Paris Letters (5 page)

At the end of our conversation, I added, “Oh, and forgive me for anythingelseIcan’tremember,” just to cover my bases. He absolved me of all my sins, advised me to do the same, and sent me off to recite a few Hail Marys and Our Fathers. Soon after, I skipped off for gelato with Áine and Marco. Dreamy gelato. Dreamy Marco.

On our final day, Marco hugged me good-bye, whispering in my ear, “Promettimi che ritornerò.” Promise me you will return. I swooned, giggled, and nodded.

After Rome, Áine and I spent a few days on the Amalfi coast. Whenever we met somewhere in the world, we rounded up a couple of hardboiled eggs. We wrote our wishes on the eggs with a black magic marker and hurled the eggs into the sea. My wish was for a sweet life. La dolce vita. The results of this manifestation ritual have been mixed, but we’re still working on perfecting our little tradition.

I also had a Manifestation Box back in Los Angeles. I had seen The Secret and was well educated on the Law of Attraction. Basically, the Law of Attraction is one of those laws of the universe. “Your thoughts become things” and “the more you think about, the more you bring about” and other pithy epitaphs are outlined in the film to further illustrate the idea that when you focus on something enough, it can come true. Magically. So I decorated a shoebox and added the ingredients that I thought would bake into a happy life. Then PRESTO, it would all happen, and I’d be amazed by the accuracy of this magic little box. This box sat center stage on my windowsill as if I thought adding sun would make my dreams grow faster. I clipped photos of happy couples and tossed them in the box along with a wad of Monopoly money. I also added photos of models that looked like me but were wearing pretty dresses and were thinner. One photo was of a sophisticated woman dressed in black walking along a street in Paris. I remember wanting so badly to be her. But that was before Rome.

When I returned from Italy, I revisited my Manifestation Box and pulled out each piece of paper, each dream, and tossed it in the trash bin, including that woman walking in Paris. After emptying the box, I chucked the box itself and was left with an empty windowsill and mixed emotions. On the one hand, I felt calm when looking at an empty windowsill. I felt the same peace I had felt the day I cleaned out my underwear drawer. I also felt a pang of disappointment that my manifestation experiment didn’t seem to work. But after that slight pang wore off, I turned away from the windowsill and felt a sense of relief. No more pressure to MANIFEST. As if life was one big checklist of accomplishments. I had a big enough list of unfinished business, thank you very much. I walked away from it all, not as part of a happy couple in a dress two sizes smaller, walking hand in hand in Paris. I walked away free of all that. I walked away happy to stop aiming for it. If you want to hold water in the palm of your hand, you can’t grasp at it. I was willing to be satisfied with the notion that if I hadn’t accomplished what was in the box, I had at least accomplished something. I had a clean windowsill.

By June, the sixth month into my journaling year, I had crossed plenty off my list of unfinished business and let go of many items, such as most of my books and one of my guitars. I was ruthless. I knew, without knowing where I was going, that I wouldn’t need this stuff when I got there.

But one item stopped me in my tracks.

My Kris Kristofferson album.

I haven’t owned a record player since my single-digit years, but I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of this album. This record was pilfered from my parents’ collection. When I was a kid, I would gawk at this album cover and stare into his steely blue eyes. Kris Kristofferson was a real artist. A great lyricist and pretty good actor. When I looked at Kris, I thought, “This guy is so good at everything he does. And what he does is so cool. I want to do something cool.” I kept the album.

Though I didn’t realize it at the time, that album was my Manifestation Box.

5

Cut Down on Groceries

By July, my slight changes in behavior were making a surprisingly big impact on my bank balance. I wasn’t necessarily saving $100 a day, but I stopped buying décor items for my home and clothes for my wardrobe. I was still delighting in my sparse closet. Each month, I deposited my checks and tried to leave them alone.

This constant monitoring of money made me extra vigilant when invitations came my way. I started saying no to group dinners that included Chuggalug Chad, who always drank seven glasses of wine to my one glass and then suggested we split the bill. No, thanks, I’d rather use that extra cash to buy my own drinks, preferably at a café on a terrace while watching the sunrise over the Vatican and without you slurping and slurring next to me.

And then came the vegan thing. I never really thought much about veganism or vegetarianism beyond my mother and aunts huffing at having to make a vegetarian lasagna because a few of my veggie cousins were coming by for dinner. Then after the dinner, when everyone had left, someone would wonder aloud if vegetarianism was a healthy choice. How can you feed your children on a vegetarian diet, for heaven’s sake? How can you possibly feel satisfied without a decent piece of meat?

That’s just it. Films and books were coming out about factory farming, and I became aghast at how there are hardly any decent pieces of meat left. Factory farming made up 99 percent of the meat in our grocery stores. To find that 1 percent of meat that came from animals that had a good life and a humane death was so difficult that I threw up my hands. The Kind Diet by Alicia Silverstone provided me with all the logic I needed to become vegan. I want to be healthy. I want to be kind to the planet. And I could do them both just by not eating meat? I bought into the kindness factor. Sign me up.

Turns out saving the planet didn’t cost near as much as ruining it. After deciding to go the veggie route, I saw I could save a lot of money, which was appealing if I were to ever quit my job and hit the road. Without the dairy and meat in my diet, my grocery bill was halved. Did I mourn the loss of burgers? Nah.

Did I mourn the loss of cheese? You betcha.

Great big sobbing mourning about not getting to have melted cheese slathered all over and oozing out of everything. Science has proven that cheese is actually addictive. The primary protein in milk is casein, which gives that satisfied reverie we cheesists feel on a soul level. I was a happy cheese addict. But I knew if I took out the meat from my diet, I’d overdo the cheese. I know me. I know what I’m capable of. My path to veganism had to be paved with oatmeal.

I thought veganism would be hard when I went out to eat. Not so. I discovered that in California, all restaurants must have at least one vegetarian meal on the menu. I started appreciating the limited options. I remembered what I learned from clearing out my closets: There is a certain freedom in not having so many choices.

And my body didn’t seem to mind one way or another if it had meat. I was already tired and miserable all the time. I was still pretty much tired and miserable as a vegan, except now I had a glimmer of hope that it could actually be possible to save enough money to buy myself a year or two of freedom from my advertising job. And that little nugget of hope was more delicious than a chicken nugget any day of the week.

But my vegan days were over the day I sat across from the butcher shop in Paris. I’d need a reason to go in. And in Paris, they didn’t have vegetarian options at the butcher shop.

6

Find an Accomplice

You don’t have to worry about keeping your dreams a secret when you tell people you’re going to quit your job, because they don’t believe you anyway. I had mentioned this to a circle of friends at a garden party back in Santa Monica. Most nodded in that way you nod when you’re not really listening. But not my friend Ben.

“What?!” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m thinking of starting in Europe.”

He pursed his lips and crossed his arms.

Later, when I came out of the bathroom, he was standing there waiting for me. “Listen,” he stammered. “I want to go to Europe. On tour. With my music.”

“You want to be a rock star?”

He nodded.

“That’s crazy.”

“I know.” He smiled. “You want to quit your job to travel and just hang out. That’s crazy.”

I smiled. “I know.” And with that I found an accomplice.

He wasn’t my first choice, I admit, but after one strange day in the car with my coworkers, I knew I had made the right choice.

On that day, I grabbed a rare lunch with a few colleagues. We piled into Akemi’s Prius and headed for Indian food. That’s when I announced that I had paid off my credit cards.

I had that one credit card that demanded my attention every month. It wasn’t a huge amount, but I rarely paid it off so it slowly grew until it gave me a feeling of dread when I saw it lurking between the pieces of junk mail in my mailbox. But with my extra cash from saving up and selling off, I did what any good reader of Suze Orman would do: I paid it off.

If you only accomplish one thing in a year, let it be paying something off. A student loan, a car, a credit card, your bookie, whatever. The relief that follows feels like the releasing of a knot in your stomach.

Until you tell someone.

“That’s great,” said one coworker.

“Wow, good for you,” said another.

“Are you kidding me?” said Akemi.

“I am not kidding you. I am officially debt free for the first time in forever. No student loan, no car payment, no credit card payment.”

“You’re, like, rich.”

I laugh. “Not exactly, but it sure feels that way.”

Then silence. Strange silence. The kind of silence that happens when you tell an off-color joke. The kind of silence that hangs heavy in the air. The kind of silence that’s just plain weird. According to the Federal Reserve, the average credit card debt per household is $15,800. I wondered about the debt balances of my car compadres.

In Dr. Phil McGraw’s book Life Strategies, he writes that to achieve your goal, “find someone in your circle of family or friends to whom you can be accountable. Make periodic reports on your progress.” The credit card progress report hadn’t worked on my lunch mates, but perhaps I could make Ben my accountability partner.

I had met Ben at a birthday party six years prior. We discovered in each other that we could both remember obscure lyrics from songs as far back as thirty years before we were born. My lyric education stems from my father’s insistence on listening to the country music radio station when he was in the kitchen where the radio sat on the windowsill, my mother’s insistence on gospel when she was in the kitchen, and rock when my sisters were in the kitchen. When everyone was in the kitchen, it was too chaotic so I sat in front of the TV. I was no Mark McGrath, but I could hold my own with lyrics. So could Ben. He was a songwriter at a record company by day, and occasionally he performed at bars around town.

During September, I spent long evenings at the coffee shop on Wilshire and Third Street in Santa Monica working my way through unread books from my bookshelf. One evening, I was reading at a barstool along the window and heard a knock on the glass. I looked up and it was Ben. I smiled and waved. He came in and sat down.

We looked at each other, saying nothing for a minute. He spoke first. “Why are you leaving Los Angeles?”

“I can’t do this town. Somehow, my dream came true and it sucks.”

“Yep.”

“Yep.”

And that was that. We talked out our plans for our escape to Europe with the only other person who believed it was possible. For many evenings over the next few months, I’d be sitting in that coffee shop reading or writing and he would walk by, see me, stop in, and we’d talk. We would go over lyrics he was finessing and household items I was selling. I told him I didn’t know where to go once I got up the nerve to quit my job. Europe, yes, for a vacation. Then what? Just stay? He didn’t know how to bridge the gap between writing songs for others and becoming a performer himself.

I started to feel stirrings for him, but by now I was already mentally packing my bags. This was no time to start anything. No illicit plans were made, no flirting, no innuendo. On one of our coffee nights, I started to pack up to go. “It’s late,” I yawned. “I’m heading home.”

As I got up to leave, he grabbed my arm and gave me a wink. “The night is young. Let’s get a beer.”

And that’s when I knew it. Inside this tiny, innocent moment, I knew that any stirrings would have to simmer down.

“Ben, I’m the Early Show.”

He cocked his head, sat with this for a moment, and nodded. “I’m Late Night.”

Understood. It would never work.

We still met at that coffee shop for many nights until I left for Europe. At times, when we ran out of ideas and suggestions, we would allow silence to hover in the air between us. Perhaps we were waiting for a voice from somewhere beyond to just tell us what to do.

7

Turn What You’ve Got into Something You Can Sell

I finally got around to cleaning out my art supply closet. The final mess. The closet full of unmet expectations. I pulled out all my unfinished canvases and started painting. Each night for weeks, I went straight home after work and tinkered away. I learned to quietly decline invitations when others asked me to do things. Turning people down was never my strength, but I just felt like painting more than I felt like doing anything else.

Before, I thought I needed to know what I wanted to paint before I picked up my paintbrush, but when the goal changed from painting something wonderful to painting something just to use up the supplies and finish a canvas, I managed to create some art. Inspiration, it seemed, was not required.

I knew I couldn’t take these paintings on the road with me, so I opened a shop on Etsy, the online marketplace where you can sell handmade and vintage products. Setting up my account was easy. Linking it to my PayPal account was just as easy. And selling actually happened. On the site is a blog called Quit Your Day Job. It’s filled with success stories of those who worked in cubicle land like me until they started making art and selling it on Etsy. Eventually they were able to quit their jobs and sell online full time.