Perhaps, other gay men feel this way too but I always felt a unique connection with the ladies in my life. Growing up, my lovely gal-pals would always come to me with their problems and use me as a sounding board when dealing with break ups, friendship drama, family issues and of course fashion choices.
Their strength and overcoming such battles was truly an inspiration to me. What can be so powerful about friendship is that two souls have the ability to lift each other up, guide each other and support each other in more ways then one.
Maybe having that balance and unconditional love is what really makes the relationship between women and gay men so special. Yes, we have been known to have similar interests but there is an indescribable energy of pure joy when we are in the same room. A good example of this was when I was going through my own moments of sadness and questioning my happiness. During the reality show filming, I met a woman that was an entrepreneur and philanthropist that came into my life at just the right time.
We quickly started a friendship and later began working together. She showed me all that life has to offer outside of Hollywood. I learned about working internationally in the areas of real estate, fashion, finance, and business along with seeing other entrepreneurs build up their own companies and add value into the world. I started to feel a huge upward shift in my life, I was inspired by all the hard working people I met, the different cultures and new drive instilled in me.
I guess you can say the takeaway from all this is that what happens to you in life does not matter but what you become through those experiences is what is important. They are the forces that inspired me to start writing. With Gratitude, Matt Jacobi. Oh, come on. If you're alive and in America, you know them. I guarantee it. Stephanie is that supremely annoying woman on the Progressive Insurance television commercials. Not only that, you see her face every single time you open your home page.
Eric is the male version of Stephanie: he's the guy featured in the ubiquitous free credit report commercials. Honest to God, I would never ever consider buying - or even investigating - Progressive Insurance because I find their spokeswoman cloying, insipid and patronizing. And as far as my credit rating goes, I've never ever wondered about it - not once - and there is not one thing about hopping online to get a credit report that appeals to me, free or not.
Years ago, a financial advisor I know mentioned that the new found feeding frenzy over credit reports or "knowing your credit score" was something of a financial canard. In other words, if you need to know your number, you can assume it's probably too low. The reason I've titled the post this way is that apparently, at least when it comes to Stephanie, I'm in the minority. They call her "breezy. I can only hope these callers deep down understand she's an "actress," playing a role of some kind, although I can't quite figure out what exactly she's supposed to be.
To me, she's aggravating, not approachable. She's unctuous and smug. I'd run in the other direction if someone with her style and manner tried to talk to me about insurance. But again, that's me.
Maybe I am mostly alone in my perspective here. She does seem to keep getting work so there must be some return on this investment for Progressive.
More troubling is the report of people calling the company and asking to speak to Steph or have her work up a policy for them. Could any of them be serious? Even just some of them?
Sometimes, I wish I were that clueless. Sometimes I feel too mean to live. Maybe therapy would help. I wouldn't mind getting some counseling, but only if I could sit across the room from Dr. Paul Weston for an hour or so every week. OK, so Paul is really Gabriel Byrne, playing a psychologist on television. What's the difference? Weston's Brooklyn office is located. And we worry about securing healthcare coverage for everyone in the country.
We should be more concerned about the number of citizens who think they can buy insurance by calling an actress who appears in a television commercial.
I'll bet for every one who called, there are ten at home who believe the same thing. We're doomed. Posted by renee at PM 4 comments:. I need to start paying attention to the annual rhythms of my life. It seems to me I go through similar kinds of feelings from season to season, from year to year.
Not that much gets resolves, mind you. But it does feel kind of cyclical. Example: like a lot of people, I usually find myself re-examining my life about mid-January every year. Once the holidays are behind us and a new year is underway, I spend a great deal of non-productive time thinking about my life and how exactly it has progressed to this point. I rethink my job, my personal life, my activities, my resolutions, my plans I've worked at the same place for more than twenty years, I've been married for almost twenty-three years and have no taken up a new hobby in forever.
I'm not sure I have any hobbies if I think about it. But it's too early for all that; this isn't the new year and the post-holiday brooding I engage in annually. No, it's the start of fall and if my personal history means anything, I'm entering into my Jane-Austen-is-a-goddess phase. Darcy ever conjured up by a casting director, Colin Firth. There must be something about the fall, the coziness of a room with a blanket, a cup of coffee or tea and a great story from Ms.
Austen that just cries out for some attention. It's a fall book, requiring a blanket and fading afternoon light. What would Jane do? In Elizabeth, we discover a woman who seemingly didn't spend a lot of time questioning her life. Well, maybe she did in some ways but let's face it, her choices were somewhat limited. Even so, I admire her resolute behavior, her independence, her intelligence and her feistiness.
I wish I had more of her and Jane in me. I doubt she ever spent one single second considering the shape of her thighs or her weight. She didn't regret her abs, her roots, or her wrinkles. She didn't buy product after product to address the size of her pores.
In fact, if she felt insecurity about her appearance, she kept it to herself. She never once seemed envious of anyone around her, although it could be reasonably said that many possessed more and had more opportunities afforded to them in life. She enjoyed the company of her friends and was attracted to particular men, but she never lost herself in her pursuit of friends or lovers.
I have to think that was mostly unheard of in actual life for Jane and the women who surrounded her. I need to be channeling a little more Jane and Elizabeth. For god's sake, at this point in my life, the insecurity is getting a little tiresome, even for me. Like the next time I see that "one simple rule to lose your belly fat" or whatever that ever-present ad is every home page I visit, I'll close it without so much as a pang of regret.
Maybe I won't click through another ad that will tell me how to get effective butt-shaping moves. And maybe I won't develop Michelle Obama's arms. I'll live.
I might not look my best, but I'll live. The question is: WWJD? She would note them with polite interest and move on. Okay, it's not much. But it's a start. Wednesday, September 02, I think this is what it means to come full circle. Something about my activity this last week feels very familiar. I walk into a neat, clean, welcoming room; a room that looks absolutely perfect but for the absence of its owner. I wander in and out of it from day to day, puffing up a pillow there, smoothing out an already smooth bedcover there.
The pictures are in place, the curtains hang neatly, and the little touches that make it unique remain intact from day to day. I know what this feels like. I remember sitting in a rocking chair, anticipating who would eventually live in that room, first cradled in my arms as we both swayed in that glider rocker, day after day, night after night. I remember how much I loved creating that baby space, anticipating my newborn.
So here I am, some eighteen years later, having witnessed three little boys who are not so little anymore leave their rooms behind. All three are enthusiastically making new homes for themselves in a college apartment or a dorm room this fall. Only the glider rocker remains from all those years ago, but its former occupants are otherwise occupied.
Well, not me, not really. The primary-colored plastic toys and stuffed animals are long gone. There is not even one cash machine receipt crumbled up on a desk, not one soggy towel draped on the floor, not one food wrapper or empty snack bag to be found. After housing years and years of living and laughs, years of sadness and tears, shouts and whispers, hugs and kisses, slammed doors and raucous debate, the rooms are strangely and unnaturally quiet. Each room has survived nicely, still standing after the challenges and missteps that define childhood.
I can only hope the same is true of their owners. I realize not every mother or father does this kind of nightly stroll down memory lane in what are now unoccupied bedrooms at home. Just standing in each room, looking around, quietly tells me each of their stories one more time.
Sure, the rooms look more pristine than they have in more than a decade but the stories remain. Now I spend some time anticipating my sons in a new way; imagining who and what they will be, this time as adults, not as my children.
Yes, the school breaks, the vacations, sure; the next several years — maybe more than that - will find us with at least part time occupants in those rooms again. Like the toys and games, our days of sitting in the glider rocker together are also long gone. What I hope remains, lingering in some way in those rooms and beyond those walls within each of us, is the familiar, comfortable feeling of home, of connection, of love.
Tuesday, September 01, This confounds me. It really does. As I stood at the checkout counter at a local bookstore, I came across a People magazine cover featuring a headline that confounded me. Here it is: Kate Strikes Back!! You won't be surprised to hear I didn't purchase it.
There she was, the ubiquitous Kate Gosselin. The subheads exclaimed: She's mortified about his affair with Hailey, feels like 'it's a fifteen-year-old I'm getting divorced from,' and finally, her explanation for Jon's behavior?
I can't think of anything that would compel me to do so. But even though that's the case, the media has done a bang-up job educating extraordinarily disinterested parties like me about every move the unhappy couple makes. At this point, I have to wonder: leaving people like me out of the equation, aren't even the fans of this show sick of these people yet?
I wondered what exactly Kate was striking back at these days. Could it be "the media? I'm sorry, but I have no sympathy for any of the adults in this little melodrama. The kids yes, the parents, no. Unfortunately, my feeling is that the kids don't have enough hours left in their lives for the therapy they're going to need with these two chuckleheads for parents.
The part that really, really gets to me, though, is Kate's best-selling book. Remember that? Just eleven months ago, this horror show found its way to the printed page and her fans snapped it up.
Where do you start with something like this? Let's go to the logical place: the dedication. Kate dedicated this to her husband: " Now I know you meant it when you said in your vows that you would be here 'through new and challenging experiences. The introduction talks about God's plan for them and how fulfilled they are as parents.
Published by Zondervan, a Christian publisher, each chapter opens with a quote from the Bible. I'm sure the Zondervan folks are wondering what the heck happened in the past few months. Let's recap. The book pubs in October, and by June, , the couple has separated. I don't know about you, but that sounds a bit like fraud to me. To your publisher and to the book-buying public, you are a Christian, spiritual, loving couple.
Eight months later, the marriage is over and the husband has a girlfriend? Let's go back a little further and consider the marketing savvy of this couple. Their sextuplets arrived in May, Fifteen months later, Discovery Health taped a few television "specials" about the family and by October , production had begun on a regular television show.
The show films three days a week and has been on the air regularly for more than two years. All this, while Kate was apparently drafting a book where they thank Jesus for the gifts he gave them and the strength to raise them. I know we like to watch misery. We wait for the car crashes at a race track. I think Kate and Jon and the rest of them have shared enough of their own particular type of train wreck with us, don't you?
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