My life in a magazine

For many years almost religiously I buy my regular magazines on a weekly or monthly, depending which one, basis. (  Fortunately not daily) You know as one would have the bread, milk, and daily list the magazines are added as an essential. A crucial part for a dull week. The big escape…… the unlimited frontiers of  a magazine. When raising children, the you within, is often silenced by the needs of these growing human beings and the business of their daily existence….. and that is when Alice escapes to the wonderland of magazines…… the land to which many mothers choose to escape to…the land of endless dreams and may I add, slightly cheaper than the cost of reality.

I have often wondered exactly what is the bait to lure me into spending so much money on these glamorously presented colorful pages of writings and pictures, what is the drawing factor? The answer my friend is not written in the wind, but the answer is time. We do not have time or energy to actually live out our dreams and yearnings and tonight when these beings you thought would never come to rest are all asleep and you only have energy left to page and glance, many a housewife or mother escapes into the wonderland of media and wishful thinking and when you finally fall asleep you can wake up the next day feeling I did something, I had a dream.

It is amazing just how many dreams you can dance through by merely paging through someone else’s dream who had enough time to make it into a reality. I actually assisted my son with his debate topic on imagination and that many a successful person starts with a dream he/she imagined and actually followed through. I guess that is what happened to my dear friend , Mr Landon Pigg. He too had a dream and I did not only buy it, I went on a music hunt to track it down so that someone else could remind me of the dreams I once had somewhere in a coffee shop. And that is what I fall in love with every time I take up a magazine and stare at what used could have been my dreams.

But I think maybe in the all pursuit to happiness, I too should remind myself of my dreams, start working on my magazine compiled of dreams and turn it into a reality, the reality of my life as a magazine………

My date with Landon Pigg

Being a mother  , part of my daily living consists of traveling. Before you think the travel sounds interesting. No I am not seeing places and I don’t  have an exiting Get-away-like life, I just cart my ten year old son from one activity to another after school and THAT  is the traveling I do. In any case, I tune into one of our regional radio stations for a rather interesting afternoon show. Every so often your ears are soothed with a catchy song or just something that triggers a smile and leaves you with a feeling of….I like… You try to catch the title but you missed it. Then you have a serious attempt to find out what it was and eventually you succeed and the smile broadens. That is how I met Mr Landon Pigg, never heard of , didn’t even know what he would look like or where he’s from and no cooking clue what age. ( By the way  he looks as if he could have a leading role in Alice in Wonderland – maybe the Mad Hatter’s son and peculiarly very handsome, I may add). In any case, the search began. The obvious thing would be to connect with a music store. Gee things have changed over the years. When we did part time jobs as students it was required that you should know your products and you were drilled on customer relations and how to treat them, never mind the customer is always right or respect etc etc. So with my first visit to the city I popped into a music store which I always admired and had a highly regarded opinion of, only to be utterly disappointed in how matters were handled. When mentioning the song title and artist,  I was glanced at as if I might be a Martian that is clearly not understood. Eventually they told me, somebody will google the artist and phone back over the weekend. No call and then I thought well it could be any weekend, I’ll wait. Patience ran out , I phoned back only to be disappointed once again regarding the phone ethics and customer service. Not only could I hear the phone attendant saying to someone in a very frustrated tone of voice, “ could someone just speak to this woman,” as if I was a deaf Martian.That was it. I had to end this affair and change my brand. In desperation I phoned to another music outlet and gone was the disappointment and in walked the surprise. This music store sales person did however know the ethics of telephonic customer relations and remarkable manners. Immediately I had the confidence that they will be able to end my search  for“ The boy who never.", mr Pigg’s current album which hosts the song Falling in love at a coffee shop. Finally, I became the proud owner of this album. I don’t know who he fell in love with at a coffee shop but I surely fell in love with the nostalgic memories I could rekindle , listening to the song. Coffee has always been one of my favourite past times and along with that the aroma and cosiness of a good old coffee shop, comes the fondest memories. Time spent with accidental conversations, dear friends or sometimes the quiet moments entangled whilst paging through a magazine. Sometimes it was the encounter when strangers became friends. All in all,  good memories. I specifically remember one coffee shop in the original city centre of our nearest city. It was nestled in an arcade and had the ambience of a moment in Italy.I can still remember the heartfelt greeting of freshly grounded coffee, the steaming sound of the frother and the jingling of a bell anouncing your arrival.  A fragmented escape to a place you want to be. It had the flow of regulars and occasional passing strangers into this quaint little shop and here, I  spent many a fond and happy moment. Our lives consist of memories, moments, places and people. Some are good and some are not so good and some are plain straight forward BAD. Mr Pigg, I can honestly say that not only have my “date” with you taken me on a customer care questionare BUT also, you have taken me back to a place I want to be, a place where I have fallen in love at a coffee shop, with some of  the dearest memories of my fragmented life. So watch out mr Blog, you have competition…………….Mr Landon Pigg, if I may say, you have truely taken the dullness out of my mom’s –taxi-travelling life and turned it into a wonderful date, a date with a lovely memory that I will cherish along with the fragrance of a good old coffee shop hidden in the alleys of my mind…………………..

Why blogging?

And so I ended up treating myself during my on-my-own weekend, no teenagers rearranging my life for me, with a chic flic……Julie & Julia. Most enjoyable I must say and then it made me think……the blogging.  For quite a while now,  in actual fact a couple of years now, the sudden urge to make my inner voice heard has often been silenced with doing something for the kids, or had to do something else or just simply something that occupied my mind and daily living. Well and before you know it a month passed and it became a forgotten thought. Much later you try to assemble the thoughts again but truth is, they vanished amid the business of everyday……… and you have to sadly bid a possible best seller goodbye and you become another fan once again of  the ever so known song “ Seasons in the Sun’. Once again the constant goodbye as time goes by. Well ,as I was saying about the blogging, it just appeared to be a current solution to my unspoken thoughts and my post divorce state of mind, which I often think listening to my married friends possibly is just a fallacy that  you always or when you need someone to talk to have that someone to talk to….. In any case whatever the truth might be, my truth is there isn’t that someone so Mr Blog you better listen to me or else you’ll have a divorce on your hand.

So what does blogging actually have to do with How to spell Happy. May I remind you that knowing how to spell Happy enables one how to be and miraculously remain Happy and if I’m happy everyone around me might become Happy( although the Teenagers around me is not influenced by this, they haven’t found the magic potion for that) and then I can say I reside in the street of Happy ever after. For me just being heard at this stage is a way to happiness. Many a married mother has the urge to be heard because it is something that is constantly over driven by the domestic inhabitants of what used to be something to come home to, not just a refreshment station. If  I can just hang my thoughts from the stars- maybe someone will read my heart, hear my voice and I no longer at night when all is done and off to bed I don’t enter my dream world feeling………..

“ In the  city of Singlehood,in the suburb of Closed Off, the street named Never heard , lives solitude in a house built by NO Voice”

I’ll now enter my dreamworld with a smile, and maybe I’ll just like Julie be able to do something constructive with with what I like to do ……… you never know……..cyberspace the unknown frontier……my space , my time, my voice………..

Where do I start?

In the eternal search for" what is happiness?" I am confronted with the question where do I start? what am I doing here in this space? the only answer I find for the moment is yet another question, what is my mission and somehow i end up once again with the issue of happiness. Where to find it? I think back upon my life and the moments highlighted by mishaps, disappointment , hurt , unfulfilled empty spaces and somehow I dig back, way back to try and remember what made the happy moments in my life. What exactly made me happy?
At the moment I am on the search for the ME hidden amidst the cob webs of daily existence. The existence of post divorce...... Divorce,the whirlpool at the bottom of the waterfall of marriage . I survived the fall but clearly not the marriage.....the input was deleted.....was not good enough....someone else is better.....not wanted anymore....
Not a nice whirlpool. And sometimes the vortex action of rejection and disappointment pulls you down for quite a while, drains your energy and sometimes exhausts you to such an extent that you barely have energy to find the surface for a second, just totake a breath, just to be taken down once more until the unbearable reality of hurt numbs all senses, you loose consciousness and your lifeless bruised body is washed up somewhere on rocky shallow water.
That's where I ended up. Spent almost seven years coming to my senses but finally I am here. Here in this net space, talking, sharing looking for anwers to my questions of happiness . But most of all able to speak and to share and to be able to rekindle the space I used to call my smile.
Ever since I was taught to read I knew that you can only understand the meaning of a word if you know how to spell it and that is why if I can find how to know how to spell HAPPY I can make it truely part of my life....and successfully complete the spelling test.......