Just in time for Halloween, I bring you affirmation on a string!

Besides dressing up as Sarah Palin for Halloween last night for a party and today in our newsroom (complete with "Miss Wasilla" sash and tiara), all for the sake of making people laugh (a smashing success I might add), I am not really one for the holiday.

When you are someone who has never liked candy, it kind of doesn't do much for you.
(I promise, half a Fun Dip packet and a couple Trolli Peachie-Os once every year or two is about all the candy I can take).

I recall a funny Halloween memory from my childhood:

It may surprise some to know I was a tense, uptight and intensely private melodramatic kid.

i.e. Instead of "House," I used to play "Homeless" in my room to enact how it would be, you know, just in case...it consisted of tying the four corners of my blanket into a portable 'sack,' filling it with with beloved stuffed animals and snacks (the essentials). Then I envisioned where I would go to hang out i.e. 'bum'..... you know, just in case.....

And that was about it.


I also got really angry when I watched Disney movies, because I easily ferreted out the 'conflict' and was on the verge of an internal panic attack until 'resolution' came. For example, I secretly HATED watching Beauty and the Beast because thought it was a waste of my two hours to see a dumb girl's consequences of getting lost. The whole 'inner beauty' moral lesson was lost on me (no pun intended) as I was too busy being frustrated over Belle's incompetence in walking down the wrong road (because, with my famed knack for directions aka 'built in GPS,' I would never have).

(Little Mermaid, on the other hand, was another story. My older brother attests our VHS copy died out from watching it so many times. All the color, fun choreographed dancing, under the sea...I did grow up on the beach, you know).


So back to Halloween. Being the first daughter, my poor mother loved me so much she felt like she had to appease my every whim. Which is why, on Halloween one year when I was about 7, when I had been set for weeks to be yet another Disney princess with my blissfully happy little sister as a lamb for a sidekick (she is, to this day, completely useless with directions...I guess it's no wonder she had no problem sitting through Beauty and the Beast), I decided in T-15 minutes before we were set to go Trick-or-Treating that I did not, in fact, want to be a Disney Princess.

Crisis.



After many a fretted suggestion, my mom and I came up with me being "a composer."

Yes, like Mozart and Beethoven.

I wore one of my mom's brown skirts, she put my hair in a bun and I carried a piano book.

At the time, I thought I was ingenious and believed people thought I was the most clever kid of them all.

A couple years ago, my mom told me she had never seen more raised eyebrows in her life: every house we went to, people thought I was nuts.

Okay, anyways.


I bring you some affirmation on a string, courtesy of Yogi Tea which has good-will messages on their tea bag string 'handles'.....kind of like a fortune cookie.

So in lieu of hitting up the Hollywood House party (solo), I'm drinking some peppermint tea curled up in bed with Macbook who is tuned into hulu.com catching up on Gossip Girl, Lipstick Jungle and The Office.


"Recognize that the other person is you."
(Ooooooh, deep)


"The art of happiness is to serve all."
(Boring! In Christendom, we've been calling that 'charity' for thousands of years.)


"The beauty of life is to experience yourself"
(Oooh, nice...)


"Self-reliance conquers any difficulty"
(Yep, I have my own track record for that one).


In case I have intellectually overloaded your nirvana quota today, here's a highly addicting, oddly satisfying, and brain numbing virtual....'game'???

Happy Halloween.