Guest contributor: Jen Sincero

Bad Advice Wednesday: Beam Me Up,Scotty!

categories: Cocktail Hour

4 comments


Jen Sincero is famous for many things, though in our house most of all for being a collge friend of Nina’s.

What follows is from her book, You Are a Badass, published by Running Press.

 

BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY!

 

Nothing is impossible, the word itself says “I’m possible.”—Audrey Hepburn; actress, icon, fabulist

 

 My grandmother on my mother’s side lived to be one hundred years  old. Nana was as WASPy as they make ’em: prissy, reserved, able to avoid confrontation with the skilled precision of an F-16 pilot. For as long as I can remember, she always looked exactly the same. She was  eternally adorned in a cardigan, pinned together at the top by an antique broach, her pink lipstick and sparkly brown eyes shining through a face-full of wrinkles that erupted in a series of “oh dears” every time she laughed.

 

In her long lifetime, Nana witnessed the birthing of such pivotal human achievements as the phone, the car, the TV, human flight, the computer, the internet and rock and roll.

 

The two things that blew her mind the most, however, were putting a man on the moon and the soda dispensers at McDonalds. She’d stand there watching, gripped by disbelief, as an employee placed a cup, small, medium or large, beneath a spout, pushed a button and walked away, leaving the machine to fill it up the perfect, proper amount. “How does it know where to stop?” Nana would shake her head, mortified, “How does it know ?!”

After we figured out how to clone a sheep, she pretty much threw in the towel on ever questioning anything again.  One day my family took her out for lunch to a restaurant on the top floor of some giant hotel. When we got into the elevator, someone accidentally pushed the button for the floor we were already on the moment the doors closed, making them open right back up again.

Thinking we’d just gone up forty-five-flights in a split second, we watched my sweet little grandmother exit the elevator, nervously patting her hair as she wandered down the hallway muttering to herself, “Why not?”

I want to sign off here by encouraging you to pursue your dreams with the same belief that anything is possible as a little old lady inknee-high stockings and sensible heels who was born in 1903 and lived through the most technologically flabbergasting century to date.

Whatever you desire to do with your precious life—write jokes or rock out or start a business or learn to speak Greek or quit your job or raise a bunch of kids or fall in love or lose your flab or open orphanages around the world or direct movies or save dolphins or make millions or live in a canyon in a loincloth—believe that it’s possible.

And that it’s available to you. And that you deserve to be/do/have it.

Why not?

Give yourself the permission and the means (yes, this includes the money), to be who you are REGARDLESS OF WHAT ANYBODY ELSE THINKS OR BELIEVES IS POSSIBLE. Do not deny yourself the life you want to live because you’re worried you’re not good enough or that you’ll be judged or that it’s too risky, because who does that benefit? No one, that’s who. When you live your life doing the things that turn you on, that you’re good at, that bring you joy, that make you shove stuff in people’s faces and scream, “check this out!!!” you walk around so lit up that you shoot sunbeams out of yer eyeballs.

Which automatically lights up the world around you. Which is precisely why you are here: to shine your big-ass ball of fire onto this world of ours. A world that literally depends upon light to survive.

You are powerful. You are loved. You are surrounded by miracles.

Believe, really  believe that what you desire is here and available to you. And you can have it all.

 Love Yourself

You are a badass.

 

 

 



  1. D.L. Wood writes:

    “You are surrounded by miracles.” – This is so true but we take them so for granted because we have always had them. We expect miracles.

    Like your grandmother; mine saw many changes in her life. My grandmother lived in rural Michigan and died two years ago at 107. What she appreciated was the mundane things we grew up with – and don’t usually think about – I know I don’t and I’m 63.
    Electric lights.
    Phone – in 1959 only because my grandfather passed out at home and she had to walk the quarter mile to the neighbors to call the ambulance – their first phone had 17 on the same party line as they called it – there was no private conversations. lol
    T.V. – they got in 1960
    Sewing machines everyone could afford.
    Automatic washing machines.
    Automatic coffee makers – she loved her Mr. Coffee.
    Vacuums to clean her rugs.
    Electric irons.
    Hot water heat that heated the whole house with a twist of a thermostat on the wall.
    Glasses in hour so she could see better the same day as her exam.
    Propane to cook instead of wood and coal.
    Microwave ovens – she could make her morning oatmeal in a minute instead of cooking it a half an hour.
    Modern medicine – she had her second hip replacement at 100 and was home taking care of herself in two months.
    Indoor plumbing – no more squatting over a bowl because it was 10 below with a 30 mph wind howling making the 30 yard walk to the privy unacceptable – and a bathtub with a drain and with a hot water heater to just turn on the faucet to get hot water. – what a luxury. No more hauling hot water then having to haul out the cold after your bath.

    We should believe but also appreciate.

    D.L. Wood

  2. monica wood writes:

    Jeez. Now I really, really want to be a badass.

  3. Bill writes:

    Thanks Jen–This is badass for sure. Love.