Second Chances …

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If people would listen to Jack, life would be so much easier.

So much easier.

 

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Just So You Know …

 

🙂

 

 

Everybody Has a Little Jack in Them

 

Image courtesy of StatusShuffle.com

 

Apparently he thinks I’m like Jack.

 

Jack is back … Are you ready?

 

And you know what?

Sometimes I am.

Although I may need a little more than 24 hours to save the day and a lot of chocolate to celebrate.

Things get rough and tough, whether you’re married, or divorced. Parent or living single. I’ve learned that everybody has a struggle. Everybody has something in their life that challenges their patience, their zen-like state of mind, and their road to happiness. Everyone has something that will eventually burn them out. I know something pops up for me at least once a week.

But I think I’ve found it.

Perspective. Sometimes I lose it.

Yeah it’s gone missing a couple of times during road rage, relationship disasters, and personal crises. Writer’s block attacking you when you’ve only got an hour to spare, mother reminding you of things you just can’t bear, rejection letters piling in, anti-aging creams that are just not working,  kids that love you but don’t listen, and student loans that don’t seem to be shrinking. All this burns me out, but it doesn’t completely ruin my day anymore. I don’t know if I’ve developed a thicker skin. I’d like to think that I’ve just managed to find my Jack Bauer.

Yeah … I eventually have a light-bulb moment and it comes back to me.

I’ve found a routine that’s helped me uncover it … helped me find my hidden Jack Bauer. Normally it takes a triathlon or climbing 1,400 stairs to ignite this bad-ass nature but I can still capture that feeling without running a race or achieving a Bucket List Adventure.

Through my hour of power in the morning, which includes a Rocky Balboa type of work out minus the raw eggs of course, thoughts on gratitude although on days when everything blows up I’m just grateful that I have clean underwear, and my pump-it-up jams which often include 80s music and Pharrell Williams, and my meditation challenges in the evening which at times lead to a snooze fests in mid session because I’m not as Zen as I’d like to think, just exhausted. With all of these steps I’ve managed to improve my outlook in the last couple of months.

I’ve managed to find my inner Jack Bauer. My badass.

Dude … everybody has a little Jack in them.You just have to remember to let him out.

Jack is back.

 

 

Kiefer Sutherland Drawing Out My Road Map

I’ve said it before … I hate it when people say “…everything happens for a reason…” but ever since I saw Kiefer about two months ago I’ve learned to hate it a little less. I didn’t believe that “everything happened for a reason,” I thought it was bullshit … until Kiefer touched me.

Yeah he touched me … in his Kiefer way.

No…not in that way. In a philosophical-Nietzsche-blind-faith kind of way.

He’s awesome at connecting the dots of the universe with his emotionally challenged son, Jake, in his new show Touch. It’s a story about the relationship between a son and a father… and how they communicate.

The premise: “Our lives are invisibly tied to those whose destinies touch ours.”

Dude.

Pretty deep, and I really don’t get deep in this blog. But it’s Kiefer and The Guat can get deep. 

I know it’s just a TV show, but sometimes shows are so awesome they change your perspective by sheer entertainment and good writing. Hot actors  too. I’m not going to lie.  Hot actors definitely help. Just like LOST, 24, The Sopranos, Sons of Anarchy, or Mad Men. Maybe there wasn’t anybody too hot in the Sopranos, but it was just a good show.

Kiefer changed my perspective once before in my first Kiefer post: I Don’t Believe Everything Happens for a Reason Unless Kiefer Sutherland is Involved, and now he did it again.  It’s Kiefer.

Serendipitous moments creating a chain reaction of events sometimes called fate. Coincidence. Some people call it coincidence … yeah I guess that’s true … in some cases being forced to make a right turn because there’s construction blocking your path, just means you’re making a right. Don’t get all crazy.

But if you see the same construction worker three different times in three random locations, the universe is trying to tell you something stupid. Other than stalker possibilities, watch out, Kiefer may be in the mix, trying to gear you in the right direction.

There are no coincidences with Kiefer. Things lead up to something. A road map. This is what happens in Kiefer’s new show.

I hadn’t thought about it before, but I’d like to think of it as a road map, instead of those “everything happens for a reason” words. Destiny Road Map sounds better … sounds like something Tony Robbins would say. But Kiefer drew this one out for me.

 So I take it that all the writer rejections will lead up to something somewhere. I mean I’ll keep writing, it’s their job to read it and say yes or no, that’s what they do. It’s just my job to put it out there. 

I take it that this temporary living situation at my parent’s will give me an aha-moment soon. 

I take it that all the weariness, gray hair, and tired-struggles of a 35-year-old Guat staying afloat with two kids and trying to take showers on a daily basis led up to this mother-and-son moment:

I’m weary, I’m on four-hours of sleep. I haven’t worked out. I’m not too thrilled about playing monster trucks for the 247th time. I’m not too thrilled about being in the heat, playing construction site with my son for the 248th time. Then he turns to look at me: “I’m glad you’re my mom.”

Dude.

I don’t know if that would have happened if I wasn’t in my parents’ back yard. Maybe…maybe

But that was the road map for the day.

 

I Don’t Believe That Everything Happens for a Reason Unless Keifer Sutherland is Involved

Image via Wikipedia

I hate that saying … “Everything happens for a reason.”

It’s like nails scratching on a chalkboard when I hear it. Do we still even have chalkboards in America? Ugh. You’re down in the gutter of disillusionment, clinging to life by a rope made of dental floss and someone says…”Well, everything happens for a reason.”

What is that?

You don’t want to hear that.

Does anybody else hate that?

That just makes me want to tie a noose with that dental floss rope and hang off a bridge. 

At the moment that your hemisphere is crashing on you, all you can think of is what crappy luck you have, because it can’t be karma. You’re scared of that bitch so you tend to walk a straight line and only live vicariously through characters on AMC or FX shows.

So you never really give thought to that saying. You chalk it up to bad luck or bad decisions. As in a bad decision for that person not to give me that job so I’m broke, or bad luck that I got a flat tire and there was no spare in the back. Nothing happens for a “mysterious reason” that will probably never appear. 

I’d probably drive myself into a drinking coma if I tried to find the reason. I’d learned that it was just bad luck and I was probably suffering one of the worst batches of bad luck in the universe, like a degenerate gambler clutching onto his last chip because he gambled his house away and now he’s letting it ride on red 32.  But apparently the universe is interconnected in some way. This is what Kiefer says and it was completely laid out in his new non-Jack Bauer show: Touch.

I normally don’t write about television shows, because I figure everyone has their own sense of great television from Mad Men to crazy reality television on Bravo. But after watching Kiefer’s show last night I finally “got it”. 

All these people were having pretty much crappy existences culminating in one day and Kiefer’s son sort of connected the dots. It was a good visualization of “things happening for a reason,” although the man who lost his daughter and the phone containing his only pictures of her…yeah the universe would have to cough up some more meaningful answers, because that sort of thing never makes sense and has no reason. But the “eventually” happened for everyone in the one-hour show, granted for the characters it was more like a week or so, and for real-life Guat time it takes years. Maybe a decade.

So Kiefer as everything happens for a reason…I’m still waiting for my retrospective moment as to why I’m stuck living with a Dr. Jekyll-Mrs. Hyde mom that does laundry at eleven o’clock when your kids are sound asleep and then woken up to the sound of Gloria Vanderbilt jean buttons whacking away in the dryer. Or perhaps the retrospective moment will happen when my 93rd loss of “Battle of the Bottles” occurs and I say screw it the baby can learn to drink from a straw. 

So now that Kiefer opened my eyes to the road map and the Chinese unbreakable red string that mysteriously connects all these people in my path…what up Kiefer? When am I getting out of purgatory and how many dots in my-everything-happens-for-a-reason map need to be connected for that?

Thanks to Kiefer I’m aboard the train now, just waiting for the transfer to kick in.

Giddy up!