I have no idea who actually took this picture, much less who spray painted the words. I’m just glad they did and it made it’s way to me.

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Speak the Truth

I’m proud to announce that I’ve found a way to use my hardheadedness for good, not evil.

How?

I quit smoking.

Yep.

After more than 20 years of that nonsense, I smoked the last one and didn’t go buy more. That was Thursday, April 15th at 8pm central time. Done.

Do I miss it?

No, not really.

Has it been hard? Surprisingly – not as hard as I thought it would be.

Why?

Because I’m hardheaded.

I refuse to be “addicted”. I refuse to entertain the idea that I can’t quit doing something that

a) is no longer enjoyable,
b) is bad for me on so many levels,
c) might end up being the death of me.

What has surprised me most is that none (so far, anyway) of the big fears I had about quitting have come to fruition.

I’m not eating 24 hours a day to keep my mouth busy. Therefore, my ass will remain it’s current width or – God forbid – narrower because I’ve also gotten up every morning this past week and walked the dog. Before coffee! (I know!!)

I’m not biting people’s heads off, kicking the dogs or generally threatening to “go postal”. Although, I did put myself on “time out” the other night when I felt all of that coming on. (Turns out taking good care of myself makes quitting easier. Who knew?!)

So do I want a cigarette?

Physically? No.
Intellectually? No.
Emotionally? No.
Habitually? Yes.

That last one won’t last forever. And it’s fairly easy to ignore. And when it’s not, here’s what I do:

I have one, lonely cigarette stashed in this house. One. It’s sole purpose in life is to be available to quell the petulant child in me who wants what she wants when she wants it…and not surprisingly, what she wants here of late is a damn cigarette. So, I tell her, “Ok, girlie – you can have that cigarette. But when it’s gone, it’s gone. I’m not buying anymore. So, do you REALLY want your last cigarette now?”

Well, of course, that little petulant child sits right down and shuts up, because she’s worried the urge for a cigarette might be worse sometime in the future, and then what will she do if she’s already smoked her stash??! So, she “saves” it for that emergency situation.

You and I both know what’s gonna happen…

The day will come when even that stashed cigarette will be too stale and nasty to contemplate smoking it.

And that day, I will know for sure I’m free of cigarettes.

Thank God for my hard head – it’s what will get me through until then.

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Using My Hardheadedness for Good, Not Evil

I’ve got my own barrel of monkeys I’m dealing with, though, and while they have diddly to do with the economy, they sure are a drain on the ol’ good vibrations.

But hey – that’s life with teenagers. They’re insane creatures, teenagers, and if you don’t watch it, they’ll try to take your sanity, too. But that’s a whole other post, my friends… I digress.

My friend Nancy Boyd, and a friend of hers, Bonnie Boots, came up with an idea to offset some of the fear and frenzy people are feeling right now. They asked the most positive people they know (including yours truly!) to contribute a positive article, video or audio message to be part of a free e-book to be distributed freely all across the Internet.

We’re proud to present Project Powerful and Positive. Download your copy by clicking the book cover. Share it with people you care about. Send it to those who’ve taken a kick in the pants in the stock market or who are facing financial crisis of their own. Put it up on your own blog as a free download. Help us spread its positive message as far and wide as possible.

If you’re thinking, “Man…I wish I could have been a part of this…”, well – you can! We have a lot of people who would have participated had they known about it in time, so we’re taking submissions for Volume 2. And we’ll do as many volumes as it takes to include everyone who wants to send some positivity out into the world.

What a great idea, huh? Yeah. I’m tellin’ ya – it’s much easier to “don’t worry, be happy” when you’ve got positive, let’s-do-something-good people like this in your life.

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Don’t Worry, Be Happy

Today is Blog Action Day, and the topic is poverty. This is a topic I thought I knew something about, having been, at one point, a single mother, pregnant with another child, bankrupt and barely employed. In the years since, I’ve “qualified” as living at or below the poverty line a few times.

But since I signed up to participate in Blog Action Day, forces in my life have conspired to teach me that I don’t know shit about poverty. I haven’t seen poverty – real poverty – in my life. And, I probably won’t. At least not the poverty some of the people on this planet are living with. Thank God.

Great Things Come Through Great People

Let me introduce you to the lady who helped me realize, once again, how very blessed I am. Irene Kabot is her name, and she’s a gym teacher in an elementary school in New Rochelle, NY. Well, ok – that’s her day job. Who she is? Whole ‘nother story, folks. But this really isn’t about her, either, and she’d be mad at me if I made it about her, cuz she’s humble like that – for real.

Suffice it to say, when my friend Nancy told Irene that I could help her with her websites, Nancy did a whole lot more for me than send me a new client. But Nancy’s like that, too – she’s just good people and she’s always up to something good.

So, Irene contacts me, and I’m going about my usual deal finding out what she’s got online already (if anything), what she wants done and how I can help. I found out that she actually needed 3 websites built from the one she’d put together herself, but wasn’t at all happy with. No problem, I’m thinking…so I write her up a proposal, she accepts it and we get busy.

Oh. My. God.

Get a Load of This

Right now, as you read this, children in Kibwezi, Kenya, Africa are missing school because they have to walk for hours to get water for their families to drink. Seriously, they walk for miles to get it and then have to carry it home. Every. Damn. Day.

As bad as that is, you know what’s worse? Their village sits atop a water table! At home, they’re within 50 feet of fresh, clean, plentiful water, but they can’t get to it because it costs about $4,000 to dig a well. Is that ridiculous, or what?!

Wells of Love and Hope

When Irene learned of this, she couldn’t sit still. She had to do something. So, she started a project, which now is in the process of becoming a non-profit organization, called Wells of Love and Hope. Please go visit her site (we’re not done with it, but there’s definitely enough there for you to get the picture of what’s going on and what she’s doing about it) and make a contribution.

She learned of this just a year ago, and in that space of time, she’s coordinated fund-raising efforts at her school and raised enough money for two wells and they’re working on a third. She went to Kibwezi this past August and saw first-hand what’s its like for the people there, and came home with a renewed fervor to make a difference.

They’ve also started a program called Seedlings for Sustainability, where $20 will purchase and pay for the care of a seedling tree to be planted and cared for by the Kibwezi children. Their reward for their work caring for the trees is school supplies. A simple pencil is a HUGE deal for them. A notebook? Like handing a kid an iPod, here.

Kibwezi is Stuck…and Stuck SUCKS!

There’s an out-of-sight-out-of-mind element here that makes it easy for us to be exposed to something like this, yet not do anything about it. Kenya’s a helluva long way away from me here in Oklahoma, from all of us here in the States. And yes, we all have our own problems and challenges here to deal with. We’re paying outrageous sums at the gas pumps, people are losing their homes to foreclosure, our whole financial system is a wreck… But as bad as we think it is…we’ve got it GOOD.

Do you have to tell your kids they CAN’T go to school today because they need to walk miles for water?

Do you realize, albeit too late, that having cut down all the trees in your town to sell them for lumber fed your family for a little while, but now the trees are gone and there hasn’t been significant rain in years and you’re screwed? And how about the fact that your family would have been screwed just that much earlier if you HADN’T cut down those trees, because there’s nothing else to do to make a buck BUT cut down the damn trees?

These folks aren’t looking for us to fix their problems and do for them what they can and should do for themselves. They simply need some help to get un-stuck. And a little help from us is a TRUCKLOAD of help to them.

Irene wrote a really moving description of how Wells of Love and Hope came to be. One of the things she wanted to say, but didn’t (because it would have been too “off color” for some of the audiences it will reach) was how the people of Kibwezi are stuck and how much being stuck SUCKS!

So, this post’s title is in honor of Irene and all that she does. I’m honored and privileged to now be a part of the Wells project. I encourage you to visit Irene’s site – bookmark it, because there’s a lot more to come – and make a donation. No, right now your donation is not tax deductible, but come on – is a $20 donation to buy a tree or help dig a well REALLY gonna make THAT much of a difference on your taxes?

No, probably not. But it will make a HUGE difference in Kibwezi.

And now there are only three people between you and a child in Kibwezi. You know me, I know Irene, she knows Agnes and Agnes knows all of Kibwezi. Put that way, they seem a LOT closer, don’t they?

And hopefully a lot harder to ignore.

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Stuck Sucks!

Remember, it was not until 1920 that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote.

The women were innocent and defenseless, but they were jailed nonetheless for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking for the vote. And by the end of the night, they were barely alive.

Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden’s blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of ‘obstructing sidewalk traffic.’

Lucy Burns

They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air.

Dora Lewis

They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack.

Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.

Thus unfolded the ‘Night of Terror’ on Nov. 15, 1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson’s White House for the right to vote.

For weeks, the women’s only water came from an open pail. Their food – all of it colorless slop – was infested with worms.

Alice Paul

When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks
until word was smuggled out to the press.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/suffrage/nwp/prisoners.pdf

So, refresh my memory. Some women won’t vote this year because – why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn’t matter? It’s raining?

Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO’s new movie ‘Iron Jawed Angels.’ It is a graphic depiction of the battle these women waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder.

All these years later, voter registration is still my passion. But the actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote.

Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege.

Sometimes it was inconvenient.

My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women’s history, saw the HBO movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to talk about it, she looked angry. She was – with herself. “One thought kept coming back to me as I watched that movie,” she said. “What would those women think of the way I use, or don’t use, my right to vote? All of us take it for granted now, not just younger women, but those of us who did seek to learn.” The right to vote, she said, had become valuable to her ‘all over again.’

HBO released the movie on video and DVD . I wish all history, social studies and government teachers would include the movie in their curriculum. I want it shown on Bunco night, too, and anywhere else women gather. I realize this isn’t our usual idea of socializing, but we are not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think a little shock therapy is in order.

It is jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the doctor refuse. “Alice Paul was strong,” he said, “and brave. That didn’t make her crazy.”

The doctor admonished the men: “Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.”

Please, if you are so inclined, pass this on to all the women you know.

We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so hard for by these very courageous women. Whether you vote Democratic, Republican or Independent party – remember to vote.

History is being made.

Note from Suzanne: I don’t know who wrote this, but I wish it was me. My friend, Kelli, forwarded it to me in an email. Thank you, Kel…

Please go vote, and if you’re not registered, get registered and then go vote. Please.

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Why Women Should Vote