Orson Welles on Better Living Through Adversity...

I had to write this down before I forget it. Its just what I mean about thriving under adversity. It makes for stronger, better people with more character.

"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Thank you Orson Welles, for the great quote.

My daily dose of adversity in the form of...corset training

So as if all of the other things aren't enough, I add a little extra adversity to my daily life by trying to function while wearing a corset? You would think I love the toil and trouble. This is probably going to be a boring, just for me kind of post, so unless you are a corset enthusiast, I'd skip it.

Actually, the corset makes me feel better, believe it or not. It is my protective shell. The stiffer and more immobilizing, the better. I prefer no bend in the torso whatsoever. I am in a constant struggle to find the right corset, the right style, the right fit. Of course, if you are going to attempt to wear a corset in what enthusiasts call "23/7" you MUST have a custom fit corset. This is not as easy as one would think. I have been wearing a corset for a few years now and have now worn corsets made by several makers and it seems like its just a neverending process of finding just the right one.
I dont plan on writing a whole bunch about my corset wear now, mabye later. But as with other things, I want to write down what I think when I think of it. I have just been looking at some photos of me in older corsets and it suddenly occurred to me that I am happier and do better when my corset is leather. This might sound like just a preference, but I really feel prettier, sexier, and more motivated to train my waist when I see it in leather. Feeling pretty is a huge motivator for me. If I dont feel beautiful I have a hard time motivating myself to do anything. I swear I'm not a total narcisist (sp?), or maybe I am, I dont know. All I know is that the smooth feeling of running my hand down the side of a leather corset to feel my shape is just a happy feeling I cant get with anything else. My husband and I discussed this more than a year ago, and decided that all of my future corsets should be leather, but for some reason he changed his mind. I guess it was the expense. He used to be more involved in my corsetting, but seems to have lost interest, so now I have to do all of the lacing myself, which does take some of the fun out of it for me. I liked the closeness of him lacing me. I need a real job that pays well so that I can afford leather again...sigh.

This post was published to Better Living Through Adver... at 5:21:49 AM 5/31/2010
An explanation of sorts...


Two posts in one day...this will likely be the only time this happens, unless I am extremely inspired or bored. One comes more than the other.
After looking at my very first blog post I realized that the title might not make sense without a little background. I chose the title after reconnecting with a friend I’d had a falling out with for many years. I came back from the dead so to speak, and many did not expect me to. I think most expected me to continue living my life like a speeding train waiting to crash and burn and later it would be talked about as some inevitibilty. Of course, I am the kind of person that strives even harder when someone has the expectation that I will fail.
It seems like my entire life has had some sort of adversity. Someone told me that its because I’m a Scorpio…I tend to think that being born to the parents I have, it was probably inevitable, regardless of my date of birth. My mother took us to a hippie commune where we lived for a few years, and nowadays when people think of hippies and the 60’s in general they think peace, love and good vibrations or whatever. What they don’t seem to remember is that hippies were social outcasts, people HATED them! People wanted to actually do you harm for being different. Sort of odd now that I think of how the same statement could apply to my teenage years in the punk scene. My mother and her friends were seriously bucking the system by ‘dropping out’ and going to live in the wilderness. The communities surrounding this wilderness were not exactly happy that ‘the hippies’ had moved in. There were FBI raids on our land and brutalities that most people only see on TV. The FBI agents scared the shit out of me as a little kid. I was under the age of 6, but don’t remember my exact age when I got interrogated. Without another adult present, without my family. My interrogator scared me so bad that to this day I remember his name: Barry Lawson. He tried to get me to tell things about my mother that weren’t true and threatened that I would be taken from her, etc. Of course these days this kind of thing might happen, but people would be pissed about it at least. Back then, if you looked different you might as well have just checked your rights at the door. Ok…so now I think on that, and it’s probably STILL true. I have memories of SWAT teams pointing their guns at children, beating and slamming the bodies of our friends inside car doors, and my mother imploring me to be quiet as we hid inside the Wolf Creek Inn (a now historic hotel in Wolf Creek, Oregon) watching through a basement grate at the violence happening outside. Ok…I am rambling off of the point that I had wanted to make…it being that I grew up very differently than your average American, and that made it difficult for me to fit in a lot of the time. I have always felt like I am swimming against the current. I guess you can just say I am a survivor of many things: unenlightened parenting (though aren’t we all?), drug overdoses, kidnapping, rape, torture, heroin addiction (13 years clean, thank you), PTSD, and I am still trying to survive marriage and motherhood. I seriously struggle with the last sentence turning over and over whether to leave it and I probably will because despite the discomfort it causes me, it illuminates a small amount of the adversity I speak of and somehow writing it makes it less powerful and reminds me that life’s seemingly large problems are only bumps in the road and they will not crush me. I am so, so fortunate to still be here to write these words…
EDIT: The photo is a LIFE Magazine cover that pictures the commune I grew up on. Yes, they did a story on us; cool right? And no, I am not pictured...I was a year old at the time.