If you have just tuned in, make sure to read Part 1 of this series here.
Yesterday in the story, we left off at the point where I had all this great success, figured out I was miserable, and that I wanted to find my bliss, via living my brand.
A road trip was scheduled with two strangers, one was my student from my Launch Your Brand Program (Starts Aug 4) and another a follower via my blog. Here we jump back into it....
Since yesterday, I've decided that the term "Living My Bliss" just makes my teeth hurt, and my fingers numb, and I get this incessant urge to poke out my eyeballs when I hear it. The woo-woo-ness of it makes me WOO-WOO-ZY!
In fact, I might not be "on brand" by using the term bliss. Yet I have felt compelled to use it because, I just feel so amazingly happy and inspired right now, and I mean it's sort of an onomatopoeia don't you think? But the adverse side to this is just makes me feel a little cliché, and quite honestly, that is one of the worst feelings in the world!!
So my new reaction to the word bliss is:
A little graphic design humor for you. Don't ever use Papyrus, or we can't be friends.
Let's come up with something better shall we?
Someone pointed out yesterday in the comments of my blog that Amelia Earhart probably wouldn't have used the term "Bliss" cause it is too woo-woo....(and she CERTAINLY would never be as cliché to use Papyrus as a font.
Perhaps the term "Boom!" or something... "Living Your Boom!" --- The tagline for my design studio Create Thunder is "Brands that Boom!" so this fits... (Sidenote: I also have a student named Amy, who is developing an amazing financial program with the term BOOM...) perhaps this is trending... So for today, we will be talking about Living Your Boom!
Lesson 3. Splurge on a fancy hotel room because you deserve it, but don't act like a pig.
I drove myself straight up to Santa Barbara, after I had strategically jammed my car full of stuff. I noshed on dried fruit and bubble water, and hopes for the summer. The excitement of being alone on the road with so much possibility, and so much great music on Spotify. I was feeling really good. I was choreographing pole dancing songs in my head and Picasso was TOO SCARED to look out the window.
He is such a baby, sometimes.
So this was the first vacation I had, had in several months...and I rarely ever splurge for the sake of splurging. I don't splurge often because there is a part of me, like so many people out there, that feels like I don't deserve to.
Now this doesn't mean you need to go off splurging on everything all the time. That would be unwise financial planning. But this does mean on occasion you should just go all out -- fancy hotel, fancy dinner, get a massage (hell----get a massage with a happy ending if you want-----you are splurging..... HAHA JUST KIDDING, that's gross. Well unless your massage therapist just so happens to be a Ryan Gosling, and then I say SPLURGE AWAY, GIRL!!!!!)
The point is, splurging is amazing. We only live once, and sometimes having a good nights rest on 10,000 thread count sheets, celebrating your success with a butler to bring you a wine opener at 2am and share your pizza with, is just what you need to feel alive.
(Just don't eat too much pizza and wine! More about that in a sec...)
Say Hello to Hotel Indigo... The most quaint and beautiful little boutique hotel, I've ever had the pleasure of staying at. They even gave Picasso a gift bag with poop bags and milk bones.
He looked at me and said "Hey Mom, this place isn't so ruff!"
(Sorry that is a terrible joke)
The rooms here end up being about $375 a night with taxes and dog fees. SHEESH. I deserve it. I deserve it. I had to keep telling myself this.
Hotel Indiogo
My room (or at least a stock picture of it -- it had a veranda and a huge shower, the bed was to die for!)
After we checked in we were starved. So we took a jaunt around the neighborhood until I found a wine bar to have an appetizer and a flight of wines. Picasso and I had our first lady and the tramp moment. This is perfect, because he has a super feminine energy, and I'm such a tramp!! (I'm totally kidding...mmm hmm... kidding.)
Our Date. Everyone loved him.
We went from place to place. I ate too much. I drank too much. I got a pizza and shared it with the front desk guy, and he warmed it up in the microwave and delivered it on a platter with a wine key.....The food was delicious, the wine even more so, and I had fun... and I felt alive at the time, but then things took a turn for the worst.
Apparently I overindulged, and I woke up feeling like I wanted to die.
The revised lesson learned in this is: OVER indulging does not mean more fun. I wasn't hungry, I had already had a big appetizer and wine out...but I was OVER-CELEBRATING, because I had been feeling so miserable before. Apparently, work and no play, makes Jenna a very hungry girl. I am very ashamed to say, this is not the first time something like this has happened.... but it's at this point that I'm really starting to make note of it.
Over-indulging means that you aren't really enjoying the moment you are in, you are making up for something that is lacking. I wasn't present, I wasn't savoring things, I was hiding behind food and alcohol as a "Reward" for all my hard work.
Soooooooo.....I got sick... call it food poisoning, call it over-indulging, in any case I was not in great shape the next day, and THEN Picasso had chased a bird from the patio into our room at 5am. So there was a bird swooping down and trying to escape as I wanted to crawl in a hole and die.
Nope, this not really a vacation yet, I decided. This is sort of like a very expensive punishment. I had ruined, what could have been a lovely experience....The hotel room was lovely, my decisions to celebrate not so much.
I pulled myself together, and Miss Angelica was on her way to meet me. She showed up at the hotel around 10am, and we packed up her stuff in the car. And something really embarrassing happened as I was packing my suitcase, into the car. All I will say is there was a noise, a noise coming from my suitcase. A noise I needed to make stop, and I couldn't tell Angelica what the noise was without getting really embarrassed. So I sent her to the front desk to return my key card, as I was mortified.
(Just like the embarrassing stories in Seventeen Magazine, that always end with AND I WAS MORTIFIED)
That is all I am going to say about that.
Lesson 4. When trying to have a beer with Emilio Estavez call ahead and make sure he's bartending!
We had plans to stop at a bar in Los Alamos to see the famous Emilio Estavez, whose wife owns a beer tasting room called Babi's Beer Emporium. Emilio apparently bartend's there sometime, and I found proof of this on his Facebook page.
He wasn't working that day, but I really wanted to experience this idea of having a drink with a once A-List celebrity, who played the jock in The Breakfast Club, was in Young Guns, and The Mighty Ducks. To see him in action at a bar..... YES please.
But since he wasn't working, here we were in spirit with him:
Want to learn how to make terrible superimposed pictures of your friends with celebrities? Want to avoid using terribly cliché fonts like Papyrus, and words like "bliss"? you will get the skills to learn this and more through my Launch Your Brand Program (Starts Aug 4)
