Every morning, seven days a week, I do five miles in 29-32 minutes on my Exercycle. It’s not enough exercise. So this morning I enrolled in North Myrtle Beach’s Boot Camp I hope to be in the best shape of my life by next July 19 when I will be as old as Bruce Springsteen.

Then I read this advert for an online class on branding yourself. By the end of the class you and your art will become a brand. Nowhere does it ask for work samples. Actual talent might be an impediment to successfully branding yourself.

Yes I know that’s another word for marketing but it sounds so today. I can picture myself taking a cattle brand and doing my own tattoo as I’m my own brand.

Hell I am a brand, or was. Pia Savage, LLC. Has a nice ring to it. No depth but a great tone.

I became a bit caught up in revising and revising and throwing out entire books because as I learned more I liked my work less. Maybe I just wasn’t branding myself correctly. The Pia Savage part was working. My blog, well, it went through stages. In the past two years I haven’t been focusing on it.

I must find my brand, and have it visible and not in some private area where I would feel more comfortable. My energy needs to be publicly displayed for public consumption. I will no longer be a bloggerslashwriter but a compilation of chakras, chants, colors and cravings I won’t hesitate to shout out.

Instead of taking the time to perfect my product I should be branding my product. My product will be amazing. I will have the best pitches, stationary, email, resumes, handshake, vocal tone, web presence–surely that part must be the easiest. There’s only a blog or several, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter (if only I cared enough to remember my password) and by the time the class ends I’m sure there will be at least ten other social networks I will just have to join.

Product? In the number one blog on Technorati that I’m not going to link to I read you shouldn’t spend more than 20 minutes on a blog post. I’m betting that writing a novel has the same formula.

This sounds much less fearsome than North Myrtle Boot Camp. Or not.

The ending of this post blew me away. Perfect little story.
I really don’t like my post nor have I liked most of my posts recently or longer. In keeping with my new philosophy of branding myself I can safely say it’s just a minuscule part of the much larger brand

I have been going through what Bone kindly calls my “sad time.” It gets better every year but this year has been weird. South Carolina has been in the news a bit too much, and I went to that 9/11 Memorial that turned out to be a radical right call to arms. No I’m not letting that drop quietly into the humid Southern air.

I have never been a big TV person and have all kinds of rules for watching. To watch during the day, except for “historic events,” it must be raining as if the sky wants to fall into the earth, and I must be officially sick. Only I never have any desire to watch TV when I’m sick–that’s how I know I’m getting better. That and cleaning everything in sight. I haven’t really been sick here but the one time I sorta was I washed the linen in the middle of being sick because I could. Then I became totally confused and didn’t know if I was getting better or not.

While I don’t have a TV in my bedroom, I have a flat screen one in the living room. Had I known about LED’s I might have waited but I’m cheap and waited this long for an LCD….

True confessions: I love Mad Men, Monk,Friday Night Lights (great choices) NCIS (weird for me but the sets are great and Mark Harmon, Republican that he is, is the stuff of middle year crushes. Plus the Goth CSI (but more) is a great role model for all the girls I know in high school and college.

This is leading up to the third show. The original began when I was an SSI Claims Rep. It was a brain drain job; I would come home and need to chill. It was still on when I went to grad school and led a woman’s group for eight (let’s not beat around the bush) very old ladies in varying stages of cognition and most weren’t ambulatory. I made getting them to their rooms into a game. I would have to do it before 7:40 so I could be home by eight. The nursing home wasn’t renovated yet and usually I walked up and down the six flights of stairs but I couldn’t walk the women much as I wanted to. My reward was Melrose Place

I like the new one more. This is based on two episodes where the sets starred at least to me. I love great sets. I tape shows I have already seen on HGTV for reasons that remain unclear to me especially since I end up deleting 9/10ths of them. Actually I delete most programs before watching them. I love doing the whole delete thing more than I love TV usually.

Saturday night, around midnight, I couldn’t find anything I wanted to watch–1,000 stations and countless on-demands ones. Being cheap I only like the free ones and up to $1.99. I couldn’t find The Big Leibowski which I heard was on for Big Leibowski weekend in Manhattan.

I was channel surfing and hit on something maybe I would watch for a second–and yes I was angry I had deleted all the HGTV shows. The sound and picture went off. I tried unplugging the box, rebooting it, played with all the controls on the side of the TV and on the TV and cable box. None of the 2,000 usual tricks worked. It was time to call Time Warner Cable. I could have waited until morning but being obsessive….I tell the woman everything I had done: “That’s nice but I only handle phone issues and what is your email address?” This is Time Warner Cable. When I gave her my telephone number—I get it from them–she could access my life story. Or not.

She finally let me speak to a level four tech which was the real reason I was calling at midnight. They’re easier to speak to and can help you. My cable box just wouldn’t reboot. We were up to exchanging life stories when he asked if I wanted an appointment with a real life tech. I guess I did but could we just try five more minutes? I explained that I wouldn’t have cared last week but this week is premiere week. He understood and we waited. My TV came back to life!

I’m kind of proud of my TV fixation. I didn’t have a DVR in the townhouse and found myself scheduling things around NCIS. That was bad and kind of embarrassing though in retrospect if I hadn’t gone to the secret meeting of the Democrats on Inauguration night at a bar where people smoke and I hated the food which I needed as I had been too excited to eat all day I might not have gotten a cold. Or maybe I would have and maybe NCIS wasn’t on that night–but I missed the best part of the Inagural parties and I really wanted to see one night where all was right with the administration as I knew the honeymoon couldn’t last.

President Obama on Letterman, tonight. I know he’s over-exposed but I love Letterman though I have been taping Jon Stewart…..

A few weeks ago CLo, W and I went to our almost-local multiplex and saw Inglorious Bestards. It was the 9PM Thursday show We had a private screening as we were the only people in the theater. We might have been the only people aside from staff in the whole theater. I can get used to not waiting an hour for a movie. I really can.

When did 9/11 become Todd Beamer Saved The White House From Destruction Day? I remember two big very buildings imploding, and a smaller one and…. They were barely mentioned. Hell they weren’t mentioned in a 9/11 memorial. Something’s wrong with that.

A teary voiced fireman talked about people who disrupted firemen’s funerals. WTF? They were sacred. We cried for the firemen, went to fire stations gave money and more money and more money. My mother died suddenly and I thought tragically the next month. She kept cash in her apartment and I gave my half to a firehouse that lost fourteen.

No person who thought Bush pretender to the presidency as he was the first appointed by the Supreme Court, certainly not elected president disrupted a funeral. Fox News and every other news source would have been all over it. LIAR!!!!!!!! My friend knew Rodney Gillis’s mother–the last cop to have part of his body identified and hence the last to have a true funeral. We all cared about every first responder.
I remember some religious fundamentalists picketing a funeral. Yes I remember a little girl with a picket sign. It was beyond gross. They call themselves Christian.Nobody else would. But they aren’t LIBERALS and the fireman made it seem as if liberals protested. I have been sick and second and third guessing myself ever since hearing him speak.

Oh the speaker who spoke for the Congressman (not Joe Wilson) Real funny when he said the Congressman couldn’t be there as he had to work on health care. Only it was Friday night and Congress goes home on weekends. Oh Tea Party Saturday. Right. Not on my dime and I’m the new face of North Myrtle Beach. The person who actually bought a house and renovated when nobody else was. I’m so willing to respect you in the morning but….

Getting people riled about the never mentioned directly, LIBERALS, is great politics. Really brings people together. Only quoting W, priceless. W came to Ground Zero once. New York got its promised 9/11 aid 3 years late. Wyoming needed it more. So populated; such an obvious target.

They’re calling 9/11 “Patriots Day” and apparently you can only be a patriot if you’re Republican. Everybody else wants to forget it. No, many of us have that day seared into a large spot in our brain.

We were told to go on; be like Brits during the blitz so we did. We went on because to not go on would be to mean we were insane.

Manhattan changed after 9/11. It would be easy to blame Bloomberg and the spirit of “make money, make money.

I moved to this city as it is so different from Manhattan. I had been living there since 01/03/76 when I moved daddy approved and found 5 East 63rd St. I was the uptown girl on the downtown train but when it came to buying I bought on Riverside Drive @ 75th Street on the Upper West Side.

I’m never going to stop being a New Yorker and you’re never going to stop being a small Southern city with a beach music theme. So keep the beach music and lose the telling people who is good and who is bad because there are more people like me here now.

I keep forgetting Friday night was about 9/11. Yours was very different than mine.

Two articles that put a human face on the health care mess.

After this weekend I have lost all faith. In NY I only knew people who had my beliefs except for the “Jews for Bush” family–Saturday was “Heroes Day” Yes lets salute the troops the day after 9/11. Lets keep up the pretense the war in Iraq was a response to the attacks. I have nothing against the troops and can’t believe the job they do and redo and redo–all the re-deployments. But the war had nothing to do with 9/11 and everything to do with Bush, Cheney and let me throw in Karl Rove as he’s my biggest hate, egos.

After Friday night my friends from home who live here want nothing to do with anybody here unless they can produce documentation stating they voted for President Obama and I can’t blame them.

Because you would still think the president is Bush. The local newspaper is pretty balanced so I assume most people get their news from each other and from Fox

Go Rob Miller. The new face of South Carolina and the face that represents me. Cos I ain’t leaving. And when I get angry I’m dangerous. Ask any man who has dated me.

I don’t usually wish I were in my 20′s or 30′s now but I do today. So that I could fill these pages with pictures of moi and write pithy sentences mistaken for oh so clever because back then I could recite the phone book and six out of ten people would be enthralled.

In October of my freshman year in college I forgot I had to give a speech the next day for speech class. It could be on anything I wanted. Fortunately I didn’t have to take the remedial speech class “losing your LonguyIsland accent.” I so wish I had a copy of the catalogue to show that I’m not making this up.

I was helping my boyfriend and his friends roommates guys he sort of knew and I was to know much better then he did* clean their new house on the Long Island Sound. House sounds grand. It was a basement apartment. Over them lived the biggest dealers on the Island but we didn’t know that yet. Or maybe the guys did but I sure was clueless.

My mother only used cleaning products like Ajax. I found myself enthralled by the Pine Sol bottle. It smelt so good. It was a liquid. It wasn’t on the Savage family approved list. As much as I lusted after my boyfriend I think I lusted after this bottle more. It was in the province of “I don’t have to be like my mother, and when I have my own apartment I’m going to use all the fancy cleaning products I can find.” I know–pine sol? I’m just telling this story not editorializing.

I read the back of the bottle to my boyfriend and his roommates. They loved it so I read it the next day. We had many friends in that class and they all reported back to my boyfriend. I was a complete success and got an “A.”

Unfortunately I never went back to class again and failed it. I, Miss Priss & Proper, do everything as soon as you get it, never let a bill sit, treat life as if it’s one big test, was a total screw up then.

But I can’t remember ever having so much pure fun. Well yes I can but that was the first time since grade school life was uncomplicated yet complicated.

*It was complicated.
I’m having the 9/11/dead mother thing again. After I got over thinking she was my father’s appendage but loved her much anyway, she became my go to person for just about everything. And in the revised family history I was always perfect.

I’m really looking forward to the illumination of the Shagger’s water tower. Sheet, I’m turning into the Sylivia Miles of North Myrtle Beach. Look her up. Oh she was a kinda actress turned older who would go to the opening of an envelope I can’t believe who came up with that line. Wiki has been wrong before…..

I heard a noise this afternoon and thought “the neighbors.” Then I remembered I live in a house I bought during the worst housing market in modern history and have been in slight (OK crazed) shock ever since.

The noise turned out to be thunder. I’m a T&L storm fanatic and miss the ones I saw from my east facing living room and north facing bedroom in my coop on Riverside @75th Street. My apartment was on the ninth floor–the so called “architects” floor for Manhattan pre-war buildings. It gets the best light and yes I loved that part.

Here I have an upper floor deck and deck that wraps around half my house, and I don’t have the magical light and sky that went on forever. It was the best part of my apartment except for the bathrooms, floors, nine foot ceiling, and general adorableness but that began to cloy.

My ceiling @63rd & Fifth was eleven & half feet high but I only had three windows–granted a bay ceiling that had no view and the light had been cut off by the shadows of the old and differently named AT&T and IBM buildings that were actually built during my tenure there.

Here I don’t have the great light. Nor do I get to see spectacular T&L storms unless I run into one of the two upstairs rooms and I do. Also I don’t think they play as well as they did in New York because of the absence of tall buildings. I have seen it from the beech and it’s incredible but I have to get home as I’m scared.

Have to meet people with ocean beach views, and oh I have to invite myself during a storm to a house that looks over the Inter coastal–it’s common to have Inter coastal views. Not as great as the inlets in Miami (I am a fussy guest) but doable.

I knew before I decided to move here that if I lived here I wouldn’t have an oceanfront condo. I haven’t found one I think “attractive.” I look at real estate for a hobby. It’s normal for me to go house hunting as soon as I first visit a place. Between that and walking everywhere I get much more of a feel for a place than most people. I recommend both as low or no cost activities.

Most of the foreclosures in North Myrtle itself are ocean front condos that, I assume, people bought to flip. There are many more “regular” house foreclosures in the surrounding towns. Summer season really ended two weeks ago–school began inland and last week here.

Main Street was very busy at times. Now it feels a bit desolate in evening. So many people depend on tourists and/or newcomers for business.

I’m having Eldon make me a bamboo dresser and bamboo, in front of bed, bench. I have to find white furniture on sale for the sunroom as i want to do one room all in white as a contrast to the color in all the other rooms. Now Eldon must understand I’m not the National Bank of Pia.

People here are hurting big time and currently. It hurts too come into a community and see so many people doing so poorly. I’m not a soup kitchen kind of volunteer. The volunteer work I will be doing entails courts and people who suffered at the hands of….It’s what I do best so.

I feel incredibly insecure and will until new health care legislation is passed. I planned and began this move under one economy….I have developed a love for buying stocks that seem incredible and do or promise to do great things but if I buy them they begin their long descent into failure. People my age aren’t supposed to buy that much stock but I come from a long line, well my father, of people who love the stock market.

Thing was he bought most stocks before the day of the institutional stock investor and warned me repeatedly that an individual doesn’t really have a chance. However….I fear getting sick or needing an operation and the insurance that I pay $505 a month for will refuse to pay. It’s a valid fear these days. I hope any kind of reform is passed this session because frankly I will have more energy to fight for universal health care–a phrase that shouldn’t exist in a void–knowing I’m fully insured.

I’m sorry if I have been harping on this but getting off the meds gives me slight panic attacks and I stay up at night thinking about health insurance when I would rather think about anything else

My friend the former soap star is going to be back for the end of Guiding Light This did make me tear up as I think they treated him like shit. I thought soaps were the medium you could grow older gracefully in, and Jay looked incredible. I will be watching on 9/17 and maybe just maybe will finally be able to understand the show.