Wanting something into existence, wanting something else the hell out of it

portapotty PART 1: The Wanting In

If you've been following along, reading between the lines (or more specifically, reading the comments), you know that one of the fifty books I'm reading right now is a little tome entitled Excuse Me, Your Life Is Waiting: The Astonishing Power of Feelings. Yes, it's a "woo-woo" book; yes, it's a little wobbly in the writing department. And really, it doesn't say anything too earth-shaking, at least, not to someone who's been well-familiarized with the Law of Attraction and spent the last several years learning how to focus on the good instead of the...well, the other.

But reading it does give things a boost in the actualizing-one's-intentions department. It makes sense, really, since the whole magilla basically boils down to what you focus on is what you get. If you look at this from a more scientific standpoint, it's not unlike telling someone to NOT think about a large, white elephant or to point out that there sure are a lot of yellow Hummers on the road today: all that person is going to see on the way home is how many damned yellow Hummers are in the way, and she's going to be thinking about white elephants while she does it.

The extra spin, juice, if you will, that EMYLIW offers is the passionate wanting of something vs. the dry thinking of it. In other words, if you would love a new washing machine, well...LOVE UP THAT WASHING MACHINE!!! Admire it, caress it in your head, feel all the joyous feelings that washing machine will give you. An example: I've been looking for a pair of jeans that fits. (Ladies, you know what I mean: "fits" = "makes my ass look like Jessica Alba's".) This is generally an exercise in frustration, if not futility; even if one is Jessica Alba, one still has to actually try on all of the expensive jeans one's stylist hauls over to one's fabu L.A. pad. And if one is not Jessica Alba, if one is, say, over 40 and cheap as hell, it entails...well, I'll spare you the horrors.

But me? I've read EMYLIW. I'm lovin' up the jeans. I'm thinking about great-looking jeans on my ass and letting it go. I'm looking at other ladies' great-looking jeans on their great-looking asses (my sister has a killer butt) and lovin' them up, too, albeit from a respectful distance, and in my head, only. Oh, wait, I take that back; I actually told a girl at SAKS SFO that her ass looked great in those jeans. Which it did.

But I digress.

So yesterday, I'm walking from the car to a Trader Joe's in the Valley and I see an American Cancer Society Thrift Store. These are usually the worst thrift stores, and I knew this one to be generally overpriced with really uncool stuff. Still, I felt lucky, punk, so I walked in...and found the mirror I've been looking for. And then I found a denim jacket that fit perfectly. And then I found a pair of Ben Sherman jeans, nicely distressed, the perfect waltzing around jeans, for FIVE DOLLARS! I held them up; I put them down. I held them up again. (I hold things up a lot before I will put myself through the agony of trying them on.) I tried them on. They fit perfectly. Perfectly! These stupid jeans in this stupid thrift store I randomly went to because it was between my parking spot and the Trader Joe's in Toluca Lake.

Okay, so I get it. This thing works.

PART 2: The Wanting OUT

So now I am home, typing this. It's 8am. I've been up since 7am. I love the quiet. In general, I love my apartment. It's been a shaky week, health-wise, but still, I am LOVING EVERYTHING UP...ya dig?

Except that for the third day in a row, there is this Cologne Thing happening. As in, at 7:15, like clockwork only with smell, the scent of a thousand European men who have freshly doused themselves in cheap man-cologne is wafting through my window. Or that they shimmied up the drainpipe and tossed a baggie full of cheap man-cologne through the slats of my jalousie windows and it broke on my carpet and now it's like a wall-to-wall sachet of man-cologne badness right under my nose. I mean, it's gag-inducing. I can't figure out why anyone would want to smell like that, much less why someone would want to smell so MUCH like that.

It makes me hate my neighbors, with whom I have enough issues already (noise, poor parking manners, that one dish they make on Slovakian holidays that smells like fried cat shit). It makes me hate Los Angeles. It makes me hate, period, which is not good for the wanting (having bad thoughts = low vibrational energy = attracting the bad stuff).

So tell me, wise ones, what to do? How do I turn this into gold? How do I pull myself out of this low-vibrational minefield and send myself soaring back up into the land of high-vibrational voodoo that nets me great jeans, new headbands and, now that I think of it, really bitchin' parking spaces. Because try as I might, I cannot see the lesson or the gift in this daily morning stink bomb of vomit-inducing cologne.

Other than that I am really, really lovin' up that ceiling fan I had the handyman install three years ago. And that handyman...he was really nice and friendly. He helped me fix up several items around the apartment to make it more liveable. And as I recall, he kind of smelled like...

AUUUUUUGGGGGGHHHHH!!!!

xxx c

UPDATE: This is being posted way late b/c the friendly servers at DreamHost (no, I'm not linking b/c ever since I signed up with them they've been NightmareHost, or at least, BadNightsSleepHost) keep crashing. You see? Like attracts like! Again, auuuuuugh! And I'm'a wait to link this post up until the server seems more stable.

Photo by amanky via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license