KICK-ASS

kicks ass - MAJORLY.

possibly one the of the best interpretations of the overly used 'coming of age' theme i have seen in a long time.

i realized, my children will grow up in a world that i could really never have imagined. where with the help of a tiny screen streaming images, superstars from nowhere are suddenly born. justin bieber, susan boyle, panacea, julie and julia.....

its easy to see how someone could imagine superheroes being born. its easy to understand how all the power of this technology could make anyone imagine or aspire to levels that perhaps ordinary humans twenty years ago would never have thought to aspire to.

it's a story of self-discovery that this generation can all relate to, understand. it is a generation, which i hope, is smart enough to actually understand the metaphors the movie used. they are all regurgitated universal storylines brought to life with a modern interpretation of violence softened by the fantastic sheen of a comic book.

a mad man's twisted desire for revenge born out of love, a daughter's desire for her father's approval, a young man's dilemma of being asked to choose between the truth about kick-ass and the truth about his father's character, a young man's ambitions to be larger than himself and aspirations to human nobility temporarily being shelved for teenage love and most of all, sex with the hottest girl he has ever known.

watching the movie made me feel like a teenager reading a comic book - at some points you are so engrossed you begin to believe you ARE HIT-GIRL then the hilarity of the cleverly devised action stunts of the pint-sized angelina jolie wannabe takes over and you realize, hey it's a moving film of a comic book.

the movie is incredibly clever, amusing, entertaining and imaginative. it also has a smashing soundtrack.

"What do they know about us?
Are they thinking of somebody else?
Are they wondering what we might be?
Are they thinking of you or of me?

We are the dream
No other way
To be

We are young
We are strong
We're not looking for where we belong

We're not cool
We are free
And we're running with blood on our knees"

KICK-ASS by MIKA.

KICK-ASS is one of the COOLEST MOVIES i have seen in a very long time. don't wait as long as i did to see it.

You Know You Are a Woman When...

you are down to your last 80 pounds, it is five days away from your next payday but when you find the pair of kurt geiger boots you've been lusting for on sale, marked down to £80 from the original £180 because YOUR size happens to be the LAST pair they have and they just want to get rid of it, you GLADLY fork over the money.

you try on 2 sizes of jeans - one which is slightly too small and your muffin top belly is sort of hanging over the edge and one fits you just right but of course the fact that it is a larger size than what you tell people you are just bothers you to death. you take half an hour dilly-dallying in the fitting room as to which one to take, you wisely take the larger size because muffin top bellies horrify you but right when you are at the till, you walk out of the line, grab the smaller size pair, you quickly run out of the shop once they have bagged it and you immediately tell yourself 'right NO carbs for the month'. you then spend the remainder of the day torturing yourself with thoughts of all those times you shoved cake in your mouth when your brain was telling you STOP.

you have several pairs of granny panties which you wear when you have your period because they hold your pads firmly, they're super comfy because they hug your cramping woman's belly and heck there is ABSOLUTELY no chance your man will catch you wearing them because it's that time of the month.

you intuitively know the difference between beige, cream, eggshell, taupe, off-white and champagne.

you always keep checking out other women's bodies and you always tell yourself 'wow at least i don't have her saddlebag thighs/bulging belly/flabby arms/fat legs/droopy boobs'

every time you see a woman with a better bag than yours, you want to rip it away from her and hit her on the head with it. several times.

you can psychically feel pain in your feet when you see another woman trying to rock the latest 7 inch gladiletto (the gladiator-stilletto) but is miserably failing with every mincing step she takes.

you can spot the woman wearing spanx under her clothes without the help of infrared vision goggles.

you stop to hold open the door for another woman pushing her baby pram with one hand while holding her toddler's hand in another. you also chastise the man sitting on the tube to get up and give the pregnant woman standing beside you his seat.

you never go back to the shop where you, in the effort to be friendly, asked the shop assistant 'when is the baby due?' and she told you 'i'm not pregnant actually'. in fact recalling the memory makes you go beet red.

you want to take every crying child and lonely puppy into your arms, make them feel safe and loved and spoil them rotten for the rest of their lives - and you want Clive Owen to do the same for you.

you LOVE, ADORE and WORSHIP Oprah.

you order a diet coke because a regular coke is just WAY too much to go with the double-double-bacon-double cheese-onion ring burger with supersize fries with garlic-mayo dip.

you like to mess with your man's head by asking him 'damned with whatever the response will be' questions like 'do my jeans make my bum look saggy?', 'is my eyeshadow even?', 'does my lipstick make my teeth look yellower?', 'does my new hair color make my skin look sallow?'

you decide what starter and entree to order by first looking at the dessert menu.

you end up coming in late to work because the outfit you decided to wear last night was too tight in the morning because of PMS bloating, which irritated the hell out of you, which made you rip out all the clothes in your closet and scatter all over the bed and the floor in the desperate attempt to find something suitable to wear, which made you angrier, which made you pull out your FAT trousers and FAT top, which you then decided to wear for work, which made you MISERABLE because they make you feel fat, which makes you even angrier because you came in to work late and you spend the rest of the day feeling angry, miserable, tardy and FAT.

you read my entire list and laughed your head off at every single one of them, screaming 'OH MY GOD THAT IS SOOOOOOOO TRUE!!!!!!!!!!!! I CAN SOOOOOOOOOO RELATE TO IT'.

Susan Boyle and The Phenomenon of All Your Wildest Dreams Come True (or so you think)

i was one of those who watched susan boyle's initial audition and like many people in britain and pretty much all over the world, wept buckets for her and silently prayed she would win the top prize.

she was crowned first runner-up but actually ended up the big winner. youtube virtually guaranteed she would.

overnight, this woman who previously lived alone with her cat in a small scottish village, outsold rihanna, shakira and adam lambert. those glossed up, writhing, rude boy, glambert people didn't hold a candle to this woman who even with the best makeover teams on both sides of the atlantic still managed to look like your everyday aged, spinster auntie, albeit a much more glam version.

even elaine paige, whom susan boyle idolized, could only throw a hissy fit about susan's success, calling her 'a virus'. this brought on no doubt by the green monster. susan after all, has achieved what most emerging british artists dream about, which is to break america and boy, break it she did. sorry elaine paige - i don't ever recall your name being mentioned while i was in america nor did my american relatives ever mention knowing you. they do know about susan boyle though.

susan boyle's 'i dreamed the dream' has become officially, the fastest selling launch album of ANY female artist. take that lady gaga.

i think every single artist who launched their album at the same time susan did are continually scratching their heads as to how this woman outsold them all.

i think the formula is simple - everyday in every part of the world, there are millions upon millions of us living lives like the one susan had before she stepped out of the house to audition. millions of us, who live like zombies, wake up, go to work, go home, go to sleep and wake up to the same boring humdrum life. during our most lucid moments, the occasional thought hits us 'is this the rest of how my life is going to be?' which strikes momentary fear into our hearts. however, the more anesthetized of us manage to push this question away and fall back into the same life simply because it is easier.

this was susan boyle for 47 years. alone in a little village in scotland with only her cat. that was her life and it certainly looked like it was going to be that way.

however, one day, one of us sleeping millions, will just suddenly decide, we are tired of asking 'is this how the rest of my life going to play out?'

and just like susan, she decided, what the heck, i'm going out to audition. and voila - destiny intervened and with the almighty power of the internet her life changed in a heartbeat.

susan represents all those sleeping millions who still one day hope that, by some lucky stroke of fate, prayer or even freak coincidence, their boring lives will one day too change overnight. one day, they will wake up and find that all their wildest dreams have all come true.

but in the case of susan boyle, instant fame meant heartaches she couldn't have ever anticipated like paparazzi intrusion. gossip about her psychological meltdowns have been rife and i do believe she is still waiting for her first kiss.

all your wildest dreams come true or so you think.....

granted, i don't think susan ever regrets having stepped out of her house to audition that day. meltdowns and waiting for your first kiss to still happen are considerably softened by a few million pounds in the bank. like my aunt always used to say 'you know whats worse than being miserable? its being miserable WITHOUT money'

perhaps though every now and then, she thinks, 'i thought this was all my dreams come true...but i guess not quite...but it's still a heck of a LOT better than my previous one...HARHARHAR take that elaine paige' (cue paparazzi flashbulbs leading to psychological meltdown at this point).

i'm a full believer in chasing dreams and never compromising what we have always wished for ourselves. even if what we want for ourselves changes every now and then. and i don't believe in any way that susan boyle is a cautionary tale of 'be careful of what you wish for'.

i believe you should go on the roller coaster ride that is your dream but be prepared to occasionally be sick and for the possibility to even vomit your guts out when the ride is over.
at the end of the day, i've found that sometimes the prize isn't necessarily the goal you set out to achieve - the real prize is having the balls to have done it anyway such that reaching the goal only becomes the icing on the cake.

that's why there's only one susan boyle. that woman had the balls to say, 'ok i'm sick of this being my life - i'm going out there to audition knowing full well I will be jeered at and ridiculed but what the heck? people already ridicule my life anyway so here goes nothing'.

what's the line? be afraid but go ahead anyway.

i heart susan boyle still..

now....who in the world won britain's got talent again last year and where the heck are they? just asking..........