Three Dozen

Today I turned three dozen. It's kind of fun to think of your age as a few sheets of cookies or cartons of eggs. And we only get to turn a dozen every 12 years, so I think that makes these birthdays kind of special.

I felt awfully lucky when Mr. W suggested (after making me bacon...mmm...and French toast for breakfast) that we go look at new couches during lunchtime. I LOVE furniture shopping. Even if I'm not buying anything. Going into home design stores is like going into candy factories (or wineries) for me. I get giddy.

Anyway, we've been cruising couch websites because of this:

And this:

And sometimes this:

Despite the fact that Mr. W has owned his couch for nine years and that some of our friends won't even come over to watch movies at our house because the couch is so tiny, the thing that finally pushed him over the purchase edge was the fact that he was getting too crowded by the cats.

So today he bought this (color has been fudged in Photoshop because the picture on the website was bright magenta):

What he doesn't realize is that even with all the space the new couch offers, the cats will likely still be right on top of us.

In the midst of our shopping, we stopped at Culver City's famous Tito's Tacos for lunch. I texted an old Yahoo! coworker to tell him I was there (it's his favorite) and he happened to be on his way there at the exact same time, so he joined us for lunch. Birthday luck.

As I sat munching on chips and salsa with post-couchal glow, I felt so happy to be having such a simple, yet wonderful birthday.

Not all the birthdays were like this. I can think of one that included sobbing in a bathtub in Carmel and another that involved a screaming match and throwing a certain present at a certain belligerent boyfriend. Those were all years before I met Mr. W, of course. Three cheers and four deep breaths for being drama-free at 36. Whew!

But something else is at play this birthday. A sort of calm mixed with excitement at the sense of possibility and openness I feel in my life right now. Last year's birthday was great, but I definitely felt stuck in a rut. Thirty-five felt heavy and confining. Likely because I was tied to the same job I'd been in for five years prior. I launched an Etsy store in an effort to spice things up.

Well, this year I wasn't exactly looking to spice things up—more so follow that sense of possibility toward something I'm really passionate about: dating and relationships. So I finally finished the book I've been tinkering with for 4 years, I self-published it and I started a new website to go with it.

Introducing The Path to Wonderful.com

I'm excited to dive into this world and hopefully make contact with some single gals (and guys!) who are anxious to learn more about dating and manifesting.

Now that I finally have the book and the site done, I'll finally be able to get back to reading all your blogs more frequently!

That's another thing that makes this birthday happy!

A Little Peek at Life in Our Bedroom...

Admit it: you only clicked on this post because you thought it was going to be about sex. You thought I was going to divulge some crazy story about how Mr. Wonderful and I tried the new KY mortise and tenon formula and it was AMAZING. Well we didn't. And that's not what this post is about. So pick your mind up out of the gutter, dust it off and check out how cute our duvet cover is. Right?

My real reason in writing this post was to showcase the super fantastic vintage Santa Barbara map Mr. W bought be for Christmas.

At the end of last year, one of the things we put on our 2011 To-Do list was to buy a nice print for the bedroom. We considered having one of Mr. W's pretty wine country photographs blown up or even buying a stock photo of a vineyard somewhere. Our goal was to hang something on the wall that would have us going to bed and waking up focused on where we wanted to land in the future. Hello, visualization and manifestation.

Mr. W hit the nail on the head with his purchase of this hand-drawn vintage map. It totally supports our dream of wormholing back to old-timey California farm days. Just kidding. But the simplicity of the rendering does underscore our desire to move to a simpler life somewhere. And there are even little drawings of some livestock, which we one day hope to own in the form of some sheep and a couple pygmy goats.

So there's our bedroom. I won't tell anyone about the pervy thoughts you were having when you first landed on this page...

Getting What You Believe You Deserve

When I was in D.C. last month and met up with my friend Geekhiker, a couple beers in the hotel bar led us into a rather intense conversation about dating and relationships. I, of course, started in on my beliefs that individuals create their love lives based on the kind of thoughts and energy they project into the world. What you put out comes back to you. Like attracts like. Focusing on what you DON'T want will likely draw that right to you. Yadda, yadda go read "The Secret" and "The Power of Intention."

After I reminded GH that I am convinced this mode of thinking is what brought Mr. Wonderful and I together, he came back at me with something to the effect of, "it was easy for you because you're thin and blonde."

This has been eating at me ever since.

First of all, weight and hair color do not automatically make you some sort of siren with the menfolks. There are a multitude of other necessary components, many of which I did not have figured out for a long time. Also, for the record, my teeth are off-center, I have freakishly long toes, my voice could belong to a muppet and, as we all know, sometimes my tongue smells. But all that aside, my biggest issue when dating was that I lacked confidence.

I was so concerned with all the flaws in the list above and so worried that I wasn't worldly enough or smart enough or just ENOUGH that I put out a vibe that screamed "I'm afraid I'll never find a man to love me!" And guess what: for a long time, I had a hell of a time finding a man who loved me!

It wasn't until I accepted who I was, got really comfortable with what I had to offer and what I was looking for in a partner, and started believing I WOULD find him that I actually had luck—and ultimately met the man of my dreams.

When I was single, a friend's father once told me, "You get what you believe you deserve," and now I see how dead on he was.

Believe in your heart of hearts that you deserve everything you desire, and you'll figure out a way to get it—whether you believe in manifesting or not. But if, on some level, you don't think you're worthy; if you question whether you're deserving of true happiness, I don't know that you will ever find it.

Remember what our moms all used to tell us: you can't love someone else until you learn to love yourself. And part of that loving is knowing the happiness you want  will come to you. Even if your tongue stinks and you have monkey feet.

Checking My Pulse

 

That beautiful covered pathway above is one of the streets that Mr. W and I walked along in Positano during our Italian honeymoon in May. Because neither of us had ever been there, everything we saw was a surprise. A delight. 

This is one of the things I love most about traveling. 

You can wander around, not really knowing where you're going, and experience something novel at every turn. Much different from trekking through familiar territory. 

Today I read a journal entry I wrote in July where I lamented the fact that I was feeling stagnant at work. I wrote about how I thought I should be appreciating the comfort of my cushy, stable job. And then I wrote about how I thought the problem was that discomfort made me feel more alive. 

Thus, the love of traveling to unfamiliar places. 

Now, I'm not talking major discomfort here. I don't need to be dropped in a jungle somewhere and contract a case of malaria to feel a sense of adventure. I just need some space for not knowing. A glimmer of possibility that my routine could get changed up or that I might stumble upon something totally unexpected and wonderful. Like a new office and time to work on my own writing projects...

When I wrote that entry in the summer, I was feeling really stuck. I didn't think it was "right" to walk away from a top company. I didn't want to abandon my coworkers or my boss when they've taken such good care of me these last 6.5 years. But I did want to feel alive. 

Funny how the Universe hears us when we put these things out to it. 

6 more days in the office. And then the adventure begins.

 

The Planifesto

Several months ago, I read this great article by Martha Beck about the importance of attaching adjectives to your life goals. She cited a couple different examples of people wishing for things—one woman thought she would find happiness by being her own boss, another by having a baby.

Unfortunately, both women failed to accurately investigate the details of their goals before charging ahead. The woman who aspired to be her own boss was really seeking a job with freedom. She quickly learned that starting your own company means you're tied down a lot of the time. The woman who wanted a baby thought it would finally make her feel fulfilled. But it also made her exhausted.

These examples got me to thinking about the life Mr. Wonderful and I are hoping to create over the next several years (or decade). We talk a lot about how things will be "when we move to the vineyard." But we haven't really tried to flesh out what that will look like. And as I learned from dating, you gotta put color to the details (and then stick to them) or you end up with some really unflattering shades...

After all the wedding hoopla finally faded, I decided that Mr. W and I should sit down and start listing our adjectives. Penning our descriptors might help us to start paving the path.

So I found an empty notebook. The French cat one above (which Mr. W actually bought me in Barcelona at the gift shop inside La Pedrera) and we sat down with a glass of wine and brainstormed. The hope is that we will continue to fill the book with ideas, and by the time we've covered each sheet of paper, we'll be well on our way to living the list.

Here's a little peek at what we have so far:

• blissful • peaceful • low maintenance • fun • easy • rich in experiences • satisfying • inspiring • creative • challenging (in a good way) • communal • balanced • healthy •

It's sort of fun to hypothesize where we'll end up and when. I think maybe we'll be farmers... Or maybe a writer and a photographer... The possibilities are endless, really.

The Science of Certainty

If I'm going to start a blog about my relationship with Mr. Wonderful, I really should start at the beginning. Which goes back before I even met him.

See, I don't think it was just luck or fate or coincidence that we found each other.

I believe it was science.

Oprah likes to talk about the third law of physics to explain it. According to Wikipedia, this law states that "The mutual forces of action and reaction between two bodies are equal, opposite and collinear." Every action has an opposite and equal reaction. Or, what you put out will come back at you as an equal force and an equal energy—positive or negative.

Before I met Mr. Wonderful back in the fall of 2007, I made a conscious decision to put certain things out into the Universe. I believed that what I put out would not only shape WHAT but WHO came back to me. So I did a lot of thinking about who exactly it was that I wanted heading my direction. I made lists. I made a collage. If you've ever read The Secret, you know this drill.

But more importantly, I focused on who I was. I worked on being my best, most authentic self. During the 3 years leading up to Mr. W's arrival in my life, I took some big risks (quitting my job and ultimately landing in a much better one), I tested my physical limits (beginning to run and doing a 17-mile hike to climb Half Dome in Yosemite) and I dug deep into the cracks in my psyche and self esteem (hello, Therapy, I heart you).

I wanted to make sure the Me I projected was a Me I was proud of. By the time Mr. W and I met, I was in a great place. I was ready for him. I knew who he would be and I trusted myself enough to identify him. This was something I didn't have in the past. That ability to discern.

The reason I feel the need to talk about this is that I believe other people can do the same thing I did and end up with just as much happiness. I think anyone can concoct the right recipe for this kind of wonderful.

I also think that Mr. W and I can project goodness out into the world to create the life we want moving forward. And maybe this new blog will help document some of that.