“To dream anything that you want to dream.
That is the beauty of the human mind.
To do anything that you want to do.
That is the strength of the human will.
To trust yourself to test your limits.
That is the courage to succeed.”
— Bernard Edmonds
I don’t make resolutions, per se. But I do have hopes and dreams.
These are my hopes for 2012.
See Aidan more often
Write more, unabashedly and with excitement
Possibly write/complete a novel
Travel to another country
Get hard core with my yoga practice
Lose weight
Get enough work-at-home projects to be comfortable financially
Read 75 new books
Write more in my paper journal
Be more positive
Become more assertive and honest
Have more faith
Write and mail more handwritten letters
There is so much to look forward to in 2012! New music to discover, new books to read, new people to meet, new experiences to have, and new opportunities to pursue. Plus The Hunger Games movie!
You already know about our Disney World trip, but I’d love to visit my friend Amy in New Orleans. A trip to New York City wouldn’t make me sad, either. But that can wait until summer. Oh, and I’d love to hit a nice, warm beach. A resort where I do nothing but relax and drink juice while baking in the sun. Or under a beach umbrella. Whatever.
There are some online friends I hope to meet in person in 2012.
I’m still undecided as to what to do about yoga teacher training. The spring session begins March 8. Am I ready for that kind of commitment? I suppose I can wait til the summer session. But I don’t want to put it off too long…cause I can see myself doing that then going “It’s too late. I may as well not do it now.”
NOT OKAY, RONICA.
I know your tricks and manners.
…good Lord. I’m talking to myself on my blog.
I’d like to volunteer at PAWS Chicago, the no-kill animal shelter where we adopted Helena. I really want to work with the kitty cats. I should make it happen in 2012.
And of course, there is the usual workout more, eat better, blah ditty blah blah blah crap we all spew out. Will I be able to stick to it, is the thing?
I understand why people make resolutions. 365 (366 next year) days seem like a lot. But I think that most of us make these resolutions and expect to get them done right away (like within 30 days)… and well, when we don’t, we get discouraged. The weight isn’t dropping off all that quickly. Just can’t/won’t quit the Whatchamacallit bars. The winter is so gloomy and grey, and who wants to work out when it’s like that? Writing? It’s too hard, man.
I have to give myself time. That’s why I don’t make resolutions–cause then I’ll end up beating myself up for failing, when I really just need to ease myself into things rather than shock myself with ALL THESE LIFESTYLE CHANGES RIGHT NOW which will NEVER stick, not with that kind of pressure.
I can’t complain. 2011 was a pretty good year for me. I got to do some neat things, go to neat places, and meet cool people (like Weird Al Yankovic!). I was introduced to new music, made some crazy life-changing choices, and did some neat things. I got to meet my Plurk friends Jon & Rho, I had the chance to see my favorite author Sarah Dessen (and she totally recognized me!), I got to see SJ Tucker loads of times, and I got to eat a lot of sushi!
The easiest way to recap is to do a survey. I know how much you guys love those. Feel free to steal and do it yourself.
Was 2011 a good year for you?
For the most part, yes!
What did you do in 2011 that you’d never done before?
– attended Musecon
– rode a horse
– pet a giraffe
– purchased exercise equipment
– got a passport
– Pilates reformer
– Capeoira
– got a facial
– lipolaser
Did anyone close to you give birth?
A lot of my friends had babies or are pregnant,
but I can’t say anyone particularly close to me.
Did anyone close to you die?
My aunt Lue passed away during the summer.
What countries did you visit?
None.
What date from 2011 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
August 5, 2011. I took my life back.
…and a giant leap of faith.
What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Getting into better shape.
What was your biggest failure?
Didn’t complete writing a novel. Boo.
Also falling back out of shape. Ha.
Did you suffer illness or injury?
Mostly colds.
Had an incident in April that I thought might be gallbladder related,
but it was just gastritis.
Where did most of your money go?
Disney trips, dolls, clothes, sushi, gifts
What song will always remind you of 2011?
Nataraj (Dancing in the Flames) by Suzanne Sterling
Come Down by Ginger Doss
What do you wish you’d done more of?
– writing
– yoga
What do you wish you’d done less of?
Working. I worked way too many hours at Schawk.
What was your greatest musical discovery?
Ginger Doss
Bekah Kelso
What did you want and get?
– new camera
– Disney trips
– passport
– exercise bike
– books
What did you want and not get?
– MORE AIDAN TIME (there is never enough)
– a treadmill (our apartment is too small for such things)
– a trip out of the country
What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I turned 37. I spent the day with my family and ate
food from Harold’s Chicken Shack.
What kept you sane?
Reading. Lots of reading.
My family. My kitty cats.
Jen and Amy and our email chain.
Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Matt Smith
What political issue stirred you the most?
Anything that had to do with women’s reproductive rights
Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2011:
Having a lot of money isn’t everything.
It HELPS.
But when making the money
is costing your health, family time,
and sanity,
then it’s time to rethink some things.
So I did.
How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2011?
Sweaters and jeans, or tee-shirts and jeans, or hoodies and jeans.
Grey long-sleeved tee-shirts.
Sometimes a cute skirt with boots.
Long, hippy skirts or dresses.
What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
I love that I can’t think of an answer to this question.
Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
Magic touched my life again
in a single breath
shining in your eyes
like a firefly
and a moment of revelation
–Ginger Doss
I know I have blogged about this before, but watching YouTube today brought it back to the forefront of my mind.
When I was in high school, I LOVED LOVED LOVED the all new Mickey Mouse Club. This is the show that spawned Britney Spears, Keri Russell, and Justin Timberlake. I was a fan from the beginning–well, once we got The Disney Channel installed in my house. Back then, I had to beg and plead for us to get cable in the first place, and The Disney Channel was a premium channel, like HBO or Showtime! My parents knew how important Disney was to me, so they sprang for the premium. Back then, my cable life revolved around The Disney Channel, MTV, BET, and VH1. I loved music videos and there was no shortage of them in the early 90s.
I started watching MMC when I saw the video for Summer Vacation by The Party on MTV. I thought Damon Pampolina was the hottest thing on TV. I was ready for a new crush–I was over my New Kids on the Block phase, Joey Lawrence and Kirk Cameron did nothing for me, and Dino and Glenn Medeiros were just too old. I am not sure how I figured out that The Party had to do with The Disney Channel, but once I realized that The Party was made up of Mouseketeers from MMC, I was hooked. My crush on Damon was short-lived, though. I started watching MMC in its third season, and that’s the season that Ricky Luna started. More on that later.
The show, to me, was so different from any other show. It wasn’t a typical multi-camera sitcom filmed in beta. It was a variety show, with skits, singing, and dancing. My favorite was the musical numbers. I liked learning the dance steps and I liked singing along. The cast members used their own names, and at the end of a taping, they let the audience come down and dance with them, which made them seem more approachable than say, the kids on Blossom. I really wanted to be friends with all of them.
My life back then mostly consisted of school (ugh), an after school job at the deli, marathon phone conversations with my best friends (our record: 13 hours), writing (mostly fanfic), and music. I wasn’t getting out much nor was I participating in a lot of school activities. My life was MMC and those kids. I wrote fan fiction about them before it was cool. If I wasn’t planted in front of the TV at 5:30pm Monday through Friday, then the VCR was recording the show. That show was the reason I got up some mornings, the reason I got dressed and did my hair. Maybe I was just going to be in front of the TV all day, frantically rewinding the VCR so I could learn yet another dance step, but I was up and moving. And that was a good thing.
There were two Mousketeers who inspired me the most. One was Mylin Brooks. I thought she was absolutely beautiful. She had this gorgeous dark hair, this beautiful face, and she was on a TV show that was filmed at Disney World. She was smart and talented and I desperately wanted to be her.
It was this video here that started my fascination with Mylin:
Please refresh if the videos aren’t showing up. YouTube is being a pain in the rear.
Ah yes, Disney Channel’s watered-down pop lyrics. I didn’t care. I watched the video all the time. I even learned the steps. I can still do most of the steps. I NEVER in a million years would have imagined that one day, this would happen:
Through the wonders of the Internet, I reached out and asked Mylin to be my friend on MySpace back when MySpace was cool. She accepted, and we began talking back and forth. When everyone moved to Facebook, she and I kept in touch on there. I was part of her “American Girl” street team back in 2006. It was amazing to get to work with her.
In July of 2010, I finally got to meet and spend the day with this woman, and let me tell you, she is just as sweet as she is beautiful. My mom is tickled pink because she knew how important MMC was to me, and she knew how important those kids were to me.
The other Mouseketeer that changed my life was Ricky Luna. I had an obscene crush on him when I was a teenager, and I didn’t care. Every single day from 5:20-6:00pm, I would sit in front of my TV, VCR remote in hand, ready to tape anything with Ricky in it.
When the MMC came on, the Mouseketeers would pop into a circle and say their names. He popped into his circle, yelled “Ricky!” and I was instantly head over heels. Well, as much as a girl can be with a guy whose first name is the only thing she knew about him. But we don’t need to worry about that. Look at this video:
He’s the one in the red shirt and the suspenders. I dare you to say you don’t understand how teenage me could have fallen for that total Mr. Hottyness.
I got to meet him for the first time in 1993, when MMC came to Cleveland to do a tour. Boy did I make a fool out of myself. I grabbed him and yelled “I’M IN LOVE WITH YOU.” Mortifying. Forgive me. I had no social skills and I was face-to-face with the object of my teenage fantasies OMG what was my life??? Don’t judge me.
Here are a couple of pix from that weekend:
Forgive the blurriness. I scanned these back in 1997 when I had no idea how to really work a scanner.
In late 1997, Geocities came out. I could make my own web page, what! So I did. I made a Ricky Luna fan site. If you google “Ronni’s Ricky Luna Fan Page” some old, old, old mirrors of that site will come up. Good times. I made that site in hopes that Ricky would do a search of his name and find it. He did. That site was the top hit in all the search engines. He contacted me and we kept in touch on and off over the next several years. MySpace and Facebook kept us even more in touch. Back in 2009, this happened:
Yeah, it was pretty awesome. I got to hang out with him and his manager’s family. It was a really fun day. He lived up to the crush that 17-year old me had on him and then some because he’s just an awesome, kind, and warm human being. We laugh about my declaration of love for him at Tower City mall back in 1993. I still can’t believe I did that. Anyway, now he’s a super talented producer and he makes really good music, which you can download for free from his site. I recommend the Electro Bomba mini mix. You can get it here. 🙂
I’m proud to call him my friend.
I leave you with this video. I just watched it again and it gave me chills because I loved it so much back then. And as I belted along with it, remembering all the words, I realized that I still love it today.
If only The Disney Channel was still this awesome. Oh well. At least they have Phineas & Ferb.
This post is cross posted at my Disney blog. Feel free to visit and follow!
Oh my God, what? Another entry? So soon? Well then.
I had a pretty amazing 2010. I tried new things, watched new movies, learned about new music, read lots of books, landed a full-time job, and met many awesome people. As per my tradition, I’m doing my year-in-review survey.
I try to make it a point to stay positive. I went through a pretty bad few years where it seemed like one bad thing after another was happening to me. I kept a lot of it under wraps–only the closest people to me knew the details. It was hard to pull through, and I had to work SO HARD to try to stay positive, and I usually failed at it.
The other night, my anywhere-is site did a wonky thing and wouldn’t let me into the admin panel. I was able to access my sites, so I wasn’t too upset. I just moved everything to the main directory, which I’d been meaning to do for a while anyway. I was going through some old journal entries, and WOW. Just wow. I ended up deleting quite a few of them (from anywhere-is; they’re still on Live Journal) because they reminded me of those bad times, and many other bad times. It was like I was two people. There was the happy Ronni presented to the world, the f-locked entries that expressed rage, sadness, deep depression, and the private entries that were just…. very sad. I knew that if I read them or dwelled on them, I’d get sucked into that emotional mindset. I don’t want that.
I’m not a huge believer in The Secret, but I do think that if you put out good energy, you’ll generally get good energy back. And that if you put out bad energy, you’ll get bad energy back. Not to say that everything bad that happens is anyone’s fault. I just remembered how I worried and worried and worried, and the stuff I worried about was the stuff that kept happening over and over and over with extra random bad stuff tossed in. Almost like I imagined it into existence. So, now I work on imagining GOOD things into existence.
It’s not easy. It’s not in my nature to be as upbeat as I have been. It helps that I have an Adam and an Aidan and a Crookshanks and a Helena. It helps that I have friends who have been there forever and during those really bad times, and will keep being there. It helps that I’m making friends and discovering new stuff and getting inspired every day. It helps that I’m not worrying about surviving. It helps that I am comfortable and everlastingly grateful for all of it.
Sunday afternoon, Adam and I headed to my car to go out to do some errands and hit some vintage shops in Pilson. Upon getting to the car, I noticed that the back window was broken out AGAIN. This is the 3rd time since I’ve lived here that someone broke into my car. (If we count the time in Columbus, this is break-in number four.) First thought was “WTF? Didn’t they know it was unlocked?” Second thought was “Ha, there was nothing in there for them to get. BAHAHA. Oh crap, did they do something to the McDonald’s drink I left in there?” Third thought was “I hope this isn’t the start of a downward spiral.”
It’s that third thought that set off warning bells. If I fall into that way of thinking, it WILL become a downward spiral, and we do not want that at all. I LIKE feeling happy. It’s weird but it’s nice. I don’t want to be showered with bad things/emergencies/problems. I REFUSE to be showered with them. I’ve had enough of it, and it was only by the grace of God (and some good, true friends) that I made it through. I will keep an attitude of gratitude, and I will keep sending that out in the Universe, because I’ve learned that when I truly appreciate what I have, then even more goodness will come my way.
