Long Bio

This entry is many years old and not all of it is still true. YHBW.

I was born on a Sunday. September 29, 1968 in Washington state, three months after my parents married. I went to nine schools in twelve years. I thought it taught me to be shy, but it actually taught me to make friends.

I didn’t learn how to use my social skills until junior college. Then I blossomed… into a really outgoing person. I was overtly intellectual, selfish, self-oriented, and bossy, from junior college on.

In 1995, I changed. Maybe something huge moved in my Jyotish chart. I was not who I used to be.

I didn’t talk as much. I got angry more often. I had more underlying fear than ever before. (I found myself imagining horrible accidents involving my man, my dog, and my friends and family.) I didn’t show off in public. I didn’t like looking like a hippy. I couldn’t stand drugs, but I began to drink more frequently than I ever had.

It’s really quite odd to wake up and be your own polar opposite. It smashes a lot of important “self-evident truths” and screws up your whole world view.

Then you have to change, just to survive.

Ha ha.

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One Fall several years back, two nice Mormon girls came to my apartment. They wanted to talk about my salvation. I’m very interested in my salvation, obviously more than anyone else is, so I invited them in.

They didn’t know what the hell they were talking about.

The girls had had no spiritual experience that they could remember. They had never experienced a miracle. They were incapable of transcending mere vocabulary to find the underlying similarities in all religions. They were only repeating, by rote, what they’d been told.

And they’d been told, apparently, to come to my house and tell me that I was going to hell.

Ha ha.

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I studied classical voice from 12 to 23, beginning in high school. I studied jazz voice from 17 to 23. I sang in competitions. I sang in a rock cover band. I sang in a Motown band. People said I was a good singer. I was disappointed that I wasn’t black.

I moved to the Midwest in 1992 to get the sidhis and ended up learning the blues. I opened for Richie Havens and Bo Diddley. I got really drunk at a gig at a Best Western and fell off the bandstand. I went to a jam in Iowa City and since nobody knew who I was, I had to wait until the wee hours of the morning to sing. When I finally got up there and sang Stormy Monday or Rock Me Baby or some other simple 12-bar standard in G, everyone in the house and most of the guys on the bandstand whooped and screamed. The guy who’d kept moving my name to the bottom of the list felt like a moron. I smiled graciously at him, thinking, “Gee, you stupid fuck, I told you I could sing.” I did about six songs in a row while they swapped out guitar players.

So I was a budding little rock star at one point. Kinda. I’m a sloppy singer, really, but people like an extrovert and crowds were nicer to me than I ever deserved.

Right now I’m not in a band, and I like that, because I get to eat at home every evening instead of constantly rehearsing.

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Well, almost every evening.

Sometimes I get a wild hair and decide to do a musical with the Iowa Theatre Company. I am what’s called a “ringer,” someone brought in without auditioning to play a lead role.

It amuses me that I’m a ringer. ‘Cause really, I’m not. It’s a big fish/small pond scenario, trust me. I could have beenacontendah, but I chose not to study, not to pursue. So I’m now someone who used to be talented and who lives in the middle of nowhere… on purpose. I barely have any chops left at all.

After I do shows, people say, “You should be on Broadway,” to which I respond, “Nah, I don’t really enjoy waitressing.”

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For money, I used to be an executive secretary. I did it for years but I hated it. I got tired of putting up with the insane and selfish behaviors of so-called ‘quirky’ entrepreneurs. They’re all alike at the deepest level: they’re driven, selfish, and ruthless. Some people admire men like that, but I don’t. That personality type is all about money, and ego, and pseudo-war. There isn’t much beauty or honor in it, in my opinion.

So I took an eight thousand dollar per year pay cut to work at an Internet service provider. I love it. I’m soooo much happier. I’m turning into a DNS and DSL goddess.

I once worked at a finance company in Oregon. There’s no credit ceiling in Oregon. So we charged people obscenely high interest rates on short term loans against their car titles. The only people who need high interest, short term loans are the ones who can least afford it. I found it repugnant and quit.

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Brett and I live in a big farm house in Batavia. We love it.

Brett is the love of my life. He’s a redhead, and I adore redheads. He’s also a good person, strong and good and wise. He’s a mechanic by training, but a carpenter by trade. He likes to do finish work, and if he had his druthers there’d be about fifty different kinds of saws in the garage. Actually, there probably are fifty different saws in the garage!
We got married in May of 2001. Everyone in the whole world was there. I had a blast.

Someone taught me this poem when I was little:

Monday’s child is fair of face,
Tuesday’s child is full of grace.
Wednesday’s child is full of woe,
Thursday’s child has far to go.
Friday’s child is loving and giving,
Saturday’s child works hard for a living.
But the child that is born on the Sabbath day
is bright, and bonny, and good and gay.

Brett was born on a Sunday, too.

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I am a devotee of Mata Amritanandamayi Devi. This means that I’m Hindu. I worship the Hindu forms of God, including Shiva, Krishna, Ganesha, and Hanuman.

Amma means “mother.” The first time I went to see Amma, I was more intellect-polarized than I am now. I had been living in my head for a long time, and was accustomed to the noise and rigidity of such a condition.

Amma, the Holy Mother, reached into my heart with more love and compassion than I have ever known…

…and smashed the fucking thing into a million tiny pieces. It hurt like open heart surgery with no anesthetic. I sat in the back of the darshan hall and bawled my eyes out for three days, while the Mother, smiling, gave all who came to Her big, fat hugs.

There’s a form of God known as Kali. She’s a destroyer. She’s tough. She’s where the phrase “fear of God” comes from. God is scary. God is all-knowing, infinite, and compassionate. God is so infinite and so powerful that to see God is to be terribly frightened. Sure, God loves us, but God’s so big.

Mother, as Kali, was bestowing upon me the boon of a bigger heart. God was breaking my tight, tiny little heart in order to make more room in there. Amma assumes all the forms of God at will, because at Her level of existence, there is no differentiation. She is all the different forms of God.

I’m the webmaster for my local satsang.

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My first dog, Bindu, is a Blue Heeler runt. I got her as a rescue. I can’t believe how cute she is. In bed at night, she noses under the covers and then plops herself down in the crook of my knees. I can’t believe how warm and soft she is.

Dog love is a wonderful thing.

My second dog is a golden retriever named Shiva. He’s one of Stella’s puppies. I was there when he was born. He’s the cutest thing on earth, I think. He’s young but he’s learning. He’ll be a good dog when he grows up.

I used to be a cat person, but I got better. Ha ha. (I live with the world’s coolest cat. His name is Buz. With one Z. I call him Buz McFuz. He doesn’t seem to mind.)

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I majored in vocal performance in junior college. I only went there because I had a scholarship, it was close, and I didn’t know what else to do (even though I also had a scholarship to UofO or OSU, I don’t remember which. The best part of going to MHCC was the Mt. Hood Festival of Jazz every August. I got to meet some famous jazz players and open the festival in the MHCC Jazz Choir.

I majored in literature Maharishi International University and got a 4.0 GPA. I dropped out when they said they’d suspend me for not passing dome attendance. I’d already been there for two and a half years, and had never passed dome. I am not built to get up at six thirty in the morning to slog across campus in a wind chill of seventy below zero to flash my dome badge at some freaky Nazi dome monitor and then fall back asleep on the foam-core floor with my face smushed into the corner of somebody’s back jack.

I moved to New Mexico to go to UNM, but I didn’t have enough financial aid and had to drop out after three days. I was going to major in history.

As you can see, I’m not very concerned about making a lot of money, with majors like those!

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So these days, I live in a farm house that is constantly under construction. We’ve got dogs, and sometimes peafowl, chickens, and ducks. We’ve often got a renter/roommate. We have horse shoes, volley ball, and badminton when we can find all the pieces. We’re building a deluxe outdoor cooktop and a hot tub. Most of the screen doors are broken because dogs rule our lives.

When I was younger, I wanted to be an archaeologist. An Egyptologist, to be precise. I wanted to marry Indiana Jones and crash around in the jungle, narrowly avoiding poison darts.

I wonder what happened to that?

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