The view from my office window looks down on a house with a flag on the front lawn.  It’s a consulate’s house, and today there are two painters working on the French patio door.  They are brushing the cross bars in grey, carefully lining the paint on the wood.  Their heads tilt to the sway of the brush.  Watching them is a good break from the pop-up letters and numbers on my computer screen.  I can imagine their faces, like children, focused on the lines and texture of their brushes on the medium.  It must be rewarding work, I think, from the relaxed poses of their bodies.   The painters are beautifying and preserving something of value.  Their tools and material of paper sand, brushes, buckets, scrapers, spackling paste, tapes, rollers, drop cloths – are for the intent of construction and not destruction.

 I usually start my day with reading the news.  Yesterday marked the anniversary of the war on Iraq over their presumed Weapons of Mass Destruction.  I digest the short paragraph which is general.  It stirs an inexplicable emotion, except for a wish.  I wish I had the guts to express how I truly feel about war, and specifically about that war.  I feel inadequate and invalidated to be specific about my opinions and feelings about any big issue, because I know it is not as black and white as reported to me, who lives thousands of miles from the source of the news.  The big issues are those that affect everyone.  But we don’t all want to be affected.  For me I don’t want to be affected, because that war seems unreal and hard to accept.  Maybe that’s why I can’t be specific, and bold to express my feelings and thoughts about war.   I can only describe my feelings as grief over a loss.  I don’t know yet what that loss is.  Perhaps it is one of these or all:  loss of innocence, loss of humanity, loss of sanity. 

 One of the topics about the Iraq war recently is the mass displacement and epidemic birth defects and cancer found among the population, and the cause is suspected to be the “US military’s extensive use of depleted uranium and white phosphorus”.  That is specific.  What is more specific is to see a picture of a newly born baby with more than 2 sets of arms and 2 sets of legs, and its internal organs formed outside of its internal cavity.

I remember during one of the lessons in a writing class.  The teacher talked about specificity and he presented it like looking at the multitude of faces of a cut crystal.  One face is described as “Metaphor is a tool to bring an experience of universality to the specifics of our story.”  I sat quietly, working.  Then my mind wandered away from the intensity.  The eyes shifted from the page to the view.  I spotted the painters, and I’m reminded of the headlines I read.  My subconscious has been quietly knitting at the images and words to make sense of the juxtaposition of construction to destruction.

 The brush paints up and down and side to side of the wooden frames.  Straight, neat lines contrasts the spider baby with its medusa appendages sprawling out of its torso.

 “Working with metaphor allows us to say a lot with few words.  It is a way of helping the reader to understand the underlying themes.  It can also be a way of making challenging issues accessible.”                 –  Al Watt (LA Writer’s Tribe)

I’ve recently picked up my physical activities by going back to the YMCA.  I’ve been taking spinning classes alternating that with swimming and some workouts on my own.  I had a bad case of the flu in February, and I’d forgotten the feeling of good health during my sick time.  After a lengthy and tenuous recuperation period, I began to appreciate what it feels like to be healthy.

It’s so humbling to do the simple things that keep life going smoothly.  With me, I found that I have a strong resistance to doing the simple things.  To do the simple things means:

1. “showing up”
2. “having the intention to work”
3. “having the intention to push beyond my boundaries”
4. “having gratitude to be able to do it”

 My good friend puts it this way (regarding working out), he said, “It’s a privilege to be able to work out”.  It is what he reminds himself when he does not feel the motivation to exercise.  Health is a privilege.  Creativity is a privilege.  Life is a privilege.

 Privilege defined:

  “a right or immunity granted as an advantage or favor esp. to some and not others.”    The Merriam-Webster Dictionary

 “a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people”      Oxford Dictionary

 Without getting into a political debate or philosophical debate, I just want to explore the depth of having the privilege to health, creativity and life.  I think it is becoming more of a privilege to have these things than a right.  Most people in our affluent society are born with good health, creativity, and naturally being born is life itself.  There are circumstances that occur that deprive some of us of these basic things.  The immediate circumstance that comes to mind is having the  financial ability to afford education, nutritious food, clean and safe habitation.  When I consider the hazards of living in Afghanistan or Syria, or anywhere else where to make a living is a hard struggle, then it is indeed, a privilege to be healthful, to be creative and to live as I am only able to imagine and will myself to be. 

Last week I was driving to work from my “annual” physical and it was busy in Beverly Hills, and people were driving like lunatics.  But I was relaxed.  Being over 40, I am now belong tothe group of women that needs to have a mammogram as part of my physical.  I put “annual” in quotes because this is my conversation with my doctor:

 Doctor:  “Hi Miss Revilla.” (He shook my hand while his other hand held my chart.) “It’s been a long time.”

Me:  “Not really.  2 years?”

Doctor looks down on the chart.

Doctor:  “Your last physical was in 2006. You came in 2009 for a cough, but you haven’t been back.”

Me (feeling sheepish):  “Wow, how time flies.”

 I have insurance coverage from work, but I have not gone for my annual physical, because I am of two minds on this:  One is, I wonder if there’s an insurance scam about the process, two, I really don’t like getting bad news. 

 Doctor:  “You didn’t go for your follow up mammogram in 2007.”

Me:  “I think I was out of the country.”

Doctor:  “Promise to go this time.  Otherwise my office gets these yellow cards that remind us it’s my responsibility to ensure my patients go for their checkups.”

Okay.  I promised to do so.  

A few days later, I showed up for my appointment at the Beverly Tower Women’s Center.  After the examination with its tricky maneuvers, holding poses and breaths, and squeezing my mammary glands between two cold plates of plastic, I told the technician, “Now I know why I didn’t go for my follow up.”  She laughed.  She told me to wait in a private lounge while the radiologist reviews the x-ray images.

 The last time I sat in that room was in 2006.  I had to to come back for follow up tests after the initial screening.  They explained after their intense diagnostics that the density of the tissues in my breast made it hard for them to see if something is abnormal.  This time around I thought, I’m sure everything is okay like the last time.  The technician returned.  “Analyn, the doctor wants to do an ultrasound.  Can you wait here please?”

 Of course I smiled, and nodded yes, but I thought, “Do I have a choice?”  Then I began to worry.  It’s been 7 years since my last examination, and I wonder if that little thing they found has turned into something not so little anymore.  The next minutes turned into agonizing moments.  “What if it’s bad news?”  Now, I reflect back on my thought process then, and how my mind prioritized what’s important to me.  I confess, I asked for the chance to spend time with my fiancé so I can make him happy. 

 After the appointment, as I drove back to the office I felt a sense of freedom, hence my relaxed state when there were people driving with little courtesy for others.  But I didn’t mind if someone changes lanes without using their turn signals, or if someone blocks the intersection during a change of lights.  The ease (lack of “dis”-ease, came from the freedom of knowing what truly matters in life to me.

Another female mentor spoke it well, when I described to her my experience at the doctor’s office.  My mentor is a survivor of cancer.  She said to me, “You definitely learn to pick your battles.”

The battle for me is working on the simple things:

1. “showing up”
2. “having the intention to work”
3. “having the intention to push beyond my boundaries”
4. “having gratitude to be able to do it”

 My simple things are to maintain health, to write, to play guitar, ride the motorcycle and to serve with love.

 I recently finished the book, “Tuesdays With Morrie”, by Mitch Albom.  I want to share some good quotes from it:

 “The truth is, once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.” – Morrie Schwartz

 “So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.” – Morrie Schwartz

Between 2006 and now I’ve changed in my attitude about the annual physical.  Even if I belived that the physical examination could be an insurance scam (and I don’t know the machinery behind all that), I choose not to mind being a tool for it, for the reason that my eyes were opened during those minutes in that waiting room to the gift of health, creativity and life.

Laura Shamas suggested that this week’s blogger write something about International Women’s Day.  I didn’t know that there was one and went to Wikipedia (where else) to find out something about it.

The entry is complicated and long and not very well written and I’ll have to take more  time to understand the history of the Day, which started in the Soviet Union, and then spread to Eastern European countries and the rest of the world.

In dozens of countries, some of which observe the day as a holiday, women have used IWD to agitate for equal rights in every aspect of a woman’s life –  the right to vote, to hold public office, to end sexual exploitation and employment sex discrimination.  In the Soviet Union, it was also a day in which to thank women for their heroism and selflessness in World War II.

In 1977, the United Nations formally proclaimed March the 8th as International Women’s Day –  a day for women’s rights and world peace.

Shockingly, human trafficking is the second most profitable business enterprise in the world, just behind the Drug Trade and ahead of Arms Sales.  The U.N., which has given each year a slogan, perhaps acknowledging that, calls 2013 a year in which “A Promise is a Promise:  Time for Action to End Violence Against Women.”

Today, the day before IWD, is a good day for women in the U.S..  President Obama just signed a renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, which has been extended to cover Native Americans, Immigrants, and Gays.  The renewed law makes it easier to prosecute crimes against women in federal court, and provides such services as domestic abuse hotlines and shelters for battered women.

“All women deserve the right to live free from fear,” Obama said during a signing ceremony at the Interior Department. “That’s what today is about.”

A day for hope.

What if there was an International Men’s Day, I thought to myself?  Would that mean that we had achieved parity?  Turns out there is one.  Founded in Trinidad and Tobago in 1999, to encourage good role models, gender equality, and men’s health, it has now spread to 60 countries.

And that’s a good sign, too.

Tonight, my romantic comedy, The Piaggi Suite, is having a staged reading at The Blank theater in Hollywood.  The reading is part of the Monday night Living Room Series of new plays the Blank has been hosting on its 2nd Stage since 1991.

The plays are free (suggested donation $10) to the public.  The actors have books in hand but give a sense of how the plays would be in full production.

I have been reading for the series for several years, turned on to it by fellow lafpier, Sara Israel.

I have been so fortunate with Piaggi, a play that is close to my heart.   It has incidental music and I looked for a long time for a composer who liked the piece and wanted both to write for it and promote it as well.  Ignoring the scoffers and the supercilious, who said, “bigcheap?”, I posted  on the big cheap list and found Andy Chukerman who wrote some lovely music and got us this gig tonight.

This is just part of his resume: Winner of the Richard Rodgers Award and the Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation Award as composer/co-lyricist of the musical, “The Princess and the Black-Eyed Pea”, Andrew Chukerman works extensively in film, television, theater, and concert work, as a composer, orchestrator, music director, and keyboardist.

He also worked with the Blank producers and found the BEST DIRECTOR AND CAST I have seen in a long time.

I’m posting the names of the cast.  If you are ever looking for first rate people, here they are:  Lisa Zane, Maura Knowles,  Megan Moran, Chris Devlin,  David Lago, J.P. Karliak, Peter Katona,  Julie Garnye  and  Mary Carrig.

David Glenn Armstrong, the director, is from New York, in town visiting his brother and putting this up for fun.  Instantly likeable, he accomplished miracles in three very short days.  Efficient, specific, encouraging and engaging, he moved nine actors around a small space and encouraged everyone to play, play, play.

David has staged over 160 productions/workshops seen in 49 states.  He has also worked extensively with Sheldon Harnick and just finished working with him on a new musical.  (Kitty!  Sheldon Harnick is 88 and still going strong.)

So, I’m looking forward to tonight but the best part has already happened.  I haven’t been happy with the ending of the play for sometime.   Voila!  David found me a new one and the rewrite is on.

Back Row:  Lisa Zane, Chris Devlin, David Glenn Armstrong, David Lago, John Paul Karliak, Maura M. Knowles

Front Row:  Mary Carrig, Andy Chukerman, Diane Grant, Julie Garnye, Megan Moran, Peter Katona