I Like Your Face!

 

Audrey is home for the summer, so I get to listen to her sing quite often once again. I love it! She’s been a shower singer ever since she was very young, her sweet, little songs mingling with the flowing water with so much freedom and contentment. Here is just the most darling video of Chris and Audrey from 2008. And here are the lyrics so you can sing along:

How I love that pizza.
It’s our favorite eat-za.
With good tomato sauce.
And mozzarella cheese.
We bake!
We eat!
Oh, mama mia!
*mwah*

These days I’m treated to Audrey’s clear, bold voice belting song after song. She recently made this really outstanding music video with her a cappella group that I have watched about a million times.

When people hear Audrey sing, I am often asked, “Do you sing, too?”

WELL.

That is a complicated question. Mrs. Okamura was my piano teacher from a hundred years ago. She was so kind and always encouraging. She used to ask this question:

Q: “Do you know what the definition of a singer is?”

A: “A person who is singing.”

So when people ask me whether I sing, the answer is YES! I am also a singer! Nobody usually wants to listen to me sing, but Mrs. Okamura assured me that I am indeed, by definition, a singer!

Today I took a fitness class called Hip Hop HIITs. It’s described as dance cardio combined with high-intensity interval training (HIIT). “A jammin’ total body workout set to hip hop music!” The instructor was a guest from a different club. Her name was La Tosha, and she was cool and beautiful. She told us, “If you can squat, then you can twerk!”

Q: Do you know what the definition of a twerker is?

A: A person who is twerking.

And that was ME this morning, Boi-i-i!

The secret to feeling successful in a hip hop class is to always keep your eye on the instructor. As long as I watched La Tosha carefully, her moves were my moves. We were practically twins!

Except that I am a terrible dancer. My body can do lots of remarkable things, like pop out a baby in 17 minutes flat, but it does not really move in any dancy kind of way. This did not prevent me from smiling the whole way through and having a ton of fun, however.

After class, people were filing out, and La Tosha was offering gratitude and encouraging compliments.

“Thanks for coming!”

“I’m glad you had fun!”

“You looked great!”

“Great job today!”

I smiled as I passed by. “Thank you! That was so much fun!”

La Tosha stopped and pointed at me with two fingers and a big smile.

She offered me this compliment and it felt so genuine: 

“I like your face!”

Awwww! I don’t know whether anyone has ever said that to me before. My dancing was unquestionably terrible, but my face? GREAT!

Enjoy yourself and do not focus on your shortcomings this week, my friends.
Because I LIKE YOUR FACE!

Thank you for reading!

Best Compliment Ever

 

Did you guys miss me? For sure I was thinking about you! Last week was the first week in over two years that I have missed writing a blog post. I hope you weren’t worried. I was just feeling very tired. It was that kind of tired that makes me cry, where the thought of getting myself ready for bed is overwhelming.

You mean I have to stand up and take a shower? AND take out my contacts? AND put all the potions on my face? AND floss and brush these giant teeth? It’s all too much. I'm going to sit here and play games on my phone until my eyes start crossing instead.

Some of you know that I resigned from my bookkeeping job at the church back in February. I worked there for five years and truly loved my time there. I told them that I’d stay on through April to allow enough time to find a replacement. The New Guy seemed nice, but it didn’t take long for me to figure out that he didn’t know shit.

I am committed to the financial integrity of the church, so I gave freely of my time and energy as New Guy got his bearings. I didn’t expect him to call me almost every damned day with dopey questions, however. One day, I got 2-factor authentication notifications on my phone letting me know that someone was trying to log in with my user ID. After four notifications, I texted New Guy. Are you trying to sign in with my credentials?

You see, two months after New Guy started, I tried to help figure out what exactly was preventing him for knowing how to do things. A bunch of us got together, I logged into QuickBooks, and we all poked around for several hours. The next day New Guy worked, my user ID auto-populated, and he didn’t understand that he had to change the user ID to his own. Instead he tried over and over to use my password to log in.

Aha! Now I understand what was preventing him from knowing how to do things. Lameness. Fast forward a few weeks, and Unskilled New Guy quits. The church hasn’t had accurate financial reports since the end of March, and they asked me so sweetly whether I would be willing to come in to clean things up.

I am an excellent helper. I LOVE helping. But when I got the call, Chris was home for a two-week summer break PLUS I started a different job a while back. My experience with Unskilled Quit Guy’s work told me that putting Humpty Dumpty back together again would consume a lot of my brains and time. But I am committed to the financial integrity of the church.....

You guys, what a fricken disaster this guy made of the books in just three short months. It would have been preferable if he had just done nothing the whole time. But now I am tasked with trying to get into his head to figure out what the hell he did, undo it, then redo it the right way.

It’s like "Criminal Minds" where Agents Hotchner and Morgan put their heads together with “Baby Girl” Garcia to figure out the motives and actions of the Unsub. Except I don’t have to think like a serial killer. I just have to think like a dum dum. Fortunately that is well within my capacity.

So I’ve just been working a lot lately. Sorry I missed you last week. Even though this is a huge hassle, it feels like a compliment to be asked to come back to fix things. Just a not-the-best-circumstances kind of compliment.

Chris paid me a nice compliment recently. He went back to Philly to start his master’s program a couple of weeks ago and had called to chat. He talked about his program and was excited to finally be with his friends IRL after a whole year of being cooped up.

He started talking about a friend who has long-standing issues with her parents. Her parents do things that Chris can’t comprehend. Some are things that might seem reasonable at first glance, like paying for her own college tuition and buying her own car. The confusion arises when her parents DO pay for college tuition for her other siblings. And that car she bought? Her parents took it out of state so she can’t use it even though she’s still paying for it.

Chris went on to tell me that he didn’t understand how awful other parents could be until after he really got to know some of his friends’ parents. He told me that he never really appreciated what good parents he has because he thought that we were just “normal.”

As he ranted about the violations that had been imposed upon his friend, he interrupted himself.

Chris: “THANK YOU, by the way.”

Me: “Aw, you’re welcome. Thank you for what?”

Thank you for introducing me to vegetables early, which led me to a lifetime of healthy eating habits and a career that I am passionate about? Thank you for teaching me manners which open doors to relationships with respected and influential adult mentors? Thank you for loving me ferociously and completely so that I can blossom into the remarkable young man that I am? Well, not exactly. Chris had a different gratitude in mind.

Chris: “THANK YOU!! For not being a DICK!”

AW!! Best. Compliment. EVER!
Thank YOU guys for not being dicks, too!
I love you, my friends!