Time to empty our closets!

Doesn’t it seem like everyone in the world has some sort of issue? I have to wonder if “dysfunction” is the norm. Nobody does anything in moderation. I know that I don’t! If I want to have a slice of pizza, I eat a whole pizza. If I write a song, I sit down until an entire album is done. If I find an outfit that looks nice, I buy it in 5 colors…This is one of my personality traits. Am I weird?…sure…but no weirder than the guy at the gym who likely passed over the point of getting his body in shape about 6 months ago and now can’t rest his arms at his sides. Did he just get obsessed or is his image of himself distorted? He looks like he is his own reflection in a funhouse mirror. The question is, what was his issue before? Was it the other extreme? Is it possible that some kid in high school made a comment to him about having small shoulders and now 15 years later, he still worries that his shoulders are small?…uh…they aren’t man!… The point is that we bounce from one extreme to another with little ability to stop when we hit the middle of the road.

I don’t think that everyone has this tendency but it is clear that “personality disorders” are the new “black.” Our subconscious mind is so powerful that we can stare in a mirror at ourselves and see the person we may have believed ourselves to be at one fleeting moment during our past when someone else’s insecurities forced them to redirect their self destructive thoughts towards us. Great! Thank you! What is wrong with just being confident with the person we’ve become?…well…nothing…as long as we can see clearly who that person actually is.

I noticed an older couple at the gym last night with a similar issue. They weren’t obsessive though (that I know of). They are stuck in that fleeting moment when someone told them that they looked “great!”…their “glory days” if you will. They definitely had strong healthy bodies and had worked hard for them, but they were both wearing outfits stolen out of the 1983 movie, “Flashdance.”…My only question about this is, how does this stuff not fall apart in the dryer? I have a fleece that I’ve washed once and now I’m wondering where I can get a new one. Were clothes in the 80’s made with some sort of indestructible fabric?…and too bad if so because whether it still fits you or not, there should be a general rule on how long to keep things in your closet. I have a way to make this work for me. If I’m wearing an outfit that I think I may have had for too long, I ask the person next to me how long they have been married. If I’ve owned the outfit longer than their marriage lasted, I take it to the Salvation Army. One time, I had to get rid of an outfit I had only for 6 months…apparently the guy’s wife started getting really emotional when she was 3 months pregnant and he didn’t want the child to grow up in an unhappy household. Until then, she was his best friend but “she just changed!”…Yeah…just throw it away…I’m sure there’s someone better out there that won’t change!…Whoa…so we can easily toss away our relationships but won’t empty our closets?…I think I’m going to try to empty my emotional closet. Things can be done in moderation with little or no consequence. But if you eat an entire block of cheese every single night, your pants from the 80’s that you’re still hoping to get back into, will stay there forever!

Women are from venus…Men are hiding their heads under a blanket in my living room?

I’ve known for many years that women and men think and communicate differently. For example, over the last few years, it seems that men are more comfortable with communication via text messaging than actually talking or getting together. It must be due to the need for some attention but the additional need to control the amount of attention given back. How many times have I been in the middle of a “conversation” text message and then all of a sudden there was just no response? The conversation never ended. There was no “okay, catch ya later.” – Nothing. Just cut! Apparently this is the male version of one of my favorites – “blah blah blah! I CAN’T HEAR YOU! Wah bladaladalada!”…usually when I uncover my eyes, the guy who started the conversation that I was uncomfortable with, is gone.

I met a guy one time that had his own version of this. He was older than I was but he insisted he was 8 years younger…that should’ve been my first clue that something wasn’t quite right! One day we were talking in my living room and then all of a sudden, as I sat on the floor, he was lying on the couch with the blanket tight over his face… Um…huh?... I tried to move the blanket away from his face so I could find out what was wrong. I couldn’t recall what could’ve gone wrong in the conversation. He grunted and said in a muffled, blanket covered voice, “just go!” uh…confused again! It was my house! After struggling with the blanket for 5 minutes or so and getting nowhere with this 6 foot 5, 38 year old man, I walked into the kitchen. As I walked back into the living room, his BMW was pealing out of my driveway. Of course I did what any girl would do: I made myself a pizza. I played with whether or not to go find him over a slice, or 3… I mean…that seemed like an irrational action on his part. I’ve had guys flip me off cause I wasn’t singing Mony, Mony in a small town bar, guys invite me places and just not show, I even had a guy kick a footprint into the side of my little red sports car when I was 22. I was totally unaccustomed to the “hiding his head under a blanket” tactic. Eventually I went looking for him. We had been hanging out for nearly 2 weeks so I was beyond the 1 week rule where you can simply let someone speed out of your driveway without having to wonder why. I caught up with him later and he told me that I needed to read some book about that blanket being his cave. I didn’t read the book though I’m quite certain that there is no book that tells grown men to hide under a blanket and run from a 5’3” blonde girl. I suppose I don’t really care. He disappeared completely a couple weeks later. – and I’m not talking about him just not coming around- DISAPPEARED! Quit his job, moved out of the area…gone! …I think he left a pair of scrubs at my house. Does that mean that we’re together?

Oh! That explains it- we’re all getting bad advice!

I was looking online at what the dating rules are to see if I am following them at all. And by the way... I’m totally not! I am going to give a few of them a shot though. My friend Robin talked about “the Rules” book and noted different areas that she does or doesn’t follow them in her blog. I actually think she does a little better than I do. I definitely call too much and do feel the need to explain up front why I’m still single. It’s only because I have actually been asked, “why are you still single”, as though I’m broken or something and then I feel the need to explain myself. Ok! So I was in a relationship too long and ended up in a weird demographic. If I followed the rules, that guy would be wondering on the first date if I had a house full of cats! - NO CATS!

I also have an issue with not calling. I can’t stand that one. I feel like I’m being rude if I don’t thank a guy for a nice time in a text or something when I get home that night or the next day. A big no-no apparently! Oops…As a matter of fact, when a guy waits 3 days to call me, I’ve completely readjusted any excitement I had felt about him to the realization that he just wasn’t interested and by the time he calls, I don’t even feel like talking. I’ve moved on. (I suppose that is either a protective mechanism or the fact that I move at the speed of light and get bored and go on to my next goal- either way- 3 days is a long time in my world!) Oh well!

So that brings me to this site I came across. I may have just uncovered the problem. Men are being told to play a completely different game than women are. It’s no wonder that there are any couples at all. “Just be yourself”… but be a completely different person and you’ll get her? Uh…huh? It’s a huge game. Some guys like rules girls while other guys get mad and think girls are playing games. I suppose that dating is sort of a game but it is getting ridiculous. A little bit of a chase is a good idea while you’re getting to know someone, but come on! Do we really need all these books of rules? I haven’t even read the manual on my toaster! Shouldn’t I just be able to stick a piece of bread in and make toast without being told that shoving a metal object into a conductive electrical device might be hazardous? Thank God for the warning on my hair dryer or else I would be showering and drying my hair at the same time! Feeww!

Here are a few of the statements offered as advice to men that may be single handedly taking down the dating community:


Be willing to let her moan and groan and not give in because the nice guy isn’t respected.

This is absolutely crazy. I think that in this regard, if a woman is moaning and groaning about something, you really aren’t going to get very far with her in a relationship. I don’t think I’ve ever “moaned and groaned” about anything that I wasn’t able to take care of for myself. The person who wrote this was trying to help a nice guy compete with that ‘jerk’ with confidence that many of us try to ‘fix’ because we know we are “different and he’ll come around”. Well…that being said, we can’t fix him and he will likely still be a jerk, but we will eventually figure it out. There’s really nothing a nice guy can do to pretend he’s a jerk so we’ll like him! It’s just bad advice. We are the ones who are wrong here…but that isn’t really going to change much. Sometimes a nice guy is just not strong enough or does not demonstrate a sense of security that peaks our interest! Hopefully at the right place and the right time, we will choose a nice guy who has a little something of his own that attracts us to his inner character and we’ll be with him forever while the ‘jerk’ can continue to play out all of these rules.


You must have the attitude which shows that you are not there to impress her rather she is the one who is lucky to sit next to you.

Oh my! This one actually made me cringe. Why would I spend even a few minutes with someone who thought that he was doing me a favor by going somewhere with me? If he has a line of women, he should go to the next one and leave me out of the game if this is how he feels!



Do you know that women do not always mean what they say? They might say something and mean the exact opposite.

Another gem of advice! It has been my experience that women are much better communicators than men sometimes. If someone has told men that I mean the exact opposite of what I say, it truly explains why I am constantly trying to figure out how they could’ve possibly misinterpreted my exacting nature when it comes to open communication. I just thought they weren’t listening! Now I suppose it’s that they are listening and using a secret decoder ring to figure out what the opposite of what I said was! …On a positive side… this means that they are at least smarter than I had originally noted- not any better off with me, but smarter!


When it comes to impressing women, your looks do not matter. That gorgeous girl in the corner does not care a full blow beer belly, a bald head, or if you work as a mechanic at your brother's garage. None of these things matter.

Sorry about this one. That girl does care if you have a beer belly and are a mechanic in your brother’s garage. Every girl that I talk to seems to be hoping to meet an educated, driven man and is constantly saying that “there are no single guys out there.” There are single guys out there…and many of those guys are single for a reason. The thing is that while confidence counts and impresses women, how could a guy have any confidence if he has a beer belly and works in his brother’s garage? This goes for people in general. We need to make sure that the person we make ourselves into is the type of person we’d be proud to be. When we are working towards, or have achieved many of our goals in life, we are one step closer to wearing the confidence it takes to attract great people into our lives!


Good luck ladies!

You- Over there…The one who can’t stand me!

I have to wonder why some of us try so hard to get people who aren’t worth our time to like us. I can’t count the number of times I’ve gone out of my way to prove to someone that they should want to be my friend. Why the heck?…Sometimes people just don’t like me…wait…no. That’s not true. I’m very likable. I’m friendly, smart, funny…they must be confused. I’m sure they like me but just don’t know it yet!… “Here! I made you some brownies.”, “Here! I wrote you a poem.”, “Here! I’ll give you my car.”
List of things to do today:

1. Ignore all the people who like me already! There must be something wrong with them.(check)
2. Accidentally run into the girl who rolled her eyes at me yesterday and explain the joke that she rolled her eyes at. When she rolls her eyes again, try harder!(check)
3. Call the guy who won’t answer his phone when I call and leave him a funny message about the fact that he won’t answer. (check)
4. Find someone who doesn’t want help and try to help them. (check)

The strange thing is that when you think about how many “good” friends we really need, the number is very low. I have many, many people in my life that I consider “friends”, but only a few who truly understand me and care about me. Those few are the ones I tend to put the least amount of effort into. Doesn’t it seem to be a little self-destructive to sabotage your real friendships by putting so much time into people who have blatantly let you know that they don’t want you in their lives? So why would a person waste her time on those people? Why do women want the guy whose the “player” that she knows has cheated on every girl he’s ever been with? Why do kids want to be friends with the “popular” kids that are never nice to them. Come to think of it. Many of those people aren’t even nice to the people they like. I did this as a kid too.
(Scene fades to a 7 year old Calia…Pigtail braids and the plaid pants from the nurse’s office after having fallen into the creek on the way to school in the morning…on a daily basis)
There is one girl who is my best friend who only likes me every other day. My parents told me that her parents are divorced and she probably has some problems. “Oh no! She has problems? I should help her!”…I’ll give her everything I have. I’ll do her homework. I’ll invite her over to my house so she can have dinner in a home where there is a mother and a father. If I make a joke, I’ll let her take the credit for it….But I am only 7 years old and she isn’t even nice. Can’t she do her own homework? Doesn’t she already have a McDonald’s hamburger on the table at her house that her mother left there for her before she went to work (I had to eat a well-balanced meal and wasn’t even allowed to eat candy or pudding pops!)? …Is she even funny?
(Scene fades to present day)
That girl hasn’t been heard from since she moved away in 6th grade. What the heck happened to her? I wonder if she is happy? I should call her and see if she needs some money or something. Maybe she needs me to baby-sit her kids sometime? I’m sure she’s very busy and her life is way more important than mine.
Darn! I wonder if our patterns of how we allow people to treat us are established before we are even 10 years old? If so, we are all pretty screwed. I had such an amazing childhood that I wanted to show everyone who didn’t, how great life could be by treating them with complete respect and unconditional kindness. I wonder if the kids who did have the good childhoods wondered why I didn’t want to play with them? The funny thing is that I have run into those kids, now 20-some years later with kids of their own, who have expressed to me that they always liked me. I guess I didn’t know that. I must’ve been working too hard trying to make the people who didn’t like me, and weren’t going to, care about me!
(scene fades to reminiscent times of elementary school)
Wow! I would’ve had a heck of a lot more time if I had just spent it with people who were worth it…(scene fades to reminiscent times of my 20’s)…Wow! I would’ve had a heck of a lot more time if I had just spent it with people who were worth it!
(scene fade to present)
…Wow! There are some really great people in my life who care about me unconditionally. I like them. I’m glad I don’t care what those other people who don’t want to like me think!…anymore…Day 5…

Email: Please Read this email!

Oh geez…These subject lines in my email are so enticing. I’m not sure they can be trusted though. For a while there, I was getting to work to find 15 emails in my inbox with the subject “You look so stupid today Croze.” I have to say that it hurt me a little you know?…After all, I had worked nearly all day on the previous Sunday to put together 5 perfect outfits and accessories so during the week, I could wake up, work out, jump in the shower and go off to work looking the best I could (with what I had to work with of course…and actually it wasn’t bad if I did say so myself.) BUT…apparently someone was watching and thought I looked stupid on a daily basis. I would run to the ladies room to see if I had accidentally over-moussed my hair into a Mohawk or something…After all-That would’ve looked a little stupid with my knee-length skirt and high boots…Nope…no Mohawk. Feewww…I didn’t look obviously stupid to the point that a little person inside my computer would’ve noticed. Granted, I sometimes play a little game that makes me sound stupid once in awhile, but that is just one of those blonde acts that I have found makes people feel more comfortable with saying stupid things around me themselves. It allows me to pull memories of my daily encounters out of my head at random throughout the evening for personal amusement…I know…I’m a little childish and gamey sometimes!…whatcha gonna do? Where the harassing emails were concerned though, eventually I decided to create a rule in my email that put all of the “you look stupid CRoze” and “Look at your stupid face here Croze” emails in a separate folder that I could choose to go to when I felt like beating myself up with a tiny bit of negative self-talk! On a bad day, I could just pull a chocolate cake out of my top drawer and open the folder so I could be sure to make my day as bad as possible!…ah!…Asi Es La Vida!
So today I got all sorts of emails with the subject, “Please Read!”…No! I’m not falling for that crap! I feel so silly when I get sucked into spam. I hope no one expects me to read any of my real email… “Someone has sent you an Ecard”… “Important”… “You may already have won!”…Actually, I open the “you may already have won” ones…what if I have already won something good and I didn’t open it? I’m not an idiot you know! (oops…virus…reformat…hmm…Oh well! Now I have a brand new computer again! Lucky me! I guess I did win! Whoohooo!) It seems that there are so many people “crying important” that I don’t believe them when it is. I don’t like to be a sucker, but I don’t like to be insensitive either. I’m sure that that guy from a different country who can’t seem to remember which country he’s in from correspondence to correspondence really needs me to cash that fake money order through my account! Far be it for me to question him!
I wish we could simply trust everyone blindly. Personally I still have hope that there’s good in everyone but sometimes a few bad seeds taint my Pollyanna view. One time I was in the middle of singing when a guy came up to me, showed me a knife, plunged it into his chest and then fell under my dress on the stage!…I wasn’t falling for that old “stab yourself in the chest” trick! It was Friday the 13th and I was certain that it was a collapsible knife. I didn’t miss a step as I danced over him. We kept singing and the bartender ran up and pulled the knife out thinking that it was a joke too. The blood started pouring out when he did though…oops…not a fake knife!…Well! I guess that’ll teach people not to “cry knife” in front of me so often! No one’s going to pull the wool over my eyes twice!…Sorry. Oh well… he lived!…and I still believe that people are basically good. Sometimes they just get cluttered with everyday stuff that brings out the worst in them…and then they use it- to the extreme! But I still won’t believe they are bad- Even if they do send me emails with the subject line “Boy you sure can’t get a guy. I guess no one likes you.”

Locked doors annoy me!

I can’t stand to come home and find my house locked. As a kid, we never locked our doors. It was just one of those things. If we got into a car and it wasn’t dinging, either the keys were lost in the house somewhere, or it wasn’t our car! I recently found a key to my house that my friend used to get in to water my plants one time when I went away. Actually, I had it hidden but she took it because she was afraid that someone would find it and get in….um…yeah…ME! I had to go in a window after that trip. She found it and gave it back and I put it back in its hiding place so if someone ever comes in to pick something up while I’m not home and decides to lock the door on the way out, I’ll be able to get in! Don’t get me wrong…this unlocked door practice has gotten me freaked out once in awhile. I came home at 3am from singing one time and opened the door to hear the door to the upstairs close. I freaked out! I was sure someone had just run up the stairs. I ran back to my car and called a friend. He drove over and went through the house with me. This seemed like a better alternative to the way I had done it in the past when I got scared: I had called him a few times to stay on the phone with me while I went through my house opening closet after closet and checking under beds and in the sleeves of coats. As I thought about it, I wondered what he was going to do if I did find someone in one of my sleeves?…We decided that having him come over was a better option….well…actually…WE decided that I should lock the doors on evenings when I would be coming home at 3am so he wouldn’t have to come over. Personally I think he was being a baby about it…but he did have to drive 20 minutes to rescue me. That may have seemed fun before he had a girlfriend, but once he was locked into a relationship, the 3am “I didn’t lock my house and a crazy person is inside” call didn’t seem humorous to her at all!
I have the same issue at work. I like my door wide open so I can enter and exit of my own volition. (that reminds me of a story…I knew this girl who was very pretty. She used big words all the time to seem smarter than she was. The problem was that she didn’t use the right ones. My friend and I used to laugh about it all the time after he got off the phone with her. One of those words was “volition”. She said something like, “I can’t help my son by making all of his decisions for him. It will be of his own vernacular to make things happen or not.” …hee hee…nope…the word is “volition”!)…anyway…the locked door! One time as a kid, someone had broken into our house and we had come home to hear him inside. We walked in the back door and he had to break out of the front door to escape- with nothing! Kind of hilarious if you ask me! I have to say that if I was going to rob a house, I’d choose the one with the biggest alarm system sign in the front yard. I guess I would assume that someone who lived there thought there was something inside that was worth stealing! I don’t worry about it. Someone stole my cdman off my front seat of my car in the driveway a number of years ago. I always wondered why the person hadn’t just asked if he could have it? If he seemed like his reason for needing it was good enough, I certainly would’ve given it to him.
….oh well…so much for locks! I’m sick of them. It is ironic that so many people seem to think that I’ve locked myself up when it comes to caring about someone though. I don’t think it’s true. I do think that I’m just waiting for someone to politely ask me if I’d like to spend some time with him instead of trying to beat me over the head and stealing my time from me just because I’m there. I’ll leave my door open. It’s worth seeing who tries to get in. Possibly everyone has been trying so hard to unlock a door that’s already open, that they are actually locking it?