Invisible

You don’t know me. I live in the upstairs apartment. I’m the one who never turns the music on too loud. You like that, but it’s one of those things you don’t notice. Like your heart. You don’t notice your heart until it malfunctions, until it seizes up trying to find the next beat, shoots pain through your body like an electric current. Or until it breaks. You notice your heart when it breaks.
You don’t know me because I am invisible. I look like everyone else who is invisible. Not like the homeless woman who sleeps under the tarp at back of Benny’s music shop. She’s not invisible. She’s homeless. You see her and look away. She makes you uncomfortable. She makes you wonder how it feels to sleep on a sidewalk under a tarp in February rain. Or else she makes you frantic, eager to fill your mind with other thoughts – your to-do list, your meeting tomorrow, and your kid’s soccer game in the morning.
Either way, looking at her, or looking away, you see her, the homeless woman. She’s not invisible.
But I’m not out there on the street. Invisible people live in houses and apartment buildings. We have beds and refrigerators and windows with blinds on them. We have mailboxes close enough to yours that every now and then you get our mail by mistake. Flipping through your stack, you come to an electric bill for me and what registers for you is not my name, but only how the letters don’t arrange themselves into yours.
You don’t know me. You don’t know that my car’s in the shop so I’ve been taking the bus. You pass me, there at the bus stop, every morning on your way to Starbucks. Yesterday I went to Starbucks too. I stood behind you in line.
I wanted to tell you about my car. Because we’re neighbors, and because it turns out I don’t really mind taking the bus so I’m thinking I’ll do it even after my car gets fixed. I think you’d like that. You seem like someone who cares about the planet.
You’d say, “Wow, that’s great,” and you’d mean it. Maybe we’d hug. People hug a lot now. I like it when that happens, spontaneous public affection. But when you’re invisible, certain things are hard, like saying, “Hey, I’m your neighbor,” to the person in front of you at Starbucks.
Yesterday, you ordered a non-fat vanilla latte with an extra shot of espresso. I ordered coffee. I left before you. There’s no wait for plain coffee. I walked back to the bus stop and rode the bus to work. I’m not invisible at work, but it’s not the kind of place where people talk about the planet. Or hug.
You don’t know me. I live in the upstairs apartment. I’m quiet. I walk quietly, read, eat, and listen to NPR quietly. Every now and then, I feel an urge to break the quiet wide open. Turn up the music impossibly loud, dance, stomp, cry, and scream. I imagine you downstairs. Surprised. Suddenly aware of your upstairs neighbor.
“What the fuck?” you’d say, and maybe you’d bang on the ceiling, but I wouldn’t hear it because I’m doing so much banging of my own, splashing through my apartment that’s filling up with my tears and the words I never say, and me. Me.
And when the water started to leak through your ceiling, you’d come upstairs, knock, and then pound on my door to be heard. I’d open the door and you’d start to speak, “What the? “But the words would get stuck in your throat because there’d I’d be, breathless, hoarse, wet, reborn.
You’d recognize me. You’d see me. You’d know me then.

Judy Clement Wall is a writer for isca media. You can read more from Judy Clement Wall on her site Zebra Sounds.

Change

CHANGE…

Well as most of us can relate to not liking change, we all go through it, good or bad. We all get comfortable in our lives where we like where we live, where we work, and are content and don’t like the carpet being pulled out from under us.
Some of us change because the change is happening and we just go with it, some of us choose to change whether it is to move, change jobs, cities, or change relationships or friendships, these are things we all do but do we make the right choices for ourselves?
Change is not something we always have control over, sometimes we have no control at all but we do have a chance to change it later. How do we overcome the fear of change?
Change is good, change means we’re growing as individuals, change means we don’t get stuck in those ruts we all hate. Change means we are always learning and creating new ideas. Sometimes change is exciting, sometimes it’s sad and sometimes it just makes us so angry but it’s in all what we do with it. How do we handle change?
When change is thrown at you, what do you do to make it a positive thing for you or how do you shape it into something that will make you happy if it’s not change that you agree with or don’t like or want ,or is it change made by you and you made the wrong choice.
Change is fear of the unknown and none of us like walking around in the dark not knowing where we are going or what is next or right in front of us, so what do we need to do?
Assess your change and ask yourself these questions:
1. Is your change necessary for you, do you need it to help you grow personally?
2. Will this change make you more money or change you financially?
3. Will this change get you away from what wasn’t making you happy in the first place or will it make you happier?
4. Is this change only temporary or is it permanent?
5. Is this change hurting you or bettering you or maybe helping someone else?
6. Is this change happening to fast or not fast enough?
7. Do you let change take you over or do you take over change?
8. Is the change happening?
I have personally asked myself all this as well as I myself have gone through alot of changes myself in just about every aspect we’ve talked about, some of it has been quite the ride let me tell you but when you’re caught up all in the middle of change especially when it seems to be everything all at once not one after the other like how all of us would like it to happen it does teach us alot about ourselves and definitely what finally does make us happy when it all finally starts to settle.

Thank you all for reading TheHappySelf.com
Daya

The Internet Project is now under way!

After consulting with several HappySelf readers, we have gone ahead with our internet marketing project. With the help of a financial partner, and a web designer, we’ve gone and merged two search engines together and launched www.mysearchrobot.com
(It can also be reached via www.fastfreesearch.com)

Our goal with this project is to document each and every step along the way, to see if we can turn this project into a viable online business that can be run from the comfort of one’s home whether it is run by a teenage girl, a single mom, or simply a family looking to supplement their income.

I know from your response many of you are wondering what steps are needed to start an online venture, and will those steps result in a profitable online business. Let’s find out together, shall we?

Here are the stats:

Page rank: 0 (It’s a brand new site, on a 5 year old domain)

Alexa: 3,348,107 this means our site is considered the 3,348,107 most important site on the web! (Not so great)

Traffic: 10 to 15 visitors a day (pretty sure these are just from me)

Backlinks:

Google – 0
Altavista -1
Alltheweb – 1
Yahoo – 1
Inbound – 86
Outbound -1
Listed in DMOZ – NO
Listed in Yahoo – NO
Revenue – $0.00

Now I’m sure the question on your mind is this…
What is MySearchRobot.com?

MySearchRobot.com allows advertisers to list their site in our search engine and receive visitors at a cost-per-click basis, as low as $.01 per click. Our service is much more cost effective than other advertising methods because our service is highly targeted. Instead of having your banner show up randomly on different sites and hoping people will click your link, surfers visit our site looking for specific content using keywords you relate to your site, just like any other search engine.
Example: you specify a keyword or phrase “Custom Laptops” and place your bid (currently 1 cent) then when a searcher types in the phrase “custom laptop” your ad/business is placed first in the search results, thereby resulting in “targeted” traffic results at a very low cost to the owner of the site.

Note: Currently Google charges $4.80 for the phrase “custom laptops”

So as you can see, even if this site experiences explosive growth, it will continue to be much more economical to webmasters, and web site owners around the globe.

Special Offer: All HappySelf.com readers who have a website they would like to have indexed by mysearchrobot.com will receive a $100.00 credit. Simply login and setup your account information, then send me an email with your username and website information, and I will add the $100.00 to your account within 24 hours. (Yes, this is FREE!)
Alternatively, we will need link exposure in order to drive traffic to our project, so any website owner who links to www.mysearchrobot.com will receive $300.00 in advertising credits, and will of course be mentioned here in our “Internet Project” updates!
The site is currently giving away $10.00 in advertising credits to each and every client in order to attract a large list of sites to be indexed. The more sites that are added, the more potential customers we have in the future. So spread the word, let’s sign the world up!

So let’s hear from all you website owners, internet marketers, and SEO experts out there, share your thoughts and ideas, and let us see what we can accomplish.

To join our project, simply email your thoughts, ideas, skill sets, etc to:
netproject@thehappyself.com

I look forward to hearing from you all!

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