Dear Readers,
Writing the editorial used to be just that, writing the editorial. It is quite a different thing nowadays. My printer asks: "what will you have in your editorial? Your last editorial was just so-so. Write a real good one." My friends ask, my UPS guy asks, my customers ask.
Well, here I am. Writing under the gun. Having a life, under the gun.
My girl-friend started her own magazine. She's known me for a while, and we talk every day. She knows what I go through, month after month. She has to listen to everything I can't put in my editorial. And she has learned. She learned that she can do it too. If I can do it, she can do it. So she has.
"They want to shut down all the sexual entertainment businesses is New Jersey," one of my customers tells me. "They are cracking down on the massage parlors, they want to get the bachelor parties next, and then the clubs." Who is them? Orwellian Big Brother? Or Hitler? Yeah, just like that! With Hitler, when you listened to him, you didn't realize that he wasn't running the world. He was a puppet. The real movers and shakers are behind the scenes. The front men and women, like our governors, mayors, presidents are just that, fronts. Smokescreen. And trying to do away with your sexuality, dear readers, is smokescreen too. While you scream, trying to protect what you've already lost anyway, your Constitution given rights, they get into your pocket. Because that's what it's all about, your pocket. Who has and prints your money, rules you. You are indebted to "them." Up to your eye-balls.
If I don't make any sense... It is crazy! But call me. I'll recommend some reading materials.
The president did this, the president did that. The whole country is up in arms. The TV watchers are busy, newspaper readers bury their noses. No-one watches as they put cancer-causing hormones in our children's milk, put radioactive and poisonous heavy metals in the fertilizers and on your dinner table, prosecute and silence doctors that heal cancer, so that the drug companies can do mass-testing of their drugs with FDA coverup. But most people don't hear that, they are busy watching the news about the president's sexual habits.
Dear Ann Landers: "... I am a college student, I often turn to your column in the hopes of seeing a "how we met" letter. I find these stories sweet and romantic. They show us a time when people weren't afraid to fall in love and trust each other. I dream of something like that happening to me..." Ann Landers' answer: "Keep dreaming, dear, and one day, your dreams might come true. I'll keep my fingers crossed." Tongue in cheek.
A survey done with 1,000 men and women shows, that today people have sex, on average, only once a week, while just a decade ago that number used to be twice.
What's happening? Why are people not in relationship? Why are people not having sex? I have been doing a lot of reading.
I have been finding troubling information about us being manipulated, including our sexuality. Our money is printed by a foreign owned corporation and then loaned to us. Our sex has become the topic of books, conversations, news, and not a practice. Our relationships diminish... Divide and Rule... it's easier to rule single people than families.
1998 hasn't been much fun for me so far.
I have been wondering why it is that it is hard if not impossible to get up in the morning, why I take an hour to read the comics in the newspaper, not wanting to start my day.
When I talk to people, I am all energized, laugh, feel good. But when I am by myself, I seem to be listless, aimless, and unwilling to do what I am supposed to do.
As I was editing the interview with Jill Morley, I realized that I fell into the same trap as most of us in this industry: I don't have a future. I do, but I don't sit down and actually design it. I live day by day, I react to what is happening, and I am surprised that I am not ambitious, and ultimately I don't accomplish much.
Mornings and nights are great indication if you are one of the people effected. If it is hard to get up in the morning, hard to start the day; you go out to have breakfast after your night shift; you watch late night TV; you read till the wee hours. These are all indications that you "don't have a life." Now, don't be offended, because I did not mean to insult you. After all I would have to be offended myself. Your/mine/our life is not what happenstance-ly is in it, our life is what we design into it. And the only design that wakes us up in the morning is the design of a challenging, worth-to-look-forward-to future. Do you have one? I don't.
So what am I going to do about this? Because continuing life with bouts with depression, is very much a waste of life. My life.
I think the answer is somewhat simple, so simple that I have overlooked it for as many years as I have been looking.
You have to do a business plan, both for your business and for your life!
Let me backtrack a little. About fifteen years ago, I was in Israel at the time, I bought a book that promised to turn your life into joyful. I liked the idea, because my life was anything but joyful. I started to read the book, but most of it wasn't simple reading, it was exercises. Goal-setting exercises.
I remember sitting on my bed, trying to make up some goals. I couldn't come up with anything that really excited me. I was thinking going back to school somehow to fill the gap of 15 years earlier. But going back to school and filling gaps didn't turn me on. I was an architect at the time, and that in itself didn't turn me on.
Later I went and did a course in communication, and that, somehow, turned me on. As a result I came to the US, quit architecture, and started my own magazine. I went and did some more courses, and some more courses, and more courses, and more courses.
I worked day and night, I didn't take vacations, I didn't date, I sometimes ate standing to save time. I wasn't making a paycheck. But somehow I made it through with only occasional unhappiness. Most of the time I was turned on by the challenge of the new environment, new profession, communicating in a new language, etc.
Some two years ago some "extracurricular desire" seeped in, and the all work-no play life stopped satisfying me. And then, it all fell apart. I had been operating on adrenaline, and the adrenaline was gone.
When I looked into my future, all I could see is more of the same. More work for less money every year, and ... I didn't want to get up in the morning.
I read a piece of email yesterday, and I realized that I have never made a business plan. I don't know where I am going, what I am going to do and when, where I am taking my life. It hasn't been designed, redesigned yet.
So, the first thing I am going to do, after finishing this issue, printing, delivery, mailing, and shipping, another 10 days of so, is sit down, and do a business/life plan. A plan that allows me to make a living and have fun too. Like a new lease on life. It's never too late, never too early.
I can't wait. I can't wait to be happy again. I can't wait to want to get up in the morning.
Call me, talk to me, email me.
I am here for you.
Sophie
www.mentertainment.com
sophie@mentertainment.com
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