How To Survive An Election When Your Significant Other Supports the Opponent

Well, the election is over. It was a bloody match and it looks like it will take months for our nation to heal. But one thing that’s still intact is my relationship with my boyfriend.

I told him from the beginning that I would NOT discuss politics no matter what. He tried to get me to talk about it too. He would craftily mention little things he’d seen on the news or little talking points that the candidates had been discussing.

One time he came right out and asked, “Who are you voting for?”

But I stood my ground. I refused to discuss the election. “Look,” I said, “we can talk about you farting in bed or me using your razor to shave my legs. But we are NOT discussing the election.”

So, I’m happy to report that my relationship with my BF is still great. In fact, he texted me last night, when everyone knew that all was lost for Hillary and said, “It’s looking better. She could still win.” He said this even though he doesn’t really like her. But he said it to make me feel better.

Regardless of what side you were on, say or do something that makes someone feel better. Don’t rub it in their face! Don’t twist the knife in their back. Be kind. Just this once, say or do something unselfish!!! That’s how our nation will heal … if we start to forgive, let things go, care, pray for each other. Things will start to get better if we can just learn to be kinder and more forgiving. 

Cousin Jody Tries Out for Jeopardy!

After cousin Jody’s Wheel of Fortune fiasco, he was quite eager to go on other shows. Turns out that once you’ve been on one game show, it’s easier to get on others. And the show producers never do check to see how you did and whether you were successful. They just assume that you were the average contestant who won a little money and had some fun.

They should not have assumed that with Jody. So he heard about auditions to be a contestant on Jeopardy! I says, “Jody, dude, you know I love you. You’re like family to me."So he nods and says, “Yeah, well I am your cousin…soooo."

I smile and nod, “Okay, sure, but the point of this conversation is that you’re not smart enough to go on Jeopardy! Even if you lie and get someone else to take the test and all that, I mean, you know?”

I watched him. He knew what I was talking about but he was prolonging my agony. “So, I’m not the brightest bulb in the drawer? Is that what you’re saying?”

I sighed. “Finally, you get the message. Don’t make a fool out of yourself, man! You won’t get one answer right and then you’ll be that poor slob who couldn’t make it into Final Jeopardy!”

So Jody laughs. “You just don’t get me, do you cuz? After all these years, you still don’t get me.”

I changed my stance. “Jody, baby! You know I do, but sometimes you get these wild-eyed crazy ideas and I have to talk you off the ledge. You know I’m only looking out for you.”

He took two steps forward, reached out and hugged me. “You go with me. The reason I screwed up on Wheel of Fortune is because you weren’t there.” He stepped back. “This time, you go with me and we’ll have a blast.”

I sighed. “Los Angeles... Gawd! My worst favorite place on earth.”

He laughed. “Don’t you mean your least favorite?”

“Nah! I meant worst favorite. If I’m going to LA with you to be on Jeopardy! then I gotta start practicing my crazy right now.”

He laughed and laughed and I did too. Then we went online to check out the test you had to take to be a Jeopardy! contestant. How hard could it be?

I See My Life Like...

I see my life like

Rushing water

Falling over a steep hill

I see my life like

Crazy flashes of lightening

Sometimes brilliant, sometimes frightening

I see glimpses of my past

So beautiful at times,

But so troubling

Melodies emerge from a vast chasm

Angelic voices break into singing…

And then there’s silence

For the space of eons.

I see a lonely figure

Climbing a grassy hill

Struggling to reach the top

I hear soft sobs,

Like those of a child

While dark Beings

Watch from a distance

Whispering….

 

I see my life

Moving back into alignment now

The worlds are whirring again in perfect harmony

No longer on a collision course with God

Peace comes … at last!

Carolyn L. Sorrell - Copyright© September 27, 2016 – All Rights Reserved

Things to Talk About In and Out of the Bedroom

My boyfriend came over this afternoon and we were talking and he says, “Who are you voting for?”

So I said, “Look, we’ve been seeing each other for 4 years and we’ve never had an argument, so I’m not telling you.”

So then, it got to be really important for him to make me tell him. Why are people like this? If you say NO! they just start trying to find a workaround. So he told me all the good and bad points of every candidate and I said, “Why don’t you get into politics? You know a lot about it.”

He started shaking his head, “Nah! I wouldn’t like it and blah, blah, blah!”

So I answered back, “Well, see, that’s why we have low-life people who have flunked out of everything in life that they’ve tried to do. Trump has flunked out of parenthood, marriage, business and everything he sets his hand to do fails miserably. So now he thinks he’ll try his hand at politics.”

So Kel says, “Aha! You’re voting for Hillary!”

He got it out of me. Crucial, top secret information. He should be working for the CIA. So I replied, “Yes, but I’m still not arguing with you.”

I tried to change the subject. “Did you know that Obama follows me on Twitter?”

His eyes got big. “Really? I’m gonna start sending you texts to tweet.”

I laughed. “Yeah, I’ll be sure and relay your messages to the prez.”

So he laughed too. But he is the type of guy who would be great in politics. He sees every side of an argument or situation. He rarely gets mad. He’d rather just have civilized debates on topics instead of big ugly arguments. 

This is exactly the type of guy we want running for office but most of the time, these people will say, “NO! I don’t want to be involved in politics! It’s too dirty, ugly and slow to get anything done.”

That leaves us with the dregs of humanity in high political offices. It’s kind of sad and really bad for our nation. 

This time, we have very limited and somewhat troubling presidential options on both sides of the fence. But what about next time? Whose gonna run in 2020? What if people like Beyonce and Kanye West decide THEY want to try their hand at politics?

What if Jimmy Fallon or Ellen Degeneres want to be prez? Imagine a world where Dr. Phil is president....

So next time, hopefully, we'll get great, intelligent candidates to choose from or maybe Donald Duck will run against Mickey Mouse. That would be a Goofy race! (All puns intended.)

September 2016-Carolyn L. Sorrell - All Rights Reserved

I Am

As a Searcher, I've always tried to discover the meanings of important things like Life, Death, Love, Hatred and Cruelty. During my journey, I've learned many things but at the top of my list are these two: I know who I am and I know who God is.



If you don't learn anything else during your brief visit to Earth, try to learn those two things and the rest of it will just fall into place.

I am the grass
And you are the rain
I am the leaf
And you are the tree

I am the petal
And you are the rose

I am the star
And you are the sun
I am the dust
And you are the whirlwind

I am the morning
And you are the sunset
I am the child
And you are the Father

Copyright © Carolyn L. Sorrell – May 2012 – All Rights Reserved

Country Girls and Hunting Trips

Today, I passed a field on the way home where a Combine moved up and down long rows, cutting hay or perhaps barley; it’s too early for wheat I think. It made me recall a childhood memory.

I was 7 or 8 and down at my Aunt Millie’s house swimming in her pond. Uncle Jonas was outside with some of the farm hands preparing for a weekend hunting trek. Uncle Jonas and Aunt Millie owned over a 1,000 acres of rich east Texas farmland. They had all the latest farm equipment—plows and combines and plenty of workers.

The men—and the boys who were old enough—were preparing for a hunting trip that night. With an air of adventure and purpose, they loaded their pickup trucks with food and gear. They usually hunted in the deepest parts of the woods, an area they called Foggy Bottoms, guaranteed to be overrun with snakes and ticks.

Over fifty hound dogs danced around in the moonlight in an excited ballet they always did before any such endeavor. The noise and commotion was deafening and I watched on curiously from a pond across the road wondering at the strange ritual.

What could make a man leave the comfort of his warm living room and traipse out into dark, dangerous woods with over a dozen men and boys and 50 hound dogs just to shoot a few raccoons and coyotes?

I still live in a small rural town where young girls wear Levi’s fastened with nickel-plated belt buckles in the shape of Texas. The boys are tall and lanky from years of pitching hay. Boys that grew up taking midnight journeys with their uncles and fathers into deep woods on dark nights accompanied by a legion of hounds, howling at the moon and coyotes.

You shun being thought of as ‘country’ when you’re a teen. You hate being associated with these simple folks, but the older I get, the more I realize how much a part of me these sights and sounds are. Maybe it’s time to embrace my roots and stop running from them. Once we acknowledge where we came from, we begin to really see who we are. The world comes into perfect view.

Old Dogs New Tricks

Old dogs and new tricks. That's how it feels. I took this new job last January and it looked overwhelming at first. They use tools I'd never heard of before like Slack, Jira and Consensus. But my bottom line is paying the rent. I’m just too old to be living under a bridge so I had to figure it out and it hasn’t been too bad. I’ve learned the stuff, made some friends and had some laughs along the way.

My Project Manager is always saying that I’m doing a great job. Thanks Steve! It helps to hear that you aren’t failing miserably at something.

When it was time to head out to New Orleans after Katrina, I wrestled with those same doubts and fears and there were very real threats to my survival daily. Again, my bottom line was the money. With no investment portfolio, wealthy husband or big savings account, I must always be hustling to pay the bills. In all fairness though, that’s not a bad thing. It has given my life direction.

I really want to be the best at everything I do, but I guess we all look around at our lives from time to time and think: “Damn! You sure screwed this up!”

I think it’s easy to lose your perspective. We get so focused on the elements that make up our lives and then we forget to step back sometimes and take in the whole view.

I’m alone in the world. But on the other hand, I don’t have lots of noise and confusion to deal with. If the kitchen’s messy, I can leave it that way for days and no one complains.

Next week I will celebrate another birthday, but I don’t feel so old that I can’t learn new things. I try to learn new things every day. Sometimes these are common sense lessons and sometimes the knowledge is specialized. Sometimes its personal stuff and sometimes, I learn things that make me a better human.

Once on Star Trek, one of the aliens called humans, “Ugly bags of mostly water”. I think that’s fairly accurate. But we’re so much more complex than that. We can be brilliant and inspiring and we can be dumb as dirt. We can invent amazing machines but we can also invent things like the “Beer Hat”.

The coolest thing about us is that once we all get united and work together on a project, we can crank out some pretty incredible stuff. Unfortunately, we get too easily side-tracked by nonsense like skin color, religion, sexual preference and the like.

In my religion, Christianity, we’re all created equal by one great God and we all have a purpose and a destiny. What so often happens is that we forget this or no one tells us to begin with and then we just drift aimlessly, which leads down dark paths sometimes. When you get several million humans in that predicament, it’s a mess!

So let’s take a step back from where we are today and start over. Let’s agree to love and forgive each other, even the wierdoes. Let’s stop killing each other and find something we can agree on. At the end of the day, we all love our families and we want to get home to them safely each day. That makes sense, doesn’t it?

True Confessions

Years ago, there was a cheesy magazine called "True Confessions". People would give the reporters their true-life stories of awful things they had done. These days, that's so common that we hardly turn our heads anymore for unmarried women having babies out of wedlock and that sort of thing.

Still, I believe there's a market for that concept. The guy who created "Post Secret" had the right idea. He asked people to write their most embarrassing secret on one side of a postcard and mail it to him. It was a novel way of confessing your innermost secrets without anyone actually knowing it was you.

I remember one time when me and 4 other girls from church went out to eat after Saturday night services. We were all sitting around a big table at Applebees eating our salads. We were having a great time laughing and talking, but somehow we got on the topic of secrets.

Everyone said they were very open books and had no real deep dark secrets. I told the truth though. I said:

“I was born into a world of Secrets. I’ve held some secrets in my heart for many years.”

I went through all those 12 steps and 16-week programs where you get totally healed of addictions and co-dependency etc.

I got a lot of healing there and at other times in my life, but I still don’t see the good in revealing my secrets. All those people are now dead. I’m the last surviving member of my family that I grew up with. I managed – somehow – to outlive them.

My autobiography will be finished this year and published on Amazon. In it, I share my life’s story…the good, the bad, the ugly.  It’s called “The Woman With Two Birthdays” and in it, I share the story of being born into a world where you were NOT wanted. How it feels to be kicked around most of your life. There are too many people like this in our world.

What do you do if no one likes you the way you are? Do you just lay down and die? Or do you kick the shit out of those people and tell them AND LIFE that you ain’t goin' nowhere! You’re here and even though you're not perfect, you’re still a worthwhile human being. Get on board with that or get the hell outta my way!

That’s the thing about life. It either breaks you or it builds you into a real live human being made of flesh.

I’ll end with this: One of my “secrets” is that I’m a loner. I know God wants us humans to interact: hug, kiss, love on each other…we need to interact. But I’ve got such a commitment phobia that it paralyzes me. I can’t get even get a dog or a cat.

I prefer to stay to myself. When you love somebody, you give them power over you. Been there, did that…didn’t work out too well. I thought it all over and decided to grow old alone. Much safer. I am gradually trying to be more outgoing and friendly though.

I thought that developing a few friendships might be a good start for me. The thing is, that once you move into your own little web that basically has NO HUMANS in it, you forget how to socially interact.

That has kind of surprised me…my lack of social interaction skills. I feel like a pimply-faced teenager sometimes…awkward, like I don’t know what to say to people or how to act around them. I think I have pretty good “Cover-up” skills though.

I generally play it off so people don’t find out the truth: I just don’t have strong personal interaction skills!!!

That’s my True Confession for the day. What’s yours?